Kathy Kelly

The Saudis picked us up from the detention center in Daer and put us in a minibus going back to the Yemen border. When they released us, they created a kind of chaos; they screamed at us to “get out of the car and get away.” … this is when they started to fire mortars … Continue reading “Prioritizing Human Rights in Relations with Saudi Arabia”

The United Nations’ goal was to raise more than $4.2 billion for the people of war-torn Yemen by March 15. But when that deadline rolled around, just $1.3 billion had come in. ?​"I am deeply disappointed," said Jan Egeland, the secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council. "The people of Yemen need the same level … Continue reading “The People of Yemen Suffer Atrocities, Too”

During visits to Kabul, Afghanistan, over the past decade, I particularly relished lingering over breakfasts on chilly winter mornings with my young hosts who were on their winter break from school. Seated on the floor, wearing coats and hats and draped with blankets, we’d sip piping hot green tea as we shared fresh, warm wheels … Continue reading “‘Thank You for Hearing Our Afghan Pain’”

Monday, October 11, marked the official closure of the U.N. Group of Eminent Experts on Yemen (also known as the Group of Experts or GEE). For nearly four years, this investigative group examined alleged abuses suffered by Yemenis whose basic rights to food, shelter, safety, health care and education were horribly violated, all while they … Continue reading “Abandoning Yemen?”

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was among a small group of U.S. citizens who sat on milk crates or stood holding signs, across from the US Mission to the United Nations in Manhattan. We had been fasting from solid foods for a month, calling for an end to brutal economic warfare waged … Continue reading “To Counter Terror, Abolish War”

Earlier this week, 100 Afghan families from Bamiyan, a rural province of central Afghanistan mainly populated by the Hazara ethnic minority, fled to Kabul. They feared Taliban militants would attack them in Bamiyan. Over the past decade, I’ve gotten to know a grandmother who recalls fleeing Talib fighters in the 1990s, just after learning that … Continue reading “Reckoning With the US-Caused Destruction of Afghanistan”

"Pardon Daniel Hale." These words hung in the air on a recent Saturday evening, projected onto several Washington, D.C. buildings, above the face of a courageous whistleblower facing ten years in prison. The artists aimed to inform the U.S. public about Daniel E. Hale, a former Air Force analyst who blew the whistle on the … Continue reading “Why Daniel Hale Deserves Gratitude, Not Prison”

Since March 29th, in Washington, D.C., Iman Saleh, age 26, has been on a hunger strike to demand an end to the war in Yemen. She is joined by five others from her group, The Yemeni Liberation Movement. The hunger strikers point out that enforcement of the Saudi Coalition led blockade relies substantially on U.S. … Continue reading “Hunting in Yemen: The War Must End”

Thirty years ago, when the United States launched Operation Desert Storm against Iraq, I was a member of the Gulf Peace Team. We were 73 people from fifteen different countries, aged 22 to 76, living in a tent camp close to Iraq’s border with Saudi Arabia, along the road to Mecca. We aimed to nonviolently … Continue reading “Blood for Oil: Remembering the First Gulf War”

In 1565, Pieter Bruegel the Elder created "The Massacre of the Innocents," a provocative masterpiece of religious art. The painting reworks a biblical narrative about King Herod’s order to slaughter all newborn boys in Bethlehem for fear that a messiah had been born there. Bruegel’s painting situates the atrocity in a contemporary setting, a 16th … Continue reading “About Suffering: A Massacre of the Innocents in Yemen”