I want to start by reading you a poem and telling you a story. Martin Niemoller, German Protestant minister: "When the Nazis came for the communists, I did not speak out because I was not a communist. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. When they came for the Jews, I did not speak out because I was a not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me." (applause).
In 1980 I went to Iran with my three-year-old American daughter after the masses of Iran had won a revolution against the monarchy imposed on us by the CIA in 1953. The people of Iran were so angry at the CIA agents that they took over the American embassy. I was there with two brothers, a representative of ZANU PF and a representative of a socialist organization from Sweden. And I was in front of the embassy among the masses of Iranian people. And my comrade from Sweden says "I want to take a picture, but I can't see over the heads of the people." And my brother from ZANU says "Man, I'll bend over and you climb up on my shoulders and you can see." So the Black man bends over and the white man starts to climb, and all the Iranians around me pull him down. And I say "they are brothers", but the people say "No, not in this land, a white man will not get on the back of a Black man." (applause)
I am here today representing an organization called the DC Emergency Response Network on Iraq. This organization was formed in 1991 when the American military attacked the people of Iraq, and its bombs killed the children. This attack still continues after 12 years, and every month some 500 Iraqi children die because of the bombs and because of the lack of medicine and food. We have marched on the streets of Washington for peace in Yugoslavia, for peace in Somalia, for peace all over the world, and most recently, for peace in Afghanistan.
Peace is the most important concern of the women of this world. War is a horror but it is so much more so for women and children. When war happens they kill our brothers and our sons and our husbands, and then they rape us and they rape our daughters and they bomb our homes, and they kick us out, and we become refugees. And we live for 50 years in the refugee camps of Palestine and we become mothers and grandmothers and we live in the refugee camps and they come today and bomb us and kill our pregnant women at the border checkpoints.
War brings about the most horrors on our communities of color in this country. These horrors, coupled with the feminization of poverty, impose great suffering on women of color. They take our brothers to fight the imperialist wars of the American government. And they spread drugs in our communities, then they announce what they call a "war on drugs". They kill the Black Panthers and assassinate Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. They demolish Move, and they fight against the women of color just because they happen to be poor and they call it "welfare reform".
I am here today as an Iranian woman, whose country is under threat of being bombed by US imperialism. I am here today as a Kurdish woman whose villages were poisoned by the same Saddam Hussein who bought the poisons from Germany and got his guns from the US military. I'm here as a woman of the Middle East. I have walked on the deserts of Afghanistan and become a refugee in Iran. I'm a Kurdish woman who has held her children and walked up the mountains in the snow and the cold, and then been killed by the military of Turkey, that gets its guns from US imperialists.
I'm a woman. I'm a mother. I'm a grandmother. I'm a sister; I'm a wife. I am tired.
Do not take my sons away. I did not give birth to sons so they could become killers in your imperialist wars (all right, applause). I did not give birth to my children so you could drive them to the refugee camps all over Africa and they have to sell their bodies in the refugee camps for food. I'm a mother; don't bomb my children. I'm a mother of this earth; give my children back.