The 100,000 Rings Action in Evanston, Illinois reminded people from the North Shore how devastating their support of the war is to the Iraqi people. We vigiled at Fountain Square in downtown Evanston, where auto and pedestrian traffic converges from three sides, so we reached thousands of people. We read names and rang the bell for five days from 4:00 to 7:00 and over 100 people were active participants--ringing the bell, reading the names, handing out explanatory flyers, holding pictures of mourning Iraqis, and fighting the wind with a large banner that said " Operation Iraqi Freedom, 100,000 dead! When will it ever end?" Six of the volunteers joined us on the spot after they saw what we were doing and several read or rang for three hours or more.

Veterans for Peace, Santa Fe, had a very successful Bell Ringing Vigil outside our State Capitol Building. Over 60 volunteers rang 1,000 tolls of a small brass gong for 16 and a half hours, beginning at 6:00am and ending at 10:30pm. We posted the names of the participating cities.

In addition to memorializing the untold numbers of innocent Iraqi civilians murdered during the United States' illegal and immoral invasion of Irag, we also displayed our Memorial Banners which show the names and faces of the American soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. These banners are 3 feet by six feet and now stretch for over 200 feet.

Mouths Wide Open continued our 16 1/2 hour bell ringing of 1,000 names in Union Square in 2 two-hour shifts Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. There was a mean pelting rain the second day and it was very cold, but we stood with umbrellas and felt it was important to keep going. Be and I were the constant representatives of our group and formed the 2-pronged core energy -- Be standing still, ringing the first bell and in a strong clear voice, intoning: ”We honor and grieve for…” out into the cold air and bustling square: and then reading a name of an Iraqi civilian, with their age and cause of death. I stood on the side and sent my thoughts to those dead, but also walked around and interceded with the public -- I told them what we were doing, invited them to take a flyer with information re the mortality studies, and brought many people close up to the muslin cloth to take some petals from the basket and scatter them over the pictures of dead Iraqis with me.

On Tuesday 25th October I was arrested outside Downing Street for taking part in an unauthorized demonstration in a public area, namely Whitehall. As part of the 100,000 bells ceremony Milan Rai and I were reading the names of Iraqis and UK soldiers who have died in the war against Iraq. This was the third out of the four sessions we had planned.

We started just after 9 am and almost immediately attracted the attention of half a dozen police officers. A PC told me that I was protesting in a restricted area and would be arrested in the next 5 minutes unless I moved on.

My initial feelings of fear soon passed as I concentrated on the names of the UK soldiers who had been killed in action. I was fully aware that arrest was imminent, but standing outside Downing Street on a drizzly Tuesday morning seemed the least I could do.

On October 25, 2005, the Complete Coverage Campaign www.CompleteCoverageCampaign.org organized a bell ringing ceremony from 6 AM until 10:40 PM, ringing a bell once per minute for 1000 rings.

We felt that it was important for us to host the ceremony in one continuous period. Some of us stayed for the entire 16 hours and 40 minutes. Others joined us throughout the day, taking turns solemnly ringing the bell.

Our ceremony took place at an intersection of the Las Vegas Strip. There was an abundance of both vehicle and foot traffic to view our signs, and we had many good conversations with passersby. We experienced pounding rain and blistering sun over the course of the ceremony. Being outdoors in the elements brought us closer together as a community, and a small bit closer to an understanding of the plight of the Iraqi people.

On Saturday 29th October around 50 students from Edinburgh and Stirling University People & Planet held a name-reading ceremony in memory of the thousands of Iraqis who have lost their lives due to the American and British-led occupation. As part of the '100,000 Rings for the People of Iraq' campaign, 100 names of Iraqis known to have died since the beginning of and as a direct result of the occupation were read out, accompanied by a ring of a bell for each name. The students were accompanied by a six metre long dummy missile with 'WMD' written on the side, serving as a reminder to the fact that none have been found in Iraq despite WMD being the primary reason for the invasion.

With the support of students and faculty at Nicolet Area Technical College, the Nicolet Peace Coalition started ringing our bell Wednesday morning at 7:30 AM and rang once a minute all day Wednesday until 4:00 PM. We then started again on Thursday morning and again rang all day. The overwhelming support we received from members of the student body and from members of the college faculty as they passed by and from those who volunteered for the half hour and one hour shifts were more than I had expected in this extremely conservative community. In all over the two days we had over twenty different bell ringers, including some that came up and asked for the opportunity to just take a partial shift between classes. My most memorable moment was on the first morning as I was standing there in 33 degree temperatures after about fifteen minutes and a veteran of this war asked me what I was doing. I explained our goal and he stuck out his hand and said he was glad to see that someone was willing to do it. I no longer felt the cold, and I remembered that those who gave up so much needed us to make others aware. I felt that if no one else showed up, that bell needed to keep ringing. During those two days, we only encountered a few negative comments concerning our presence and purpose.

Report on the event held October 26, 2005 in Palo Alto's Lytton Plaza, on the Fourth Anniversary of the PATRIOT Act, activists exercised their first amendment rights- to speak, to listen, ring bells, to scream on issues ignored and censored by the press.

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Voices in the Wilderness UK [A]
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Wednesday 26 October 2005

INTERNATIONAL BELL TOLL PROTEST MARKS ANNIVERSARY OF IRAQI DEATHS SURVEY WITH 100,000 RINGS

LONDON: Edith Cavell Statue, St Martin's Place (just off Trafalgar Sq), 1-2pm, Saturday 29 October

A bell-tolling ceremony will take place this Saturday to mark the 1st anniversary of a survey that found that 100,000 Iraqis had died of war-related causes since the 2003 invasion.

The ceremony is one of over 70 such events taking place in the UK, US and Switzerland which aim to collectively toll 100,000 times - each ring symbolizing the death of an Iraqi person as a result of the war and occupation [B]. Saturday's event will also feature names and pictures of Iraqis killed over the past two and a half years.

Yesterday, we held a witness for the 100,000 Iraqi dead on the corner of Triangle Park in downtown Lexington, Kentucky. At 9:40 a.m. we began to sound a Buddhist gong twice a minute until 6 p.m. to equal 1,000 rings. The gong rested on a small round table with a purple mourning tablecloth and a purple velvet runner with golden Autumn leaves. We placed signs on the lightposts which read: Mourn the Dead, Heal the Wounded, End the War and another one which explained the bell ringing witness in 100 communities across the world. We also held these signs up to motorists as they passed by. At 4 p.m. we were joined by other members of the community who were erecting a memorial in honor of the 2,000 American dead.