A pair of pink baby slippers with a tag that read “Baby in mother’s arms suffocated, crushed, drowned falling off bridge in stampede; Aimma Bridge, Baghdad; August 31, 2005″ sat among over 60 pairs of shoes with similar tags on the lawn of Wilson Plaza on Thursday.
The display of old shoes donated by UCLA students sat in front of over 1,000 mock graves to recognize Iraqi deaths since the Iraq war began in 2003. Each pair had a name and cause of death of a non-military person who was killed in the current war.
Though the approximately 60 pairs of shoes represented only a fraction of the estimated civilian casualties of the Iraq war, students who put up the display said the shoes were a visual representation of Iraqi deaths. A sign behind the shoes put the number of Iraqis killed at more than 655,000, though the actual number is unknown
The information about individual Iraqi civilian war casualties was taken from a door-to-door survey conducted by a group of volunteers in Baghdad in 2003, said Samantha Miller, a member of Students for a Democratic Society and an organizer of the display.
The mock graves ““ which were displayed throughout the week to recognize American soldiers killed in Iraq ““ and shoes were put on display at UCLA by Students for a Democratic Society and a group called Veterans for Peace.
David Lazar, chairman of the Bruin Republicans and former Daily Bruin columnist, said anti-war protests of this kind divert people’s attention from the good that has come out of the war.
“This is a war of liberation, … and life, though it is currently difficult, is certainly better than it was under Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime,” he said.
Miller said the display provides a way for students to visualize what has been going on in the war.
“It’s so impactful to look at these piles of beat-up shoes and imagine that there were people walking in these that aren’t alive anymore,” Miller said.
Miles Maassen, a first-year premed student, said the shoes were a symbol of what the Iraqi civilians left behind when they died.
The shoes “make you think about what else they left behind, like family and friends,” he said.
The display was set up on the lawn in front of the Student Activities Center, which houses the Army ROTC program offices. Miller said that though the display was placed there for reasons other than the close proximity to the ROTC offices, she felt the location was appropriately visible to ROTC students.
Jaime Wing, a third-year political science student who is part of the ROTC program, said the display makes him think because the crosses “do represent people who have fallen” in the war.
But Wing said it did not cause him to question his position in the ROTC program because “everybody who’s here is (already) pretty cognizant of the risks they’re taking.”
After the three-day display addressing the human cost of the war, Students for a Democratic Society hosted a panel discussion Thursday evening with former members of SDS who were student activists in the 1960s. Panelists discussed the importance of student movements and the impact they can have on international policy and events.
Panelists said that student activism in the 1960s played a large role in the anti-war movement, and that current students have the potential to create change in the course of the Iraq war.
Students have a unique relationship to the economy in the sense that they are in a “strategic location in the structure that keeps society going,” panelist Gordon Alexandre said.
Their position in the higher-education system can be used as an organizing tool, Alexandre said.
Panelists acknowledged the existence of obstacles that student activists will have to overcome in organizing mass movements against the Iraq war, namely indifference and the distance felt from the war because a draft has not been instated.