OLYMPIA - It isn't that they intended to turn the dining room into a shrine, explains Cindy Corrie, looking at a silk-screened, framed print of daughter Rachel.
It's just that after Rachel Corrie died last year, as she tried to stop an Israeli bulldozer from demolishing a Palestinian home, her parents were hurled into a whirlwind of political activism. Cindy and Craig Corrie have had no time to slow down and settle in back home in Olympia.
So one day when Cindy Corrie spotted a nail, doing nothing, on her dining room wall she simply chose to hang Rachel's picture there.
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The print shows a smiling Rachel, head slightly tilted, hair brushing her shoulders. Taken at her brother's wedding, the photo adorned the programs for her memorial service. The image, reproduced with three tiny doves, now highlights fliers announcing a local community celebration that will be held in Rachel's honor Tuesday night.
Craig and Cindy Corrie, parents of Rachel Corrie,
have devoted the past year to speaking about
their daughter,
who was killed one year ago as
she attempted to stop a bulldozer approaching a
Palestinian home. On the wall is a
poster made
by an artist in Rachel's honor.
Rachel Corrie died March 16, 2003, in Rafah, along the Gaza-Egyptian border. To some she was a hero, a martyr. To others she was a meddler, a conspirator even, who deserved what she got.
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"She's just our kid, our youngest baby," says Cindy Corrie, wearing a dove pin on her cardigan.
Last year, Rachel Corrie interrupted her studies at The Evergreen State College in leafy, placid Olympia to join activists in the violent Gaza Strip.
To protest the Israeli occupation, she lived with a Palestinian doctor and his wife and children in their home in Rafah.
"I don't know if many of the children here have ever existed without tank-shell holes in their walls and the towers of an occupying army surveying them constantly from the near horizons," she wrote in a Feb. 7, 2003, e-mail to her family.
Wanting to protect
In activist parlance, Corrie served as a "human shield," accompanying the family and perhaps, she thought, offering them a layer of protection given that she was a foreigner.
On the day she died, an Israeli-driven bulldozer threatened to demolish the family house.
Israel was sending tanks and bulldozers into the area almost every day, destroying buildings near the Gaza-Egypt border. The Associated Press quoted Israelis saying Palestinian gunmen used the buildings as cover, and arms-smuggling tunnels dug under the border terminated in the buildings.
Corrie protested by standing in front of the house, speaking through a megaphone, wearing a fluorescent orange jacket.
The Israel Defense Forces, which initially said they were removing shrubbery along the border area and were approached by the protesters, concluded she died accidentally when earth and building material fell on her as she tried to climb on a pile of earth.
"The crew of the armored bulldozer did not see Miss Corrie, who was standing behind a pile of earth, nor could they have seen or heard her," Israeli authorities said.
But some witnesses say Corrie did everything to be seen. Her parents say the Israeli military investigation's conclusions are inconsistent and raise more questions than they answer about how their daughter died.
The military's report on the investigation has not been made public.
From the beginning, the Corries have lobbied Congress to pass a resolution calling for a U.S.-led investigation into their daughter's death.
"Say I, God forbid, killed your loved one in a traffic accident," says Craig Corrie. "That's why we have police to come out and do an investigation. If I were truly innocent, I would want the police to come out."
He is 57, an actuary now on leave from his job, which had taken him and his wife from their home in Olympia to Charlotte, N.C. She is 56, a former educator and music teacher who was just getting her bearings in Charlotte, taking French at a community college, when their world overturned.
At a news conference just after their daughter's death, they were a stalwart pair, speaking purposefully about the need to end the violence that has killed both Palestinian and Israeli children. Rachel would have wanted that, they said.
One year later, they speak passionately about "human-rights violations" and "resistance work" without being preachy or in-your-face. They are resolute that Rachel had a purpose for being in Rafah and that they now have a purpose to carry forth her mission.
"I'm so sad without her," says Cindy Corrie, in the house in which they raised their three children and where Rachel, as a kid, played with an old hen named Brownie and waded in the mudflats.
"But I have to feel grateful that she was doing something so important. I think it's made us think about that, too. What are we supposed to do with our time?"
A grim list
The al-Aqsa intifada, which began Sept. 29, 2000, has claimed the lives of 3,460 people as of Feb. 22, 2004, according to B'Tselem, an Israeli human-rights group whose statistics are regularly cited by Human Rights Watch as well as the U.S. State Department.
Available online (www.btselem.org), the sobering list is subdivided into where people died — "Occupied Territories," "Israel" — and then, by who killed whom:
Palestinians by Israeli security forces. Israeli civilians by Palestinians. Members of the Israeli security forces killed by Palestinians. Palestinians killed by Palestinians.
There's also a sublist of children. Among the dead: a 4-month-old baby girl and a 1-day-old baby boy.
Rachel Corrie was young — 23 — but already an experienced social activist when she landed in Gaza. She is believed to be the first American, non-Palestinian killed in Gaza or the West Bank.
That she carried no weapon and was affiliated with the International Solidarity Movement, which touts nonviolent protesting, made her an instant champion to some. College students held campus vigils for her. Michael Moore, the documentary filmmaker, dedicated a book to her. A Pittsburgh folksinger recorded a song in her name.
A Rafah nursery, a garden in Italy and the 92nd Chapter — the Western Washington chapter — of Veterans for Peace are now named in her memory.
"Rachel would be in hysterics that something called a brigade was named after her," says Craig Corrie, who served in the Army during the Vietnam war.
Spreading their message
Like their lives now, the Corries' house is in transition. Their belongings from Charlotte are not all unpacked. What used to be Rachel's room is now littered with letters, plaques and newspaper clippings sent to her parents after she died.
"People seem to have been very inspired by Rachel and very concerned about the Middle East," Cindy Corrie says.
The Corries are exhausted, they admit, trying to accommodate invitations to speak, which have taken them to Hartford, Conn.; Ann Arbor, Mich.; Vancouver, B.C.; Houston; New York; Italy; Israel and Gaza.
Last fall, they visited the house in Rafah that Rachel sought to protect. And they walked up to the mound where she died.
Craig Corrie sighs when asked who's to blame for Rachel's death, while she responds, "I feel a lot of responsibility on the part of the United States."
"We are financing the occupation," he adds and then segues into the need for a vigorous, transparent investigation into his daughter's death.
They are acutely aware how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict deeply polarizes the public.
When U.S. Rep. Brian Baird, D-Wash., introduced a resolution expressing sympathy for the loss of Rachel Corrie and calling on a U.S. investigation into her death, Rep. Phil Crane, R-Ill., immediately introduced a resolution condemning attacks on U.S. citizens by Palestinian terrorists and offering condolences to their families.
On Tuesday, Amnesty International plans to launch a public campaign again calling for an independent investigation into Rachel Corrie's death.
"We have many questions. We're not satisfied," says Cindy Corrie, who will speak at the community celebration in Olympia Tuesday night.
The couple plans to return to Gaza soon, to visit the doctor and his family in their new house. The old one was destroyed in January.
Florangela Davila: 206-464-2916
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