Turkey turns back 'prankster' Marine fighting for peace

Diplomacy is failing. The United Nations is teetering between impotent protest and surly compliance. Europe is split painfully down the middle, an unsought bonus for America's hawks. Nothing now stands in the way of the Anglo-Saxon war machine but a few dozen miles of desert, a few dying spasms of jaw-jaw and a former US Marine called Ken O'Keefe with blazing eyes, hacked hair and a row of "cut here" crosses tattooed round his neck.

Yesterday he was deported from Turkey back to Italy, leaving 43 of his party and two buses behind. He had tried to enter with a passport Istanbul does not recognise, from the World Service Authority, a US-based group that issues them based on an article of the UN Universal Declaration of human rights that guarantees the right to travel freely.

In Rome he had said: "Turkey's on fire. They're very excited about this action." The Turkish government is still undecided on how far to support the war, and O'Keefe felt the human shields had a role to play there in swinging the argument.

Ken Nichols O'Keefe, his mum, Pat, their friends Katerina, from Norway, Bentley (New Zealand), Gordon (Australia) and a few dozen other peaceniks who conceived the ambition to be voluntary human shields in Iraq are now all, barring divine intervention, that stand between the world and a new war.

With hope like this (you might be forgiven for thinking) who needs despair? O'Keefe and his group left London bound for Baghdad in three London double-decker buses on 25 January. This week one of the buses packed up in Rome. "Water got into the oil," says Gary, the driver from Feltham, London, who has promised his family he will not cross the Iraqi border. "The head gasket's about had it."

You could almost hear the scoffers' guffaws: how typical, how pathetically hopeless. But in part because of the character of O'Keefe, the person who has inspired and leads the campaign, scoffing does not come so easy when you meet the new Merry Pranksters face to face.

This serious young man with the silly tattoos is a throwback to the civil rights activists who rode the peace buses and trains that travelled the Deep South four decades ago, fighting the good, non-violent fight against racial segregation.

The human shields may vanish rapidly into the blizzard of war news in the coming weeks, never to be heard from again. But O'Keefe, who knows what war is, is clear on where he stands in relation to the great non-violent struggles. His website (www.uksociety.org) is adorned with photos of his heroes, Gandhi, Einstein, Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama, Noam Chomsky. Gandhi taught that when a cause is just, even overwhelming superiority of arms can be neutralised by the skilful application of non-violent resistance. "Use truth as your anvil," O'Keefe quotes Gandhi. "You must be the change you wish to see in the world." O'Keefe is treading as firmly as he can in Gandhi's footsteps.

"I've been calling for a mass migration to Iraq," he had told me, while becalmed between gaskets in Rome. "Hundreds of people are supporting us, thousands of e-mails are coming in. The buses are just the beginning. We're also co-ordinating the charter of planes to Istanbul and Amman. We want to see a mass migration to Iraq, making it impossible for the UK and the US to start the war. People are beginning to grasp that they have the ability to dictate to governments. We have the power: it's just a matter of figuring out how to use it. I believe that if you get enough white people down there, we'll stop the war. We in the West don't put the same value on white as on non-white lives. That's a shame, but we can use that to prevent further deaths."

The Turkish government is still undecided on how far to support the war, and O'Keefe feels the human shields have a role to play in swinging the argument, though his prompt deportation has thrown his plans further into disarray.

From Istanbul – and the timetable, like the route, is constantly in flux, impossible to pin down – the rest of the party will drive in the two sound buses, accompanied by a local lorry with the bags, south into Syria, hoping O'Keefe can rejoin them, then possibly to Amman in Jordan, and a swing sharply east to head across the desert into Iraq. In Baghdad they will present themselves to Saddam Hussein. O'Keefe has already written to him, but intends to avoid being filmed shaking his hand. He has had no answer to his letter.

But already the human tide is flowing the other way: yesterday expatriates working in Iraq and neighbouring countries were reported to be trickling away. That trickle will be a torrent when diplomatic advisories become orders.

Soon O'Keefe and his company will be, with journalists and the odd spook, the only white non-combatants moving in the opposite direction. "It's potentially dangerous, though not necessarily dangerous," O'Keefe said. "It's a war zone. I fought in the first Gulf War in Kuwait, and I'm comfortable with my mortality."

And many in his group, he insists, are equally philosophical. "Of course, some are naïve, I wouldn't deny that. But many understand what they're getting into it and accept it. There's a couple from Norway, they're only 18 but they have a deep understanding of what's involved."

Forget the cut-here tattoos, the tear-drop tattoo under his left eye, balanced by a small fist by the right; Ken O'Keefe carries to Baghdad the hopes, and the fears, of many millions of ordinary people in Europe and beyond for whom the looming war is an unjustified obscenity, a nightmare lurch into a terrifying violence. "I'm actually a patriot," he said. "But it's an insult to our intelligence to think the US cares anything about the people of Iraq. The US is out of control, and if you give them all the power, either you're a fool or you're in cahoots with them."