WHEN Tony Benn arrived in Baghdad yesterday morning he joined a small but fast- growing community of multinational peace activists who have arrived in the Iraqi capital determined to halt an approaching war.

The several dozen “peaceniks” range from a 73-year-old librarian who carries placards in Baghdad traffic to a former UN senior official; globalisation protesters; Vietnam veterans; human shields and a descendant of the eleventh US President, James Polk.

Bianca Jagger was here in January; the actor Sean Penn came before Christmas. Then there are the “freelances” who plan to chain themselves to strategic bridges, and a women’s group from San Francisco who are stranded in Jordan without visas.

They have names like Global Exchange, Voices in the Wilderness and September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. Their agendas vary widely.

Hans von Sponeck, the outspoken former Assistant Secretary-General to the UN and humanitarian co-ordinator for Iraq, who resigned in protest at UN policy in 2000, has come to try to pave the way for a last-gasp peace mission by three former heads of state next week.

He arrived with the Centre for Economic and Social Rights, which is here to present the case on the humanitarian and legal implications of war, and who describes the situation now in Iraq as a “gigantic refugee camp”.

Mr Benn has come armed with chocolate and tea bags to see President Saddam Hussein. He arrived shortly after dawn on a Royal Jordanian flight booked by the Iraqi Government, but is paying his own way.

The rest are a mixed bag. The human shields are regarded with scepticism by the other peace activists, and with bemusement by the Iraqis. “A lot of the human shields are people with serious problems who just want to escape from reality,” one activist said.

The 27 members of the Iraqi Peace Team, an umbrella group encompassing most of the American peaceniks, is planning a candlelit vigil near Baghdad’s al-Ameriyah shelter, where more than 400 Iraqi civilians were killed by US bombs on February 13, 1991.

Its unofficial leader is Kathy Kelly, an energetic 50-year-old from Chicago who once spent a year in jail for planting corn around a nuclear missile site. She founded Voices in the Wilderness eight years ago, borrowing money from her father’s pension to set it up. This is her sixteenth sojourn in Iraq, the first being during Operation Desert Storm.

Other members of her group include former Vietnam medics; teachers; logisticians; poets; writers, and Cynthia, a 73-year-old in a lavender jumper. They wear moccasins, have a vegetarian ethic and cite influences such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King and the Berrigan brothers — Catholic priests who chained themselves to military installations during the Vietnam War.

They use terms such as “affinity groups”, but they are not humourless: “I know we’re easy targets for cynics,” Ms Kelly, who took a bashing when the New York Times insinuated that she was anti-American, said. The team’s headquarters is the al-Fanar, a $20-a-night (£12) hotel, dinner included, on the banks of the Tigris, which features a tame monkey called Coffee.

When members talk of their activities — of visiting poor families or reporting back to religious groups in the US or Britain — they do not sound dangerous. But Ms Kelly was threatened with 12 years in prison and a $1 million fine for transporting medicine to Iraq.

One can almost sense the furious ghosts of Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson, who believed that anti-war protesters were the equivalent of the Antichrist.

The team is stocking up with water, recharging batteries and considering where it will be safest when the bombs start falling. But Ms Kelly says her team is ready. “We’ve said our goodbyes to our families,” she said. “We deliberately do not have an exit strategy. Our intention is to be alongside ordinary Iraqi people.”

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