Caoimhe Butterly
Caoimhe Butterly (born 1978) is an Irish human rights campaigner, educator, film-maker and therapist who has spent over twenty years working in humanitarian and social justice contexts in Haiti, Guatemala, Mexico, Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon and with refugee communities in Europe. She is a peace activist who has worked with people with AIDS in Zimbabwe, the homeless in New York, and with Zapatistas in Mexico as well as more recently in the Middle East and Haiti. In 2002, during an Israeli Defence Forces attack in Jenin, she was shot by an Israeli soldier. She spent 16 days inside the compound where Yasser Arafat was besieged in Ramallah. She was named by Time magazine as one of their Europeans of the Year in 2003 and in 2016 won the Irish Council for Civil Liberties Human Rights Film award for her coverage of the refugee crisis. Butterly is a pacifist and a member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), an organisation that seeks non-violent alternatives to armed intifada by mobilising international civil society. Early life Caoimhe Butterly was born in Dublin to a family therapist. Her father's work as a United Nations economist moved the family from Ireland to Zimbabwe when she was a young child. She grew up in Canada, Mauritius, and Zimbabwe due to her father's work with the United Nations. She spent time working in the New York Catholic Worker Movement, then moved to Latin America where she spent three years living with indigenous communities in Guatemala and in Chiapas, Mexico. She also lived in Jenin refugee camp on the West Bank for a year. She has visited Iraq on numerous occasions, she visited Lebanon, where she protested British prime minister Tony Blair's visit to the country after he allowed US bomb shipments to be sent to Israel via Britain during the 2006 Lebanon War. Butterly was brought up in a culture of liberation theology, which, she says, "deeply inspired" her to engage in human rights work She spent time working as a volunteer in AIDS hospices in Zimbabwe as a teenager. At a very young age, she says, she developed a deep sense of duty. "I've always felt the need to almost a painful degree of needing to stand up against injustices in whatever contexts they lie." She left school at 18, wanting to travel, and Then after high school headed to New York, where she spent a year working in the city's Catholic Worker house, which was founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in 1933. Humanitarian work and Activism After New York, in 1998, she moved to Latin America where she spent three years living with indigenous and Zapatista communities in Guatemala and in Chipas, Mexico. She later worked with refugees and internally displaced communities in the West Bank, Gaza, Iraq and Lebanon, which included work as a volunteer EMT with ambulance services. In 2001 she spent 10 days fasting in front of the offices of the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, in protest at the Irish