Poet critical of war against Iraq

The US-Anglo invasion of Iraq represented an act of cowardice on a vulnerable people which was akin to "punching a drunk", the Nicaraguan poet and former vice-minister of culture, Ms Daisy Zamora, has said.

Ms Zamora, who is reading at the Cúirt International Festival of Literature in Galway today, said there were many parallels between the US war on Iraq and its successful attempts to undermine and defeat the 1979 Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua.

Ms Zamora lives with her husband, US poet and Vietnam veteran George Evans, in California. Both writers describe the present situation as the "darkest time" in recent US history, with a paranoid public being manipulated by a corporate-owned media.

"The Responsibility of the Artist in Times of Conflict" was the theme of the Cúirt debate in which Ms Zamora participated last night. She speaks as a leading Latin-American writer who has had the experience of "changing society through words and actions".

Born in Managua, Nicaragua, in 1950, Ms Zamora has published three books of poetry, which have been critically acclaimed for their feminist perspective, and she is also an accomplished painter.

During the 1979 Sandinista revolution, she was a combatant with the National Sandinista Liberation Front. She was appointed as vice-minister of culture in the new administration and served as executive director of the Institute of Economic and Social Research.

The current situation in Nicaragua is now "very disturbing and very sad", Ms Zamora said. The US sponsorship of anti-Sandinista Contra guerrillas through much of the 1980s, combined with an economic blockade, undermined the revolution.

"We lived and fought a dictatorship, we almost touched heaven with our hands and we had this faith that we were going to find a path, a new society and democracy," Ms Zamora said.

"Then we had to face reality and the effects of this covert war which US president Ronald Reagan started and which was essentially successful."

The US had "learned from Vietnam" and Nicaragua was the target for a "different mode of war", she said.

Daisy Zamora and George Evans read in the Town Hall Theatre, Galway, at 1 p.m. today.