More than 30 students began working to draw chalk outlines of human bodies around campus shortly after midnight today to raise awareness of the civilian and military deaths in Iraq, with organizers expecting to draw 900 bodies.

A tightknit, informal group of student activists calling themselves “projectAliveTo” has been planning the protest since September. They asked to remain anonymous, saying that they want the focus to remain more on the message than the messenger.

“People see it in the newspaper and hear it on the news, but they don’t internalize it,” said one organizer, a sophomore. “These are real people who are dying in this war.”

The group’s goal is to highlight the human cost of the occupation, which has grown since sectarian violence flared up earlier this year.

“When these bodies are on the ground, each one really represents someone who has died,” she said. “A soldier, a civilian, a son, a daughter, a mother, a father.”

It is difficult to make even a rough estimate of how many people have died in Iraq since the American invasion in March 2003. The New York Times reported Monday that the civilian death toll is at least 50,000.

“We want to push this issue into people’s faces,” another group leader said. “Stanford students aren’t going to be able to miss this. When they’re biking or walking to class, it’s going to be there.”

Students deployed themselves into three areas. One part of the group focused on the area between Meyer and Green libraries. Another concentrated on the area around the Language Corner, also known as the Intersection of Death. And the third concentration of bodies is in White Plaza, extending from the Claw to the Post Office.

“We were trying to get major intersections with traffic,” said the student coordinating the logistics for projectAliveTo. “We kind of wanted to keep them rather close together.”

Organizers said they hoped a higher concentration is more effective at showing the magnitude of the human death toll.

“People don’t want to step on graves,” he said. “It has a spatial impediment factor.”

The students do not want the chalk outlines to become a partisan political statement. They say this is not a standard, catch-all anti-Iraq war protest; it is more human than that. Planners said they do not have specific policy objectives they are trying to push. Instead, they say, the sole goal is to create a more globally aware student body.

“This is a completely non-political thing,” one organizer said. “We’re saying ‘These people died. We’re upset about it, and this is how we choose to celebrate their lives and support their families.’”

Working through various campus groups and loosely connected social networks, a handful of organizers discreetly recruited the volunteers over the past few days. Around 30 students were out drawing the outlines with stencils early this morning.

Today’s protest harkens back to the campus activism of the late 1960s, when student protests rose to a fever pitch at Stanford. More recently, the last large protest at the University was President Bush’s campus visit last April.

“What’s missing?” asked PWR Lecturer Scott Herndon, who teaches a course on protest movements. “Why don’t students come to protests? Maybe this generation has decided that there’s no solution and, as a result, the best we can do is ignore the fact this is happening.”

Herndon has advised “projectAliveTo” organizers and said he hopes that the chalk outlines translate the human costs of the war in a way students can relate to.

“I think the hope is that artistry can survive the impasse of partisan protest,” he said. “The hope is that it will strike someone between the ribs. It’s not a rhetorical, propaganda-based protest. It’s an affect based protest that plays on what we’re interested in to generate a pre-political feeling.”

One student who volunteered to help said she was really excited and felt the energy of the group’s organizers.

“I think it’s going to be neat to meet people who share similar views. When you experience this other worldly embodiment of Iraqi civilians, you make a connection,” she said. “It’s cool how they’re linking up all these different dynamics to establish bonds between people through this very symbolic, emotional act.”

The project was inspired by the graffiti art of Richard Hambleton, who painted white outlines of bodies around urban centers in 15 cities between 1976 and 1978 and then spilled red paint inside. Hambleton hoped to intensify fear in the population and to force them to think about violence in the streets.

Students drawing the chalk said they hoped to make students somewhat uncomfortable, to force them out of their comfort zones.

Organizers plan to place a copy of their manifesto on post office boxes at the Stanford Post Office.

“We are all of one kind — we must be alive to feel compassion for our own brothers and sisters,” the document says. “Iraqi civilian victims of the Iraq War, we celebrate your lives today, and we vow to be aware.”