Advance praise for
TAKING A STAND Taking a Stand is an excellent book. It gives both practical help and inspiration to all those peace activists with generous and courageous hearts who are willing to take risks for peace. — Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Nobel Peace Laureate I greet the appearance of this book with renewed hope for the world. Taking a Stand is written with the excitement — impassioned and inspirational — that such a stirring subject deserves. After reading this book, no one can fail to realize that peace teams are real; they are here, and here to stay. I dare to dream that we are hearing in these pages the death knell of war. — Michael Nagler, founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at UC, Berkeley and author of The Search for a Nonviolent Future: A Promise of Peace for Ourselves, our Families and our World Taking a Stand fills an important gap in the literature on nonviolence. It serves as a manual for the growing number of conscientious people considering becoming part of nonviolent interventions in conflict regions abroad. Through first-person accounts, Elizabeth Boardman gives readers a feel for what motivates people to make such a commitment for peace and justice, and what such an experience might be like, and gives a frank account of both the challenges and the fulfillment of making such a powerful and important personal witness. — Stephen Zunes, Professor of Politics, Chair of Peace & Justice Studies, University of San Francisco, and author of Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism
With Taking a Stand, Elizabeth Boardman provides a valuable book for anyone contemplating nonviolent resistance solidarity work. — Starhawk, author of The Spiral Dance, The Fifth Sacred Thing, Webs of Power, and The Earth Path
TAKING A STAND
TAKING A STAND A GUIDE TO PEACE TEAMS and ACCOMPANIMENT PROJECTS ELIZABETH F. BOARDMAN
New Society Publishers
Cataloging in Publication Data: A catalog record for this publication is available from the National Library of Canada. Copyright © 2005 by Elizabeth Boardman. All rights reserved. Cover design by Diane MacIntosh. Cover Images: Top Photo, Laura Beck. Bottom Photo, Laura Miller <www.lauramiller.net> Printed in Canada . First printing May 2005. Paperback ISBN: 0-86571-526-2 Inquiries regarding requests to reprint all or part of Taking a Stand should be addressed to New Society Publishers at the address below. To order directly from the publishers, please add $5.00 shipping to the price of the first copy, and $1.00 for each additional copy (plus GST in Canada). Send check or money order to: New Society Publishers P. O. Box 189, Gabriola Island, BC V0R 1X0, Canada 1-800-567-6772 New Society Publishers’ mission is to publish books that contribute in fundamental ways to building an ecologically sustainable and just society, and to do so with the least possible impact on the environment, in a manner that models this vision. We are committed to doing this not just through education, but through action. We are acting on our commitment to the world’s remaining ancient forests by phasing out our paper supply from ancient forests worldwide. This book is one step towards ending global deforestation and climate change. It is printed on acid-free paper that is 100% old growth forest-free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free, and printed with vegetable based, low VOC inks. For further information, or to browse our full list of books and purchase securely, visit our website at: www.newsociety.com New Society Publishers
www.newsociety.com
This book is for Hilary and Ken and Stephen and other people committed to peace and justice who might some day join a peace team or an accompaniment project. This book is for all those who have wondered what more they can do to help rid the world of violence and inequity.
Contents Acknowledgments Introduction ..................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Why Go?........................................................................................ 5 Taking a stand. Chickening out. Galvanizing forces. Individual examples. Chapter 2: Go where and do what? ......................................................15 Reasons. Delegations. Peace teams. Accompaniment projects. Real-life examples. Chapter 3: What will people say? ............................................................25 “Coming out” as a peace activist. Challenges and reactions. Talking to people from different groups. More hard questions. Chapter 4: Isn’t it dangerous? ...................................................................39 Fear and grace. Limelight and stage fright. Traveling in a strange land. Dangers. When should we leave? Chapter 5: Who will know or care? .........................................................51 Variations. Specific roles for supporters. Moral support. Logistical support. Publicity management. So many are involved. Others who care. Chapter 6: Learning about soldiers ........................................................65 Reading about soldiers. Real soldiers and real guns. Soldiers for peace.
Chapter 7: Christian Peacemaker Teams ..............................................87 Overview. Organization Training. The application process. What CPT provides. Language. Room, board and guidance. Short-term delegations. Expenses and spending money. Civil disobedience. Danger. Sharing the news. Headquarters. Demographics. Destinations. Chapter 8: Voices in the Wilderness .......................................................97 Overview. Background. The application process. Training. Language. Room, board and guidance. Expenses and spending money. Civil disobedience. Danger. Sharing the news. Headquarters. Demographics. Chapter 9: Peace Brigades International .......................................... 113 Overview. Organization. Background. The application process. Training, What PBI provides. Language. Room, board and guidance. Danger. Headquarters. Demographics. Chapter 10: Other travelers, other work ............................................ 123 International Solidarity Movement. Friends Peace Teams. American Friends Service Committee. Fellowship of Reconciliation. Services International para la Paz. Reality tours and delegations. Humanitarian aid. Radical fringe. Other work. Chapter 11: The way of the future ....................................................... 137 Challenges and rewards. Questions about effectiveness. Organizational weaknesses. The role of the technology. The way of the future: Nonviolent Peaceforce. Appendix. Contact Information Cotact information for all organizations mentioned ................................... 147 Annotated Resources............................................................................... 149 Index .............................................................................................................. 155 About the Author ...................................................................................... 161
Acknowledgments Joan Powell, editor of a Food First compendium of information about alternatives to the Peace Corps, provided crucial technical and moral support. Published author Carol Verburg offered editorial assistance. Peaceworkers in San Francisco agreed to act as fiscal agent. People who were especially helpful in supporting my trip and implementing the book project include Claudia Boudreau, who stayed with me the scary night before I left for Iraq, and Marilee Eusebio, who met me at the airport the night I came back. Mary deLap managed my e-mail correspondence, including wide distribution of seven reports written before, during, and after my stay in Iraq. Lots of important information for the book was provided by peace team leaders Kathy Kelly, Gabe Huck, John Farrell, Angela Garcia, Danny Muller, Laurie Hasbrook and Ramzi Kysia from Voices in the Wilderness; Claire Evans from Christian Peacemaker Teams; Andrew Miller, Emma Eastwood and Jonathan Woodbridge from Peace Brigades International; Val Liveoak from Friends Peace Teams; and Mary Murphy, Kevin Danaher, Tim Kingston and Malia Everette from Global Exchange. I am a computer klutz, so thank goodness for Simon Tse and Martin Taras, who provided extensive technical assistance. Gloria Valoris, Faith Child, David Hartsough, and Marie Schutz read and critiqued parts or all of the book, and I followed most of their suggestions. Joan Powell did a
stellar job of copyediting. Marie Schutz, Victor Staadecker and Peaceworkers provided vital financial support. Others whose moral support and expertise was important are Krista Barnard, Carol Bly, Joanne Clapp-Fullager, Dino DiDonato, Jan Hartsough, Sharon Kufeldt, Ted Sexauer, Bob Siedle-Khan, Wolf Sterling, Karen Topakian and Carol Verberg. David Hartsough of Peaceworkers, which undergirds the Nonviolent Peaceforce, was standing right behind me with encouragement, information, and guidance from the first day the idea of going to Iraq sprang into my mind. Hey, it takes a village! - Elizabeth Boardman, 2005
Introduction
What this is all about This handbook is intended to give a first glimpse into what it would be like to travel to another country in the name of peace, to stand against the violent, to stand by the brave, to take a real and serious stand for justice. This book started with my three-week trip to Iraq in December 2002 with the Iraq Peace Team sponsored by Voices in the Wilderness. For a Quaker woman who runs programs for frail and disabled elders in the Tenderloin in San Francisco, pre-war Baghdad made for an unusual vacation. But I could not bear to sit safe at home while my country prepared to sacrifice its own young men and women in a war against other innocent people. My schooling taught me to think as a sociologist and historian; I began right away to think about peace teams and accompaniment projects as an interesting historical development within the peace movement. When I returned home after the trip to Baghdad, it was challenging and interesting to talk about Iraq with groups of many kinds. Audiences were responsive and eager for information about Iraq, but they also shifted focus soon to the peace team experience itself. Trying to imagine such a venture for themselves, people would ask about the details of the experience. What was the application process? How much did the trip cost? Where did the team stay? Did members know each other before they went? What did your boss, staff and family think of it all? Were you afraid? Do you think it was worth it? 1
2 Taking a Stand
Realizing that I already had contacts with a variety of faith-based and non-sectarian peace activists, I decided to try to pull together a book about American peace teams and accompaniment projects that would answer these questions. My goal is to encourage more people to participate in such activities. The book draws on the rich demographic and organizational materials already available from sponsoring agencies, including Voices in the Wilderness, Christian Peacemaker Teams, Peace Brigades International, Friends Peace Team and others. It includes references to a number of good studies already in print about this kind of work. (See Bibliography) And, most important, there are many excerpts and quotes from people of all ages who have participated in such ventures in recent years. In writing this book, I contacted many people personally about their cross-border experiences, and most are quoted in this book. In later chapters, you will learn more about them and the groups they traveled with. This is their story as much as mine. Iraq Peace Team Like myself, several others on the Iraq Peace Team were first timers. Paul Chan, in his early thirties, is a photographer from New York City who took a stunning collection of photographs, which have been shown all across the United States. Micah Shristi was in Iraq while his young wife was in Colombia with another peace team. Sixty-two year old Martin Edwards from California was captivated by the people and the problems of Iraq, and shows every sign of staying there permanently: he has married an Iraqi woman. Mary Burton Risely, from New Mexico, was in Iraq during the early war protest, and Wade Hudson, a semi-retired taxi driver and writer from northern California, stayed in Baghdad right through the bombing. Charles Liteky, a former priest in his seventies from San Francisco, spent months in Baghdad, including some harrowing weeks at a potential bomb site, while his wife, Judy, waited patiently at home. Cynthia Banas, a retired librarian from New York, spent many months working in the Baghdad office of Voices in the Wilderness, and also stayed through the bombing.
Introduction 3
However, most people on the Iraq team were tried-and-true stalwarts with prior experience on peace teams and accompaniment projects. Steve Clemens’ wife and teenage sons stayed behind in their ecumenical Christian community in Minnesota; other times his wife is the one who travels with a peace team. Ellen Barfield, vice president of Veterans for Peace, probably in her forties, left her husband at home in New Jersey again for this third or fourth trip to Iraq. Gabe Huck was a stalwart at the Chicago office of Voices, and he and his wife, Theresa Kubalik had been to Iraq several times when I met them in 2002. Of course Kathy Kelly herself, co-founder of Voices, had been in Iraq for weeks at a time in protest against the economic sanctions two or three times a year since 1996. Elizabeth “Rabia” Roberts and her husband, Elias Amidon, in their sixties, have given up their home in Colorado in order to travel around the world in a constant witness for peace and justice. Some people with Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) commit to annual stints with peace teams in whatever part of the world has a need. Peggy and Art Gish, who live on a communal farm in Ohio and are ardent about peace work, belong to CPT and spend part of every year in this work. Peggy was in Iraq while Art was in Israel in late 2002. Cliff Kindy was coordinating CPT work in Baghdad while I was there, and has done this kind of work in many different places over the years. Alice McMechen from New York traveled with a CPT delegation to Colombia in 2003, and Michele NaarObed went with CPT to Iraq in 2003. Members of Peace Brigades International (PBI) were generous in reports about their travels. Lizzie Brock, from California, is a young woman who has spent a lot of time in Colombia. She put me in touch with Denise Cauchi, another Colombia activist, now living with her young children in Australia. Karen Brandow has traveled with PBI and is using her experience in counseling new team members. Heike Kammer, a young German woman, is now into her fourth or fifth year with SIPAZ in Chiapas after several stints with PBI in other Central American countries. Friends Peace Teams (FPT) are involved with the African Great Lakes Initiative where Adrian Bishop and his wife, Rosalie Dance, from Baltimore spent the summer of 2003.
4 Taking a Stand
Angela Pinchero from Canada and Linda Sartor, from California, wrote from Sri Lankan projects sponsored by the Nonviolent Peaceforce, and David Hartsough of San Francisco has traveled the world in the course of establishing that program. Carin Anderson and Chris Moore-Backman are young Quakers from San Francisco who have spent many months in Colombia with the Fellowship of Reconciliation and other sponsors. Tom Cahill, a rugged guy in his late fifties from California, went to Iraq during the war as a human shield. Fran Peavey, despite ever-increasing physical disabilities that now have her using a wheelchair, has traveled to many conflict scenes, most recently to Bosnia with a group of women who call themselves Crabgrass - they will spring up persistently in every nook and cranny! Mary Ann McGivern was part of a peacekeeping presence in Northern Ireland, and Ravi Chand is a corporal with the Marines who very generously shared his perspective on Kuwait and Iraq via his emails to peace activists in the US during spring 2003. At-home supporters who are quoted in this book include my sister, Emily Boardman; my friends Mary deLap, Donna Lockhardt, Andy Rose and Jeanne Wright; my neighbors Kevin Janssen, Maureen McKenna and her daughter, Kate; and my co-workers Hazel Lau, Fran Post, and John Tinloy. Trich Lachman, correspondence coordinator for CPT member Peggy Gish, is quoted, and there is a picture from the San Francisco Friends Meeting featuring First Day School teacher Bruce Folsom with Simeon LymanLevering and Raven Hill. Iraqi citizens and American soldiers pictured in this book did not offer their names but did give permission to be photographed.
Chapter 1
Why Go? People participate in peace teams and accompaniment projects because they come to a point where they feel they must take a more dramatic stand against the greed, destruction and injustice in the world. It’s that simple. When we speak of peace teams and accompaniment projects in this book, we are thinking primarily of small groups of people going under the auspices of a sponsoring organization to a foreign land for weeks, months, or sometimes a year or two, to take a stand against some injustice or violence that is happening there. Peace teams may physically get in the way of hostile maneuvers, or they may come close to the action as observers so that they can send back reports to the media, to decision makers, and to the alternative press and the peace movement. Accompaniers literally accompany or escort local activists in a conflict situation as they go about their work, to help protect them from harm, and to be able to testify to decision makers in the western world about what is happening in the area. There are many variations on these general themes discussed in the following pages. We also talk about delegations, usually shorter and more tightly structured but also often focused on conveying a message of peace and understanding, and about “human shields,” who also stand in the way of violence. 5
6 Taking a Stand
Taking a stand There are many ways to take a stand for peace and justice. Probably everyone who chose to pick up this publication has already read books or articles about injustice, signed petitions and written letters pleading for peace, attended rallies and demonstrations, made signs and designed T-shirts, or spent hours on the Internet sharing concerns about the role of violence in human affairs. Sometimes these actions do not seem to be enough. People read the alternative press, see the news, check their e-mail, and talk to their friends, and they are appalled at the way human beings are treating other humans around the world.
“Can it be that all that is required for the triumph of evil in the world is for good people to limit themselves to prayers, demonstration, and calls for peace?” - Paul Barker, “Queries from Afghanistan,” in Friends Journal, September 2003 Civil wars, declared or not, pitch people against their neighbors and copatriots in very disturbing ways in many places in the world. And as Americans, we realize more and more that our own government is behind many of the most damaging activities going on in the world; harming people, whole economies, and the environment. At some point we become outraged, moved to the point where we feel that we must take a stand more dramatic than signing petitions - it is not enough. Marching in anti-war demonstrations is not enough. Waving a flag reading “Not in My Name!” is not enough. Chanting with true fervor for peace with the local Buddhist Soka Gakkai group is not enough. Resisting taxes is not enough. A person lies awake at night. Could I do more? Is this the time to do something really dramatic? As one tee-shirt questions, “If not me, who? If not now, when?” People who call themselves pacifists wonder how they can practice what they preach. One person might read an inspiring pamphlet …
Why Go? 7
This idea of accompaniment was inspired by the practices and philosophy of Gandhi. The theory is that accompaniment provides protection for people of marginalized populations, both individuals and groups who work nonviolently for change or for human rights in countries with repressive governments, militaries and their death squads. Such individuals and groups are demonstrably safer when they are provided with international accompaniment. The brutal forces of these countries are much less likely to act oppressively when an international accompanier (especially a white European or European-American) is present. Though racist and unjust, this is true. - Pendle Hill Pamphlet, Peg Morton, 1997 Someone else might learn from a handout that some people believe we are being lied to …
We have not been told the truth about Sept 11, 2001 - not by the government, the military, the media .... The possibility that some top officials intentionally abetted the terrorist attacks (and that others have covered up for them) has not been ruled out …. - “Blindspot,” handout from the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 2002 And then from the media, they learn they are being duped … again:
So the truth is out: George W. Bush lied when he claimed to be worried about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction .... “We have not seen such systematic distortion of intelligence, such systematic manipulation of the American people, since the war in Viet Nam,” wrote John Brady Kiesling, a 20-year veteran of the US Foreign Service, in his letter of resignation to Secretary of State Colin Powell last week.
8 Taking a Stand
The second lie was that Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction represent an imminent threat to US security. The third and most dangerous lie is that our mission now is to bring lasting peace to the Mid-east by a devastating invasion of Iraq. - Robert Scheer, syndicated columnist, on KALW “The US cannot reach the ideals we hold dear while at the same time killing innocent people around the world, and that‘s reason enough to go to Iraq!” - Charlie Jackson, Texans for Peace, Dec. 2002 People might learn through a forwarded e-mail of the military-industrial conspiracy …
George W. Bush gave a speech [February 26, 2003] before the Godfather of conservative Washington think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute. In his speech, Bush quantified his coming war with Iraq as part of a larger struggle to bring pro-western governments into power in the Middle East ... The foreign policy aspirations of the Bush administration were detailed. The Project for a New American Century, or PNAC, is a group founded in 1997 that has been agitating since its inception for a war with Iraq .... It seeks to establish what its members call “Pax America” across the globe. Essentially, their goal is to transform America, the sole remaining superpower, into a planetary empire by force of arms. - From “Blood Money” by William Rivers Pitt, in TruthOut/Perspective, February 27, 2003
Why Go? 9
“The US government ... has launched an assault on the intelligence of the human race. It’s not the lies we are being told but the quality of those lies that is truly insulting.” - Arundhati Roy, in a message to anti-warprotesters in the US, Feb 2003 Meanwhile, the International Forum on Globalization publishes solid research on global affairs …
Children line up for the latrine (a shack on a little pier over the river) in a slum outside the business center of Jakarta, Indonesia. According to the 1999 United Nations Human Development Report, even though net capital flows have skyrocketed in countries such as Indonesia as a result of globalization, the gap between the rich and poor within such countries has increased by dizzying proportions. The UN report directly blames the inequalities of the global trading system for the widening gap. - “Invisible Government”, report from the Forum on International Globalization, 1999 People learn in a newsletter of grievous humanitarian abuses …
Congressman Jim McGovern said in his statement to Congress “that despite human rights conditions placed on US military aid to Colombia, our aid continues to flow uninterrupted. We keep writing huge checks, even though every reputable human rights organization in the world concludes that Colombian armed forces directly collaborate with paramilitary forces ... responsible for the majority of human rights abuses against civilians. - Newsletter, Fellowship of Reconciliation Task Force on Latin America and the Caribbean, July 2003
10 Taking a Stand
And people hear stories from their friends and acquaintances. For example, Elias Amidon wrote to many of his contacts about the man in the park …
A few days ago in Jerusalem I met by chance an American sitting with his blond seven-year old daughter in a park. The guy looked like a typical middle-American: sandy-haired with a baseball cap and shorts. He was from a suburb of Detroit. It turns out he is a hydro-geologist working for USAID in Gaza, building water wells. He has been coming to Gaza for four years, and he was completely exasperated. “I can’t believe it!” he said. “I just finished restoring and equipping a whole field of irrigation wells and pumping systems in Gaza with US funding, and then the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) came in with bulldozers and destroyed everything. They filled the wells with rubble! These were sixty-year-old wells, hand-dug, three meters wide and over 100 meters deep. And they cut down all the orange trees, as far as the eye can see! It looks like a desert. If they did this to the blacks in Detroit, they’d burn the city down.” I asked him if USAID confronted the IDF about this, or reported to Congress about it, since this is all done with US taxpayers’ money. “Sure we do,” he said, “but it doesn’t make any difference. It’s a racket. US money pays for the wells and the equipment, and it pays for the Israeli bulldozers that destroy the wells and equipment. And now I’m buying more equipment with more US money to go rebuild the wells.” I asked him how he can keep on. He looked at me and said simply, “Hey, they need the water.” - Elias Amidon, July 2003
Why Go? 11
After a certain number of these stories, a person just can’t stand it any more. Depending on where in the world you have lived, what languages you speak, what you have studied in school, you find you are more and more concerned about one of these situations of violence. And you begin to look for a way to do the right thing, to take a stand, to put your money where your mouth is - to put your body and your life into the service of peace and justice. Chickening out Very often, however, this determination fizzles out under a barrage of doubts:
We often don’t know where to start. Most of us would like to see people treated more justly, to have the earth accorded the respect it deserves, and to feel less pressure in our lives. But we find it hard to imagine having much of a role in this process. We mistrust our own ability to make a difference. The magnitude of the issues at hand, coupled with this sense of powerlessness, has led too many of us to conclude that social involvement isn’t worth the cost. Such resignation isn’t an innate response, or the creation of some inevitable fate. Rather, it’s what psychologists call learned helplessness. - Paul Rogat Loeb, Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in a Cynical Time, 2000 Loeb talks about how we think we don’t know enough to take a position:
We never feel we have enough knowledge or standing. If we do speak out, someone might challenge us, might find an error in our thinking or an inconsistency - what they might call an hypocrisy in our lives. ....We ... use the perfect standard to justify detachment.
12 Taking a Stand
… [But in fact] social change always procedes one way or another in the absence of absolute knowledge, as long as people are willing to follow their convictions, to act despite their doubts, and to speak even at the risk of making mistakes. - Paul Rogat Loeb, Soul of a Citizen We may think that we cannot afford the cost of travel, we don’t have enough time, our children are too young or our parents too old, our own health too fragile. Often these things are true - but sometimes not, as stories in this book show. Sometimes these barriers can be overcome and the depressing burden of our own silence can be relieved.
“It takes energy to mute our voices while the environment is ravaged, greed runs rampant, and families sleep in the streets. It takes energy to distort our words and actions because we fear the consequences. It takes energy ... to split our lives from our values.” - Paul Rogat Loeb, Soul of a Citizen Galvanizing forces Perhaps the time will not seem right for taking the radical step until such a move will also meet our personal needs and promote personal growth. It is entirely appropriate that the peace team member taking a stand in a dangerous place far from home should be getting some personal benefit from the experience - regions in trouble don’t need visitors who feel like martyrs or victims. Mature people who are thinking and growing personally are an asset anywhere. Peace team participants are almost always fulfilling some personal need of their own as well. • I need to get away from the cultures of my family and my country to get new perspective before I commit myself to a career - or before I make a mid-life career change.
Why Go? 13
• I need to launch my career as a photographer, a reporter, a photo journalist. • I am committed to freedom of the press and will provide news to the alternative media. • I am a religious person in an order committed to international service or peacemaking. • My mid-life marriage thrives more readily when my spouse and I are absent from one another occasionally. • I can live much better on a social security income in a developing country. • This is a way I can afford to travel outside of my own country. • I believe that going into a physically dangerous situation will help me grapple with my own mortality. • I am a veteran, so I am not afraid of danger. I know the fruitless evil of war. I want to recapture the excitement of visiting a foreign land. • It is part of my family culture to take radical stands on peace issues. I feel inadequate when I am living comfortably at home. Individual examples Peace travelers we talked “Never doubt that a small group of committed to spoke of their personal people can change the world; indeed, it is the only motivations and feelings about thing that ever does.” - Margaret Mead why they joined these projects. Some are recorded below: Peg Morton — Guatemala, 1994: I felt spirit-led in this journey; there was an amazingly smooth flow to it. I knew that several Friends from my Meeting were holding me in the Light and I was strengthened. It was intense and fatiguing for months, but also beautiful. I might add that there is a twelveyear-old kid in me that urges me towards adventure and also accompanied me on this trip! Steve Clemens — Iraq, 2003: Both my wife and I have done a lot of international peace work because we need a supportive community to be a part of, and this provides it.
14 Taking a Stand
Elizabeth Boardman — Iraq, 2002: Even though I work many more than 40 hours a week at a politically correct inner-city job, I was plagued for years with the idea that I was not doing enough for peace and justice, given the crying need in the world. Then suddenly I discovered I was free to take this radical stand. My elderly parents died, my kids grew up, my job was secure, I had enough money, and I still had my health. So grab the moment! Wade Hudson — Iraq, 2003: [I was] outraged at what they are doing with my tax money … [and I found myself ] relatively free of commitments. I want to learn better how to confront my fear of death by facing it. I think the fear of death is crippling, in general, and reinforces the lack of confidence that is engendered in us by our competitive culture. ... On the mirror in my bathroom, I have a sign that says, “Recognize reality.” Without death, there would be no life. It’s a cliche, but I want to face that fear. I don’t think I will overcome it totally. But I think I can move in that direction. Art Gish — Hebron, 1995: When I worked in the Civil Rights Movement back in the 1960s, I became aware of the racism in my own life and have tried to work on that ever since. Now I am realizing that I have been influenced by the anti-Semitism that pervades Western culture. I want to work at that with as much vigor as I have dealt with racism. Martin Edwards — Iraq, 2003: I want to join David Hartsough’s international peaceforce, and he told me I should try the Iraq Peace Team first. Steve Clemens — Iraq, 2003: [After a long paragraph on the risks and possible costs of being in Iraq during the second Gulf War, including the possibility of leaving two sons orphaned]. However, what are the costs of not acting? Every time we choose to act on fear rather than faith, our faith is diminished.
Chapter 2
Go where and do what? Peace teams and accompaniment projects come in all shapes and sizes, traveling to many different countries. Some teams stay for days, others for many months. Some organizations themselves are short-lived; others have been growing for years. Some teams have a dramatic short-term mission (to stop the war in Iraq, for example); others are more low-key and long-term (to prevent harm to peace communities in Colombia, for example). Reasons In every case, activists cross national and cultural barriers to learn more about others, to express solidarity, to prevent violence, to affirm our common humanity. In an article about the Iraq Peace Team sponsored by Voices in the Wilderness, Sheila Provencher shared this inspiration:
There is a story about a Teacher who was asked by his disciples: “How can we determine the hour of dawn, when the night ends and the day begins? Is it when from a distance you can distinguish between a dog and a sheep?”
15
16 Taking a Stand
“No,” said the Teacher. “Is it when you can distinguish between a fig tree and a grapevine?” asked another. “No,” said the Teacher. “Tell us then,” said the disciples. “It is,” said the Teacher, “when you look into the face of another human being and you have enough light to recognize them as your brother or sister. Until then it is night, and the darkness is still with us. - Sheila Provencher,Voices, 2003 One way or another, people cross borders to work for peace and justice because they have recognized their brothers and sisters. They choose where to go based on their own strengths and interests. • Language — If you know Spanish, you can be much more useful in Colombia than in Bosnia. • Experience — If you have lived in a Muslim country, you might be more effective in Iraq or Iran than in Guatemala. • Religion — If you are Jewish or Muslim, you may have a special interest in the Palestine-Israel situation. • Health — If you have a health problem, you probably will choose a city location rather than the deep jungle of Guatemala. • Expertise — If you are well trained in the Alternatives to Violence Program (see Chapter 10), you are more likely to answer a call to Burundi or Rwanda. • Special concerns or knowledge — If you know a lot about depleted uranium, the places where DU is a problem — Iraq, Vieques, and the Balkans, for example — will probably attract your attention.
Go where and do what? 17
Another important variable is how much time you have available. Peace Brigades International (PBI) generally looks for a commitment of several months, while Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) organize both week-long delegations and three month tours of duty. The Iraq Peace Team organized by Voices in the Wilderness (VitW) offered a similar choice of stints. Most information-gathering delegations are only a week or two long. Your tolerance for physical risk, your willingness to commit civil disobedience, and your capacity to endure isolation or intense group living will also make a difference. Chris Moore-Backman went to live in a remote Colombian village with one other English-speaking person for eight months, for the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Denise Cauchi said the hardest thing about her work with PBI in Colombia was living communally, never having any privacy, always being “on duty” because of her visibility as a westerner and as a PBI volunteer. Gabe Huck and Theresa Kubalik committed civil disobedience by carrying medical supplies into Iraq with a Voices in the Wilderness team, but stayed for only two and a half weeks, leaving well before the war started, while Wade Hudson went to Iraq with the same group in March 2003, and stayed right through the bombing. You will need to decide what kind of work you want to do. Although the lines are not firmly drawn, there are characteristic differences between delegations, peace teams and accompaniment projects. Delegations Delegations are initiated by professional groups, alumni societies, churches, and other sponsors. Often the local arrangements are made by one of the peace team organizations, by Global Exchange (see Chapter 10), or even by professional tour guides. Trips tend to be a week to ten days in duration, are intensely programmed and carefully guided, and focus on educating members about the current problems of the country being visited. No formal training is required, although some orientation materials are generally provided, and people tend to read up on the country they are about to visit. Participants are often drawn from particular groups such as health care professionals, teachers, alumni from a particular college, clergy and other
18 Taking a Stand
religious groups or government representatives, although they are sometimes drawn from the general public, as well. The application procedure is simple, and participants pay their own way. Delegations generally stay in commercial hotels, eat in “safe” restaurants pre-screened by the organizers, and are exposed to very little risk. The trips are completely legal. Participants will bring home stories and pictures for friends and family but are not expected to give speeches or contact the media. Peace teams Peace teams may include both short and long-term members (two weeks to six months) who live in the country, figure out their own daily agenda as a group, and focus on witnessing and preventing injustice and violence. There is a formal application and selection process. Often formal training is required. Participants sometimes can raise money from supporters for the cost of the trip, and sometimes the sponsoring organization raises funds to help pay the expenses of peace team members. Peace teams tend to stay in hostels, very modest hotels, or apartments maintained by the sponsoring organization. They may handle their own meal preparation, laundry and housekeeping, or they may engage local people to help with these tasks. Some sponsors, such as Christian Peacemaker Teams and Friends Peace Teams, draw participants from sponsoring church groups as well as from the general population. Often Jews have felt called to go to Israel-Palestine with the International Solidarity Movement. Many selected participants have had previous experience “in the movement,” in the Peace Corps, on a delegation, or in the third world. However, people new to the work may also be accepted. The Africa Great Lakes Initiative of the Friends Peace Teams is developing an important niche for itself in responding to local requests in Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi for training in the non-violent ways of dealing with conflict developed by the Alternatives to Violence Project. Though challenging, the work is not particularly dangerous. Some teams, like those organized by Voices in the Wilderness to protest against the anti-Iraq sanctions between 1996 and 2002, mostly observe and
Go where and do what? 19
document the harm and damage being done, then send the information back to the media, or bring it back to their own communities in the western world. Participants are not in any real physical danger, though they may take legal risks, such as ignoring sanctions in the interests of humanitarian aide. (See Chapter 7.) They are expected to write articles, give speeches, and be interviewed on radio and television when they return home. Other teams risk much greater physical harm. Voices in the Wilderness shifted its focus in October 2002 and established the Iraq Peace Team to protest against the impending war in Iraq. This group staged demonstrations, encouraged activists in the US and Europe, and barraged US decision makers with letters of concern. Peace team members stayed in Baghdad right through the bombing in a courageous show of solidarity with the Iraqis. Being present in Iraq “after the war was over” during the tension and chaos of the occupation was probably even more dangerous. Members of a peace team in Kosovo were harassed and jailed and stripped of possessions and hair. Christian Peacemaker Teams, protesting the misery and violence in Israel and Palestine, now has a slogan known as GITW: Get in the Way — and that is precisely what they are doing in Hebron and other places. They are determined to get in front of any gun aimed at any local person, and they patrol the streets and neighborhoods, going anywhere tensions are rising. They get threatened and spat at, and admit to being very afraid sometimes, although no one from their group has yet been killed. But in March 2003, Rachel Corrie, a young American woman with the International Solidarity Movement, was crushed to death as she stood in the way of an Israeli bulldozer about to knock down a Palestinian house. The same year, Tom Hurndall, also with the ISM, was shot by an Israeli sniper, and, sadly, died in January 2004, after spending nine months in a coma. Another ISM member, Brian Avery, was shot in Jenin; happily, he survived his injuries. Witness for Peace has brought thousands of US citizens to Nicaragua, and many of these and other activists have been jailed for their nonviolent resistance on behalf of the people of Nicaragua. What ever their failures and successes, all these people held true to their intention to never become indifferent to the pain of others.
20 Taking a Stand
Accompaniment projects Accompaniment projects are usually initiated in a country suffering from civil war, by local activists who want outsiders to stand by them to help prevent atrocities and to witness the danger and harm. Local leaders may need an international presence to protect them from being kidnapped, “disappeared,” hurt or killed. It is not illegal to serve as an “escort” in this way, but there are many challenges. In their thorough and sophisticated book about accompaniment projects in Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Sri Lanka, Liam Mahony and Luis Enrique Eguren quote Canadian Sel Burroughs, a volunteer with Peace Brigades International:
Escorting Nineth de Gracia for five days was one of the most dynamic experiences of my life. Nothing happened. But I had time, while I followed and waited, to observe and support a brave, dedicated, caring and vulnerable woman. The fact that the GAM (Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo, or Mutual Support Group) has survived and developed to the extent that it has is largely a result of the single-mindedness of this remarkable person. Escorting is difficult. It involves being ready to move at someone else’s schedule, hours of waiting and intermittent exclusion and inclusion in the lives of the person you are responsible for. Accompaniment team members require a good bit of prior education, political savvy and training, so generally they will be asked to commit to several months of work. Peace Brigades International organizes such projects in Central America, Israel-Palestine and Sri Lanka, and is able to offer a stipend, health insurance and housing to project members. Generally a local apartment is maintained where team members live, managing their own housekeeping as they see fit. With an agenda set by the local activists, the escorts’ job involves knowing the risks the local leaders are exposed to and standing by them. Depending
Go where and do what? 21
on the circumstances, the work can be dangerous, and PBI has on occasion pulled out of a situation temporarily when it got “too hot.” Below are some examples of what real people have seen and done as part of peace teams and accompaniment projects. Lyn Back, independant traveler, 1997: I took a three-month sabbatical, traveling through Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Croatia. During this journey of religious witness, which was supported by my [Quaker] Monthly Meetings and friends and family, I experienced a bonding with the people of Yugoslavia and with the incredible tragedy which was going on there ... I stayed with a Muslim family in Tuzla, with a Quaker woman in Sarajevo and with British Friends in Croatia, hearing stories and witnessing everywhere the physical destruction of the war and feeling the despair of the people. Michele Naar-Obed, Christian Peacemaker Teams, 2003: The Ameriyah shelter [in Baghdad] where 408 women and children were massacred by two US “smart bombs” in 1991 was a site frequently visited by ... peace team members …. We held two vigils at the Ameriyah shelter. One was in conjunction with the group Peaceful Tomorrows. These folks lost their relatives in the September 11 crisis. Instead of calling for retaliation, they came to Iraq to mourn with the families who lost loved ones when the US bombed Ameriyah in 1991. Mary Ann McGivern, Irish Parades Emergency Committee, 2003: I have been working for several years as an international observer in Northern Ireland during the contentious Orange marches in July. The Irish Parades Emergency Committee ... trains and fields observers at flash points and in communities that are experiencing sectarian harassment. The residents have concluded that our presence hugely reduces violent incidents, and the reports we issue each year seem to have resulted in better policing behavior. Alice McMechen, Delegation organized by CPT, 2003: I want to thank you for your support of my journey to Colombia, from which I never feared I would return safely … Yet what was my adventure is other people’s daily lives. So many of the people we met were constantly accompanied by PBI volunteers. The wonderful community in the jungle, in Cacarica, with whom we stayed for three days, is in daily danger of annihilation at the hands
22 Taking a Stand
of the paramilitaries, with our government aid complicit. My desire in going to Colombia was to find the means to elevate the peacemakers — and there are many of them — to the central roles. How do we help them to be visible and in control? FOR Newsletter (Fellowship of Reconciliation), 2003: An FORassisted nonviolent campaign in Puerto Rico has now won a commitment from the U.S. Navy to stop testing bombs and other weapons on the island of Vieques ... Our last delegation in mid February (2003) included extensive strategizing with community groups and consultation with Puerto Rico officials. This sounds like another success story for the power of nonviolence in the hands of determined and disciplined people. However, much remains to be done. Decades of destructive tests, including the use of depleted uranium 238, napalm, and the placement in Vieques’ shallow waters of a sunken ship once used as a target in an atomic bomb test, have left a devastated ecology and rates of illness notably higher than in the rest of Puerto Rico. Continued pressure is needed to ensure that the Navy and the EPA clean up the contamination to protect health and the environment. Elizabeth Boardman, Iraq Peace Team, 2003: On Christmas Day, 2002, still in Basrah [Iraq], I shared lunch with fifteen Muslim and Christian clerics and one other American woman. Lunch was a feast of humus and olives, chicken and rice, spread out upon carpets in a mosque. We visitors from Voices in the Wilderness were not expected, but our Muslim hosts, Sunni and Shi’ites together, welcomed us, and sent a runner to call for their Christian counterparts to share in this opportunity to talk. They wanted us to understand that they consider as brothers and sisters all men and women “of the Book” - Muslims, Christians and Jews. They urged us to understand that they are not fundamentalists or terrorists. They told us how their constant prayer is for peace .... Iraqis are loyal to their own leader, they said, and will resist the destruction of their country. The mosque in which we sat together was bombed in 1991 and again in 1998. “We will rebuild it again and again and again” if necessary, they vowed.
Go where and do what? 23
As they pressed more food on us, these ecumenical clerics remarked that, in contradiction to American legal and moral principles, the US administration treats Iraq as “guilty until proven innocent” in the realm of weaponry. And they noted without rancor that the facts are clear as to which country does have weapons of mass destruction, has used them, and threatens to use them again. Adrian Bishop — Friends Peace Team, 2003: On July 17, we [three volunteers from the US] met our 17 Burundian colleagues ... all ... members of the Kibimba Peace Committee or students ... working at restoring and rebuilding community .... We worked every morning and some afternoons. (Burundi is three degrees south of the Equator, and although the altitude is about 6000 feet, it is very hot during the day.) The main task was to supply materials to the fundis (builders), who expected to do the actual building work. But many of our volunteers had hoped to build, and we were able gradually to add our hands to the tools of production. It is remarkable how quickly a line of willing hands can move a pile of bricks .... After four weeks’ work, all five of the houses were substantially complete …. During our last week we facilitated an AVP (Alternatives to Violence Project) workshop for the Peace Committee and local “peace keepers.” Peace keepers are young men who are locally recruited and armed to provide overnight security in villages and camps, but who receive no training. These young men arrived sullen and seemingly uninterested, but by lunch on the first day, they were interacting vigorously with the peace committee participants. Thomas Brinson and Soraia Makhamra — Nonviolent Peaceforce, 2003: Sometimes it’s hard to believe that, in this paradise [Sri Lanka], with its welcoming and helpful people, so many bad things are happening. We are right now witnessing a time of unrest. The town of Mutur has experienced the highest number of deaths through violence since the start of the ceasefire in December 2001. At the end of Ramadan, for instance, someone threw a grenade into the largest mosque in Trincomalee, a city just across the bay from Mutur .... The regions to the south ... are controlled by the Government of Sri Lanka, and regions to the north [and east] ... are controlled by the Liberation of Tamil Tigers Eelam ....
24 Taking a Stand
Art Gish, Christian Peacemaker Teams, 2001: After coming back to Hebron, I went to visit a Hamas leader here in Hebron. He is one of the Palestinians who camped out for over a year on the border with Lebanon, refusing to be expelled from Palestine. Eventually Israel backed down. It was a warm time of sharing. I ... asked him what he thought was the essence and heart of Islam. He talked about the importance of faith and a personal relationship with God. He said Islam opposes violence, and claimed that some of the terrorist groups are supported by the enemies of Islam to discredit Islam ... Imagine, there were hundreds of peace team members who went to these countries and others in 2002 alone, and each of them has dozens of stories like these to tell. Each is even now telling and retelling these stories. Surely enough stories told enough times will begin to make a difference in the world.
Chapter 3
What will people say? When you start talking about your plans to go to a foreign land full of strangers and conflict, you can be sure that people will have plenty to say about it. They will tell you what they think, positive or negative. They will talk to each other about you in your absence. And they will think about your plans in their spare moments. This already is one of the ways in which you are having an effect on the world. “Coming out” as a peace activist Quite often, ordinary peace activists act on their concerns in the privacy of their own homes (with letters, petitions, reading, e-mail), and/or on the weekends (with speeches, rallies, demonstrations), so that their neighbors, colleagues and employers are not aware of their politics. When such a person decides to use her vacation to join a peace delegation, to take a leave of absence from work in order to participate in an accompaniment project, or to leave his retirement community, church, or neighbors to travel with a cross-borders activist group, she “outs herself ” as a peace activist. This moment in the process may in fact be scarier than actually getting on the plane or going into the jungle village. This is the moment, really, when you are upping the ante, taking a visible public position and making your colleagues stop to think. 25
26 Taking a Stand
It may well be, in fact, that this is the
“Wow! You came out of the closet stage at which you can be most effective in as a peace activist! I am thrilled ... Keep me posted on everything.” promoting peace and justice in the world.
So it is worthwhile to think carefully about how to present your plans in a way that will hook into people’s current understanding “Each time a person stands for an of you, of the situation you are going into, and ideal, or acts to improve the lot of your dedication and fervor. of others, or strikes out against You will know intuitively to speak first to injustice, he or she sends forth a those most likely to be sympathetic, refining tiny ripple of hope. And crossing your presentation each time you repeat it in each other from a million different increasingly unsympathetic circles. What centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can people say will vary enormously depending on sweep down the mightiest walls of your age and station, their relationship to you, oppression and resistance.” the desitnation you have chosen, and when - Robert Kennedy, quoted in Loeb you plan to go. Some will be very supportive. Here are some examples of the support I received regarding a peace trip: “Thank you for doing this, thank you from the bottom of my heart. There are so many whom you represent as you speak love to power.” (Emily Boardman) “Thank you for sharing with us about your plan in promoting peace in the Middle East. It’s great! I congratulate and celebrate with you in fulfilling your dream.” (Hazel Lau) “I admire your spirit and commitment toward making the world a better place.” ( John Tinloy) “I’d love to be involved if only vicariously.” (Kevin Janssen) “The mother in me wants to tell you to stay home! The peace-loving hippie in me says, ‘Right on!’” (Fran Post) Others will be afraid right away, for you or for themselves. Responding carefully and thoughtfully to them may help both them and you. You don’t want to get defensive; being able to answer satisfactorily will be part of your own process of getting clear that it is right for you to go. - Jeanne Wright, e-mail
What will people say? 27
“You’re too old.” If you are accepted by the sponsoring agency, you are probably not too old. They will be more interested in your health than in your age. Your health need not be perfect, as long as you are able to assess your capabilities realistically, and to manage your health issues so that you will not be a burden to the team. Health care services may be marginal where you plan to travel, and your health insurance will not apply if the US is at war with the country you are visiting. You will need to carry your own medicines and plan accordingly. “You’re too young.” If you are accepted by the sponsoring agency, you are probably not too young. Many have an age minimum, such as 25 years, with special exceptions allowed. (For example, you may be traveling with a parent or other older adult relative.) The sponsor will be more interested in your judgment and reliability than in your age. (Delegations have a lower minimum age.) “It’s too dangerous.” If the sponsoring agency is organizing a team for the target locale, it probably is not too dangerous. There have been very few deaths or disabilities incurred by peace team members, and they have almost never been related to the politics of the situation or the work being done. Sponsors withdraw volunteers from dangerous situations - the important thing is to agree to leave when the team leaders think it prudent. And remember: peace travelers everywhere say that the biggest danger is the traffic, the taxis, the local drivers, the bad roads. “How can you afford it?” You can probably raise the money for the trip if you don’t have enough savings. The sponsoring organization may have some funds to share, your church or peace group may help, or you may be able to raise money in your own community. Living in the third world is generally much less expensive than you are used to, and the sponsor will often negotiate cheap air travel with airlines they use repeatedly.
28 Taking a Stand
“How can you leave me?” Leaving your partner will indeed be hard. Or perhaps your spouse/partner will decide to come with you. Perhaps the two of you will have some deep and rewarding conversations about what action is needed for you to maintain your sense of integrity. You will negotiate the time line, and look forward to the reunion. Or perhaps you will find, on close examination, that you are inclined to leave your partner permanently. It would be best to deal with that separately from decisions about the trip. (See Chapters 9 and 10 for more information on partners/spouses who travel together or separately in peace work.) There are additional questions and challenges which people will present you with. Be grateful. Responding to them will help ensure that you are making a thoughtful and mature decision about participating in the project you are considering. “There you go again — another wild idea.” Well, is there in fact a pattern of wild new ideas in your life? If so, are they productive, or escapist? Is it hurtful to people near and dear - Derrick Bell, to you? Is it a pattern you need to break or do Harvard law professor, you need to find better ways to proceed with quoted in Loeb new projects?
“It is the determination to protect our sense of who we are that leads us to risk criticism, alienation, and serious loss while most others, similarly harmed, remain silent.”
“You’re just a war-zone junkie.” There definitely are war-zone junkies out there, people who like the adrenaline rush of danger, the admiration they get for their heroism. Some media people, some photographers and journalists, make a productive career out of their attraction to dangerous territory. This is an issue to explore. Am I just “feeding a habit” when I go to a war zone, or is my bravery an asset I can put to good use for afflicted people?
What will people say? 29
“There you go – you’re just like your father/mother/sibling …” Maybe it is a good thing to be just like your father, mother, sibling or some other family member. Was/is he/she a committed, careful, mature activist? Do you have some of the same traits that fitted him or her for this kind of work? Or do you just feel that you ought to follow a family tradition that is not really comfortable for you? Are you trying to buy approval in the family or larger community? Better to take on a project like this when it is necessary to your own sense of self. “Do you even know anything about “Taking a stand neither requires nor Colombia/Burundi/Iraq?” confers moral perfection” It may well be true that I don’t know anything - Loeb about Iraq/Colombia/Burundi. I will learn. What I do know is that using violence and killing people in conflict situations is wrong, and never effective in the long run. I can act on faith: war is wrong. The other side doesn’t have perfect knowledge either. If I inadvertently make a statement that is inaccurate, so be it - even my country’s elected leaders make untrue statements, sometimes deliberately, I have learned. My bias will help counterbalance theirs. “You’re a traitor to the United States!” Some people might call you a traitor to your country. What would you say to that? The media like this angle, especially when you are protesting an imminent US attack on another country, such as Iraq. They might ask it without rehearsal while you are standing in front of an international TV camera. You can say something like this. “I love my country, and I am acting in the tradition of its best democratic ideals, which allow me to say that I believe the means my government is using to deal with the situation here are wrong. War is wrong.” “Another one of your peace trips? Do you really think they’re effective?” It is true that when you go on peace team trips over and over again, the impact
30 Taking a Stand
on your colleagues at home is less dramatic than when you first come out as a peace activist, while there is still some shock value in your decision. If you return to the same host country, however, your credibility and loyalty will be appreciated there. If you are escaping from problems at home, or if you are seeing the world on a low budget, you will want to examine your motives carefully. Many people make repeat trips as a matter of commitment and principle, and the sponsoring organizations often encourage it. (See especially Chapter 8 on Christian Peacemaker Teams.) “What about your children? Is it fair to leave them like this, and put yourself in danger?” What about the children? Being away from your children can help them to develop independence. However, they will also pick up any resentment from other adults left to care for them, so it is a good idea to work through any issues with those people. The basic problem in relation to your children is that in joining a peace team, most people deliberately expose themselves to more danger than usual, more than the ordinary known risks of accident and disease. The subliminal message to your child is, “I am not keeping myself safe for you.” Even for grown children, this is a notable milestone. You are saying to them: “I judge that you could do without me now.” Younger children may be used to your occasional absence, or unaware of the import of your decision. It is teenagers who are substantially affected, both by their fear for your safety and their consideration of your values. Conversations in which their concerns are acknowledged and some negotiation of terms is allowed (no more than a month; come back before it gets too dangerous) show respect for the children. Or maybe you will decide to wait until they are older. Negotiating terms shows respect for grandchildren, too: One American woman left Iraq for home before the bombs fell at the urging of her as-yetunmarried daughter, who wanted a visible and alive grandmother for her future children.
What will people say? 31
Talking to people from different groups Clearness committees The organization you want to travel with may require you to get the written support of a group you belong to — a peace and social justice committee, a volunteer organization, or a women’s group. Or your church may have a tradition of “clearness committees” which help people make decisions of this kind. These are likely to be people you already know and with whom you share common values, so they may be inclined to support your decision. But they still may ask many questions. They may think is too dangerous for you to go, that it is the wrong time in your life, or that you are not well-suited to the group or to the task. Sometimes these discussions constitute quite a hurdle on your path. Sometimes you will conclude that these supportive advisors are right and that this is not the time or the project which is right for you. Guilty activists Many liberal people you talk to will be supportive and admiring — and selfdeprecating.
“Your letter is so inspiring ... I feel so proud to have a friend like you ... Deep in my heart, what you are doing is the kind of thing that I wish I had the guts and circumstances to do …” - Donna Lockhardt to Elizabeth Boardman, about going to Iraq to protest the coming war, 2002 Of course, you can reassure them right away:
“Don’t feel guilty and inadequate - I hate that my decision makes some people feel that way. Most people, even strong peace advocates, are not free to do this kind of thing. Nor have I been for many years. But suddenly, I can do it, so I must! There may not be a later time that works.” - Elizabeth Boardman, in response, 2002
32 Taking a Stand
In fact, your act may spur others to do whatever they do have “the guts and the circumstances” to do. When you decide to participate in a crossborders project, you are simply taking the next step for you. For others, the next step will be participating in a demonstration, putting a bumper sticker on the car, writing a letter to a congressman, or even just talking honestly about feelings or war experiences. Encourage everyone to take their own next step in pushing for a world of peace and justice. Immigrants In many places, we find ourselves living or working with immigrants who have come to America as refugees seeking freedom and democracy “in the land of milk and honey.” It can seem cruel to tell them that in fact you perceive serious injustice and error in the decisions of the US government. You can stress that it is the American democratic system that allows you to voice your concerns and criticisms, to act on your beliefs. Immigrants may see it as particularly foolhardy of you to go voluntarily, at such financial and personal expense, into the kind of civil war scenario that they have escaped. Sometimes you have to assure people that you won’t be killed, jailed or tortured for dissenting from current government policy. Perhaps they will be able to tell you useful things about the pervasive fear and distrust which is common in dictatorships and countries rife with civil war. Perhaps they will offer good ideas about how your presence in such a place might be prudent and helpful. Experienced peace travelers If this is going to be your first trip, you will instinctively seek out experienced forerunners who can tell you all about it. One of the ways they can help you the most is with constant little nudges and reassurances during the time that you are still deciding whether to apply, or whether to go if accepted. Never mind if their advice doesn’t seem to apply to your situation — it is still good to be in touch with these pioneers.
What will people say? 33
People offering money If you need financial help for your trip, it will be a great help if someone one else can do the fund raising. If necessary, you can prepare flyers or letters or background information, which an other person can take public and “make the ask.” Lots of donors will ask if the contribution can be written off their taxes. If it is given directly to you, it cannot. If it is given to your nonprofit church or peace group, etc., which just passes it through directly to you, it is not legal and jeopardizes the tax-exempt status of the church or group. It is more prudent to give to a standing program of your church or peace group, a program that supports a variety of peace and justice activities. Peaceworkers was available as a fiscal agent for me. They took 5 per cent to cover their administrative costs, which was perfectly fair — they need support as much as I did. Foundations will almost always require a fiscal intermediary with a 501(c)3 tax status (in the US), before they make a grant. But it is hard to find foundation support for an individual trip. Foundations are more likely to support a broader program, project or initiative, and by cooperating with other peace team travelers or your sponsoring organization, you may have some success raising money that way. Even if you are not seeking it, you may be offered money. You should certainly accept it, because people want a way to participate in the peace effort. You can put the money to good work in any number of places. If nothing else, your sponsoring organization needs funds! For yourself, accept the strong moral support for your own work that the money represents. People who aren’t interested Peace teams and accompaniment projects are active all over the world nowadays, but their visibility varies. The work of peace teams in Iraq before the US invasion in March 2003 was wildly popular, and peace team members were in great demand as speakers for the peace rallies and demonstrations. At the same time, activists involved in Colombia, Sri Lanka and Burundi (for example), would get blank looks when they offered to give a talk, show their slides, tell their story. Still, churches and community peace centers
34 Taking a Stand “One of the reasons we go is to show them that normal American citizens don’t agree with this war. By going, we’re still putting our own government on notice that we’re opposing the war.” - Charlie Jackson, Texans for Peace, November 2002
continue to provide venues and audiences, and, slowly, more US citizens are learning about the issues these countries face. Chipping away is what it comes down to; it takes faith and perseverance.
Neighbors Many activists, including peace team members, regret that their speaking engagements so often just involve “singing to the choir.” A good way to get a politically diverse audience in some situations is to gather the neighbors together so you can tell them your plans or report back on your trip afterwards. It can be scary, if neighborhood relations are pleasant, to risk antagonizing some people or even causing a rift by revealing your “radical” intentions. Any of the questions already discussed in this chapter may be asked. But you may also inspire others to take their own next step. If you go to Iraq, maybe Jim will go to a peace demonstration. If you care about Colombia, maybe Maureen will put a bumper sticker on her car. If you write a series of e-mail reports, maybe Martha will read them and talk about them with her colleagues. And maybe they’ll let you talk about your trip to their kids for a few minutes at the next block party. E-mail It will be helpful if you can correspond by e-mail. With some sponsoring organizations, e-mail is almost essential; fair or not, they hardly seem to know any more how snail mail works. And you yourself may find that you want to send reports about what you experience to many contacts, both from your home before and after your trip, and from the foreign country you visit. E-mail makes it far, far easier and cheaper to do this. The Internet and e-mail have revolutionized the peace movement (along with the rest of the world). In fact, in many ways, the peace movement has become a kind of global telephone tree. You will send your news to, say, one
What will people say? 35
hundred people. And many of them will forward it on to 40-50 more. Some of those will forward it once again. The same goes for notices about peace demonstrations and rallies. It is an enormous asset to the movement. The problem is that a great amount of your work as a peace team member involves sitting in front of a computer screen. For some of us, it means hours struggling to understand how to manage an e-mail list; how, from time to time, to get the computer running again; or how to use the word processing capacities of the machine to good advantage. One activist said she spent about a hundred hours developing a PowerPoint presentation about her work in Chiapas with Servicio Internacional Para La Paz (SIPAZ). Sometimes, the hazards of some peace teams include a gnarled neck and carpal tunnel syndrome! More hard questions At least three more difficult questions will come up as you talk to people about your plans to participate in a peace team or accompaniment project. ”What will you do there?” Americans, especially, like their time to be programmed, their tasks to be welldefined, and their goals to be clear. They want to accomplish something. You may be very much like that yourself. Beware. If you are traveling with a study group, a fact-finding delegation, or a reality tour, it will probably be clear how you will spend every hour of each day, and why. But if you are participating in a peace team or an accompaniment project, it probably will not. Members of a peace team, together and individually, are going to watch daily for opportunities to observe and report local injustices. As possibilities arise, they will go to places where they can learn what is going on in the area, how people are being affected by government policies and military behaviors, and what information they can send or take back home to counterbalance the picture painted by the official news. As a group, they will seek opportunities to make a media statement. Yes, you modest peaceniks will be out there looking for photo-ops! You will create scenes in order to get media attention. Perhaps you will visit a hospital,
36 Taking a Stand
a bomb site or a cemetery. Maybe you will participate in a Christmas Eve service with signs saying “Where is the Prince of Peace?” You will support the local people in peace demonstrations. You will do things like this only “as the way opens” and if you can get government permission. It won’t be easy. Members of accompaniment projects will have it even worse. Your job will be to do what is requested of you, depending on changing circumstances, by a local community leader.
“Victims of human rights abuse are frequently those attempting to organize social change movements that question their society’s powerful elites. An international presence can be a source of hope to these activists. It assures them that they are not alone, that their work is important. And that their suffering will not go unnoticed by the outside world. The volunteer’s presence not only protects but also encourages.” - Mahony and Eguren, Unarmed Bodyguards Nevertheless, a lot of the time you will just wait. Remember the quote from Sel Burroughs in Chapter 2: “Escorting Nineth de Gracia for five days was one of the most dynamic experiences of my life. Nothing happened.” Back at headquarters, you will discuss with others on the team why nothing happened, and what else is going on. And you may help to keep notes about everything which happens, including any threats or suspicious coincidences, so as to maintain continuity as volunteers come and go. “Whose side are you on?” People may ask this before you go and once you arrive at your destination. It is not always a simple question to answer. From a military point of view, it is easy. You are not armed, and so you take sides with no one. From an emotional point of view, you are probably on the side of the oppressed, the ones with less power, the ones at whom the guns are pointed. But you will not fight back. And from an ideological point of view, you are simply opposed to violence as a way of handling conflict. When you are taking a stand against
What will people say? 37
violence, it will often look as though you are taking sides with one of two parties against the other. It requires steady, patient discipline to keep your cool at all times, to remember the humanity of all players, to be consistent, to watch without flinching, and to preach peace consistently. It is heroic work. It is hard. It is gratifying.
“There are good reasons to trust the veracity and analysis of the victim over that of the attacker. But this bias must be tempered by the recognition that even heroic human rights activists who risk their lives every day may be ill-informed and mistaken in their analysis, and they may lie. A death squad leader or dictator, in turn, might be intelligent and may be telling the truth. An activist for justice may, without contradiction, be quite power-driven, and a military officer quite susceptible to moral persuasion.” - Mahony and Eguren, Unarmed Bodyguards What about racism?” Some will ask why your team is not more racially mixed. The answer is that it is basically a question of self-selection on the part of those who apply, because the organizers are always eager for diversity on the team. A more sophisticated observation is that, especially in the case of accompaniment projects, it is a kind of reverse racism that makes the accompaniment effective. Because you are from a powerful country, usually recognizable by your white skin, an antagonist is less likely to harm the native, dark-skinned person you are escorting. Why is that fair? How is that right? It is not fair. It may not be right. But it is effective. The local, brown-skinned person urged you to come. (Mahony and Eguren discuss this extensively in their book, Unarmed Bodyguards: International Accompaniment for the Protection of Human Rights.) Workload One question which your friends and family will probably not ask is whether you can handle the work load, because they will not realize what hard work
38 Taking a Stand
it is going to be. This is true especially the first time you venture into the larger world of human justice activism across borders. Preparing for any trip requires complex arrangements, and when it is - Anonymous activist to a country off the beaten tourist track, quoted in Mahoney and Eguren, it is harder. It will take a lot of time to Unarmed Bodyguards learn about the country you’re planning to visit, the sponsoring organization you will travel with, and the project itself. The application process itself can be quite time consuming. If you care about your friends and family, you will spend a lot of time talking and e-mailing them about your motives and plans. And if the project involves protest against the policies of your own government, you may find yourself very busy writing articles and giving radio and TV interviews, both before you go and after you return. Additionally, various activist groups may ask you to speak before you go, and to show your pictures after you return. Preparation and Elizabeth Boardman gets a travel time for these gigs can be extensive. hug before speaking at Friends And, of course, you will want to spend time House in Santa Rosa about with other former and future peace activists, her trip to Iraq. sharing stories and information about your experiences and plans. Fortunately,theexcitement and challenge of the work will provide you with new energy. You will shift your priorities and adapt to the requirements of the job. The rewards will be great. Press Democrat, March 2003
“A foreigner accompanies me always as a means of protection. The mentality of those who repress is that a “gringo” is very valuable. According to them, my own life, as a Guatemalan woman, is worth less than nothing.”
Chapter 4
Isn’t it dangerous? Many peace travelers report that the scariest time was when, safe at home, they were first thinking about the project they might join. The unknown is scary. Leaving home for any kind of travel involves risks and excitement. Getting in front of a curious audience or a TV camera can cause intense stage-fright. Committing civil disobedience, for all its high moral tone, is still breaking the law, and the prospect of paying fines or doing time in jail can make a person nervous. There are other hazards as well. What if the plane crashes? What if you are mistaken for a spy and apprehended? What if you get hurt or sick and there is no adequate health care? What if the water is poisoned with depleted uranium? Even if you are not acting as a “human shield,” what if you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? What about the dreadful traffic? And what if there is no way for you to leave when you think it is no longer safe to stay? In this chapter, we talk about all these hazards. Don’t worry. You will find satisfactory answers to these questions, because a kind of determination sets in so that another set of concerns takes precedence. Soon, instead, you will worry about things like this: What if I am not accepted for the team? Can’t raise the money? Don’t get a visa? Am not granted a leave of absence from work? Get sick so that I can’t go? 39
40 Taking a Stand
All your focus will shift to making it work out. You’ll be saying: I want to do this. I want to put my money where my mouth is. I want to walk the walk. I want to be honest and real and full-fledged about my belief in human justice and peace. Fear and Grace I applied in October 2002 to go with the Iraq Peace Team sponsored by Voices in the Wilderness to take a stand against the impending war. My worst bouts with fear were in the middle of November, when there was much saber-rattling in Washington. After a delay, while I was assessing the risks, Voices accepted my application. I wrote to Mary deLap, my devoted technical support buddy, about my fears. I am definitely scheduled for Dec 14 to go to Iraq and I lay awake half the night last night for the first time ... I was fixated on the possibility of being unable to leave Iraq if it got too dangerous. There is only a single road worth mentioning for leaving the country, and it seems to me it must be a major target unless the US military wants to use it themselves, in which case they will likely drive everyone else off it ... Keep in touch, because I need friendly connections after these long days planning to put myself into danger. I find I want my house to be very orderly and the garden tidy - I recognize this is a gimmick to reassure myself of security and calm! Mary wrote back: I was hoping I could come up with a brilliant response to your e-mail about being scared, but all I can say is that I would be scared, too. I can remember when I was ready to go to Korea (with the military) and how scared I was ... That restored my righteous indignation: Why should disadvantaged young men and women in the military have to endure these dreadful fears while advantaged grandmothers sit at home. I cannot stand for it! A few days later, for no obvious reason, my fears had vanished and I e-mailed
Isn’t it dangerous? 41
my sister: My own experiences this week have been astounding. If I still had an anthropomorphic image of God, I would feel that I was not only in his hands, but cradled up against his breast. I don’t quite know what to do with my gratitude and joy ... I spoke of this emotional roller-coaster to a friend who had traveled with the Balkan Peace Team, and Fran (Peavey) nodded knowingly. Yes, that’s how it goes. Fear and grace, fear and grace ... Weeks later, another San Francisco Bay Area volunteer getting ready to go to Iraq spoke of how she found herself saying goodbye to every bush, to every tree dear to her in her neighborhood, because she expected to die in Iraq. At the same time, she was inundated with joy because she was finally going to act upon her convictions whole-heartedly. Limelight and stagefright If the territory you plan to visit is in the news, or if the work of the peace teams includes trying to get media coverage, part of the job will be to get into the limelight. Before I went to Iraq, I worried more about TV cameras than about guns and bombs. I worried about my weight and about my high voice and about whether I would say the wrong thing. Finally, I got the point that the audience would not be interested in me, only in the issues at hand. I would talk to TV interviewers not for my own prestige, but for the cause of peace. It did not much matter if I said the wrong thing, it mattered that people thought for a moment about the anti-sanctions, anti-war message.
Perhaps the greatest mystery of peace is that ... it is rooted in the courage of people and communities to be and live vulnerably in the face of fear and threat ... Human security is not tied primarily to the quantity or size of weapons, nor to the power of imposition or control, but to the nature and quality of relationships developed with those most feared ... - John Paul Lederach in “Peace Colloquy #3, Notre Dame Kroc Institute, Summer 2003
42 Taking a Stand
Traveling in a strange land Traveling in foreign places, especially in the developing world, is always challenging. The usual precautions need to be followed about passports and visas, what you eat and drink, how you carry your money and valuables, what gestures you use, how you greet people, and so forth. On the whole, going with an organized team is much easier than traveling on your own. The sponsoring organization will provide guidance in advance about all the details: low-cost flights, fees and tipping, and ground transport. Most important, they will almost always arrange the place where you will stay, be it a hotel/hostel, an apartment, or a local home. The organization will provide the general framework for your work, and experienced members will show you around the town and the country. This won’t be your ordinary guided tour, but it will include some of the most useful characteristics of arranged group trips. And it will be much cheaper! Dangers Any travel in the developing world puts you at risk of contaminated water and food, but peace team travel also can take you to places where the air, water, and food may be contaminated by depleted uranium and other similar radioactive materials. If your stay is short, the danger is minimal. But if you are going to stay for months, you will probably explore the arguments about whether DU is a hazard to residents of the country or not. The military establishment and some other researchers claim that residual DU in old battlefields is not a notable hazard, but others argue differently. Of the soldiers who occupied the toxic wasteland of Iraq after the 1991 war, 60,000 veterans have become disabled and 2000 have died .... On July 17, 2003, the Saudi Al-Watan newspaper reported that US soldiers deployed around Baghdad Airport started showing symptoms of mysterious fever, itching, scars, and brown spots on the skin. Three soldiers were flown back to Washington for treatment. NATO experts tend to believe that the illness was a result of direct exposure to nuclear radiation
Isn’t it dangerous? 43
from bombs armored with DU used on Iraqi Republican Guard forces deployed to defend the vicinity of Baghdad Airport. Secrecy about the illness has been imposed by American officials … - Robert Younes, MD, circulated on e-mail by Christian Peacemaker Teams, 2003. In some places, peace team members filter their drinking water in an effort to keep DU particles out of their bodies. Who is a spy? Are you a secret member of the CIA? People around you may wonder, and the local authorities may have you under observation. Occasionally a peace team member is sent home by the parent organization for his or her own safety. You yourself may wonder about other members of the team, or about someone you are accompanying. Meeting rooms and phone lines may be bugged, and e-mail messages may mysteriously fail to reach their destination. Trust is a rare commodity in countries run by dictators or divided by civil war. Secrecy and paranoia are common. Being honest and discreet is important. Harassment and threats Cross-border accompaniers share the harassment and threats made against the individuals or groups they are escorting. The Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) reported on their Colombia project in January 2003: The residents of La Union fled to the town of San Jose de Apartado on October 20 after a paramilitary raid into their settlement. Two volunteers from the FOR Colombia program arrived today at San Jose de Apartado to accompany the residents of the Peace Community and observe the situation of the displaced peasants .... The military installed itself in the settlement of La Union last October 24 ... and has continuously harassed the community since then .... Soldiers have told them several times ... that “they will not allow the people to return, and if the people return they will massacre them.” These threats have prevented the community from returning to La Union up to now ....
44 Taking a Stand
Such repeated threats by the military against the Peace Community have previously become reality, with massacres, extra-judicial executions, and forced disappearances actually being carried out. FOR Press release, January 2003 With the FOR volunteers present, the villagers eventually were able to go back home to La Union. Eight months later, shortly after the FOR escorts left, there was another paramilitary incursion. It caused enough fear that the whole population moved down into the larger town of San Jose again. Now the latest word to come out is that one villager was taken by the paramilitaries, has not been heard from and is feared dead. - Chris Moore-Backman, e-mail and interview, 2003. For Chris, safely back at home in San Francisco, this episode caused deep grief and dismay. No sooner had he left, than the situation deteriorated right back to where it had been before his eight-month stint with the Peace Community. And one of the young men he had known may have died. After you are safely back at home, you watch for news about battles and negotiations eagerly. You read the papers, watch TV, scan your e-mail for news of people and places you care about. Sometimes there will be no news. Micah got more and more anxious: Any IPTers [Iraq Peace Team members] who ever visited the coffee and domino dive across the street from the Al Fanar (Hotel) will remember Dhia. He worked as an argeela and tea server, spoke some of the best English in Baghdad, and could play dominoes like there was no tomorrow. I consider him to be one of my best friends. In May, Kathy Kelly told me that Dhia was missing and that the physical description in a news report of someone being shot at a US checkpoint matched that of Dhia. Does anyone have any more news of Dhia? - E-mail from Micah Shristi, VITW, July 2003 Peace team members can have guns right in their own faces. We heard on the news this morning [ January 7, 1996] that the West Bank and Gaza are closed because of the death of Ayyash. Things are tense. Most of the market is closed.
Isn’t it dangerous? 45
Peggy Gish
I got a phone call this morning saying that there was trouble at Baab I Zawia. I headed up there and saw lots of soldiers. They had a menacing look. There were lots of Palestinians milling around. Things were very tense. The situation looked serious, so I decided to get involved. I went to the middle of the intersection and stood between the soldiers and the Palestinians. That felt scary, but also right .… I saw soldiers pushing people around and pointing their M-16s in their faces. I went up to one of the soldiers who had his gun in a Palestinian’s face and calmly told him that it was impolite to point a gun at someone like that. He seemed rather stunned, and walked away. - Art Gish, Hebron Journal, p 58. A week later, Art lost his nerve one night, but Cliff was able to engage the Art Gish soldiers. Not long after we returned home, we heard a loudspeaker announcing a curfew. We decided to investigate. I went downstairs and stuck my head out the door. A soldier saw me, aimed his M-16 at me, and charged. I quickly got my head back in the doorway and ran up the stairs as fast as I could. I could hear the soldier kicking the metal door downstairs. For the first time, I completely lost my courage. Cliff then went out on the street and talked with the soldiers. I ... didn’t go out again this evening. I was afraid. - Art Gish, Hebron Journal. The peace team members in Iraq with Voices in the Wilderness and Christian Peace Maker Teams stayed in or near their small hotel in Baghdad throughout the six-week bombing of the country, witnessing many direct hits on buildings around them, and many devastating scenes of destruction in nearby neighborhoods.
46 Taking a Stand
Even when they are not physically harmed, people who go through experiences like these are often traumatized. Their later need for support, and the process of recovery, are discussed in Chapter Five, “Who will know or care?” Acting as a “human shield” Just before the 2003 war in Iraq, there was a flurry of confused stories about people from western countries coming to Iraq as “human shields” to put themselves at likely target sites in the way of US bombs. The Iraqi government reputedly paid many of their expenses. Some apparently were not carefully screened, later disagreeing among themselves and failing to comply with the terms of their visit. But others stayed on into the period of US bombing, adn challenged the Iraqui government in appropriate ways. However, activists with Voices in the Wilderness and Christian Peacemaker Teams in Iraq, sometimes at the same targeted sites, always emphasized that they were not present as human shields. Taxis and traffic accidents It remains the fact that in all these countries, as everywhere around the world, far more travelers and local people die as a result of traffic accidents than from military actions or suicide bombings. In many places, the roads are narrow, crowded, and in poor repair. The vehicles are old, crowded, and dilapidated. Enforcement of traffic laws is not a high priority in countries plagued with civil war or impending international attack. In seven years’ work, involving more than sixty peace team groups numbering between six and twenty-six people, only one person traveling under the auspices of Voices in the Wilderness in Iraq died there. George Weber, age seventy-one, died when the car in which he was riding in 2003, blew a tire at high speed and slipped off the road. Fines and jail Acting as a human shield is defiant, dangerous, and illegal. Breaking the international regulations regarding economic sanctions by bringing
Isn’t it dangerous? 47
humanitarian aid to an embargoed country is an act of civil disobedience, and can be illegal. Both are punishable by fines and/or imprisonment. As this book goes to press, Voice in the Wilderness and some of its members are still involved in a lengthy struggle with the US Department of the Treasury regarding a $20,000 fine (it was originally a million dollars) imposed as punishment for delivering medicines and other supplies to Iraqi people between 1996 and 2001. The whole VITW network stands ready to protest any final decision which is detrimental to its leaders or any members. There was also a flurry in the news about Faith Fippinger, a 62-year old retired school teacher who traveled for three months during the 2003 war in Iraq as “a human shield ... guarding oil refineries, teaching in schools and working in hospitals” (BBC, 9/21/03). The US Treasury Department made an example of her (for many others did similar things in Iraq at the same time), threatening her with penalties as high as half a million dollars and up to 12 years in jail. With many activists standing behind her and lobbying on her behalf, it was not yet known at the time of this writing how her case would play out. When should we leave? The overwhelming majority of people choosing to join a peace team or accompaniment project will go in and come out from the designated country on dates chosen ahead of time. Once in a while, however, an individual will have to leave earlier than planned, generally because of health issues of their own or among family members at home. More often, team members will become deeply engaged in the work and the local community, and decide to stay longer than originally planned, or to return again. (See material in chapters 7, 8, and 9 about returnees.) It also sometimes happens that the local situation gets too dangerous for productive work to continue. Deep discussions and even divisions may occur about whether and when to leave. The organization sponsoring the trip may close the project down. Or the host country may withdraw visas and require team members to depart.
48 Taking a Stand
Five weeks before the United States attacked Iraq, Rabia Roberts wrote this poignant letter to her e-mail contacts around the world: Elias [her husband] has been busy for the past days making banners, getting tents and setting up sites for a series of actions the Iraq Peace Team will initiate during the coming week. In contrast to his energy, I am paralyzed by a deep dread. I feel the war’s shadow over my shoulder. And at this moment its darkness has me in its grip. I don’t want to meet new people or have new experiences. What’s the point, I think? This place is over! Those Iraqis who can afford it have already left Baghdad. United Nations officials are taking their vacations and humanitarian groups are being sent home. Businessmen have relocated their families. Foreigners are returning to their homelands. Journalists are surveying hotels for their structural soundness. People are selling their cars, their possessions, anything they have to help them get out of the city. But the vast majority have nowhere to go. Five million men, women, and children must stay here and endure the rain of bombs, the lack of electricity, clean water, food supplies and medicines ... Why? Why? Why? This is the one question every person I talk with asks. ‘Will you destroy so much just for the oil? Do Americans know what a catastrophe this will be? Nothing will be good between the Arabs and the Americans again, not for 100 years.’ I can only bear witness to this pain. I have no answers. Every day in the hotel, in small groups, the Peace Team people discuss the countdown to war. How many more days before the invasion? When should we leave? Will those who choose to stay through the war be safe? What can we accomplish by staying? - E-mail from Elizabeth “Rabia” Roberts, Feb 2003 About half the team left during the next five weeks. For those who stayed throughout the bombing, these anguished questions were rehashed over and over. And yet there was a satisfaction in daring to stay, in sharing the manmade hell experienced by the Iraqis.
Isn’t it dangerous? 49
In October 2003, Peace Brigades International publicly announced a similar debacle in Indonesia: Peace negotiations between the Government of Indonesia and the rebel separatist movement (GAM) broke down, and in May 2003 the Indonesian President declared martial law in Aceh and the Indonesian armed forces launched a massive military operation against GAM. The local groups that PBI has accompanied all had to keep a limit on their activities because of safety concerns, and many of them have had their offices and/or members’ homes visited by local police looking for members of GAM or evidence that could link them with the rebels .... As a result of all these events, groups that PBI works with in Aceh have reported an increased feeling of isolation and fear for their personal safety. In July 2003, the Indonesia Project was forced to temporarily close its office in Banda Aceh due to its inability to obtain the special permits required to allow its volunteers to remain in Aceh. This followed the closure of PBI´s office in Lhokseumawe. - PBI, Oct 2003 But in the same report, PBI tells about starting up a renewed action in Guatemala! Turn, turn, turn! For every thing, there is a time and a season.
50 Taking a Stand “Eight Actions for Peace In 1988, the UN General Assembly defined eight action areas for building a Culture of Peace: •
Fostering a culture of peace through promoting education for all; revising curricula to promote the qualitative values, attitudes, and behavior inherent in a culture of peace; training for conflict resolution, dialogue, and active nonviolence.
•
Promoting sustainable economic and social development by targeting the eradication of poverty; working towards environmental sustainability; [and] fostering international cooperation ....
•
Promoting respect for human rights by distributing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at all levels and fully implementing international instruments on human rights.
•
Ensuring equality between women and men by integrating a gender perspective in economic, social and political decision-making; eliminating all forms of discrimination and violence against women.
•
Fostering democratic participation by educating responsible citizens; establishing and strengthening national institutions and processes that promote and sustain democracy.
•
Advancing understanding, tolerance and solidarity by promoting a dialogue among civilizations; respect for difference and cultural diversity.
•
Supporting participatory communication and the free flow of information and knowledge, such as support for independent media.
•
Promoting international peace and security through ... general and complete disarmament; encouraging confidence-building measures and efforts for negotiating peaceful settlements.”
“When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder For more information on the International Decade for the Culture of Peace, visit the UN Web site, www3. if I have made of my life something unesco.org/iycp/ particular and real. I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, or - From the January 24, 2003 World Tribune full of argument. I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.” - Mary Oliver in Loeb, p 30
Chapter 5
Who will know or care? Many people will come to know what you are doing, to care about your wellbeing, and to share in your efforts. Voices in the Wilderness leaders encourage participants to keep in mind that the one who travels is only part of a much bigger group at home participating in the work. The person who crosses the foreign border is just the front man for a cadre of peace workers involved in the effort. Variations Sometimes the people standing behind you will have been recruited and coordinated by the peace team itself, as in the Christian Peacemaker Team model (see Chapter 8). In other situations, you will be recruiting your support people yourself, as with Voices in the Wilderness (see Chapter 7). If you participate in an accompaniment project sponsored by Peace Brigades International, it will be more of a joint effort (see Chapter 9). Sometimes the people who know and care about your trip may number a couple of dozen, or even hundreds. You will likely attract the most interest and involvement the first time you travel with a peace team or accompaniment project — there will be a certain shock value in that first trip, and a lot of anxiety among your friends and family, after which they will become more accustomed to your setting off across the seas in the interests of peace and justice. 51
52 Taking a Stand
You will also get a lot more attention if you are working to oppose an unpopular US-initiated war like the war in Iraq, than if you are trying to reduce harm in a civil war nearly invisible to the American public, as in Colombia or Sri Lanka. Ironically, the educational, inspirational and political value of your trip can be great even when you go for three weeks instead of three months or three years. Specific roles for supporters As the process unfolds, the special role of some friends will be moral and perhaps spiritual support. These will be the ones who help you decide whether to go, plan with you and pray for your safety, and help you with the emotional complexities of returning home. Another set of supporters might raise money, gather supplies and equipment, and help you plan logistics. Someone else again will play a major role as your e-mail distributor and media contact (sometimes two different people), before, during, and after your trip. Some supporters may help you contact legislators, while others might help you handle the logistics of speaking engagements and interviews after the trip. Every person in your various support groups will learn from you or from other sources about the basic issues in the conflict area you plan to visit, so the educational and political value of their involvement will be great. Remember that they in turn will explain to others, in more or less detail, what they are doing, helping news about the work to spread, which is what we want. Moral support Deciding to leave your home, family, work and income, and to expose yourself to more than the ordinary dangers of life, will involve moral decisions and logistical arrangements which most of us can not make alone. Your partner, parents, children and friends will weigh in on your decision. You may have a formal clearness committee in your church, or you may brainstorm about your plans at your peace center or with your affinity group.
Who will know or care? 53
Some peace team and accompaniment project organizers require you to have letters of reference from individuals or affidavits of support from established groups. Preparing testimonials on your behalf is an important part of the peace work to be done. This is difficult work if the people you ask for this support do not share your confidence that you are the right one to make the trip. They may anguish over their response, since they probably want to maintain your friendship even if they don’t share your conviction. (See Chapter 3.) There will be people who keep the home fires burning while you are away, covering for you at work and at home in ways which can be quite taxing for them. It is important to acknowledge their help fully, and to talk through their concerns and potential resentments. Peace begins at home. As you get ready to go, some of these people will share your fears, and some will be more afraid than you are. You will feel most supported by those who recognize that your plans are scary for you. “Sit with the fear,” a young man half my age told me when I was worried about going to Iraq to protest the imminent war.
“Yes, half of the point is to share this fear that my own country is putting into the lives of others. Think, oh just think, of the 200,000 young American boys who are being recruited to suffer way worse fear than mine for this war for oil, this war of greed.” - Andy and Elizabeth, Oct 2002 My sister went through a stage of acute fear and near anger:
When I saw you last week, I didn’t imagine you becoming one of the pawns in the game, but today I can see that happening much more clearly. I and many others need you to live out your life with integrity and service, but I can’t see the value of your becoming a victim of this war …. I wish I could say, Go for it! as I did a week ago. Today I think the shift that has happened puts you in great peril. - Emily Boardman, e-mail message, October 2002
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People will pray for you whether you believe in prayer or not, and the experience can be quite moving. Their prayer is a fervent intention for your well-being and can make you feel wonderfully cared for, whether or not you share their beliefs. Before I went to Iraq, the Catholics at my work place held a ceremony in which a priest poured holy water over my hands and called down blessings upon me. A frail elderly client made a sort of worry doll out of a clothespin to protect me in my travels. My women’s group gave me an ancient worn shard of pottery as a good luck charm. The janitor at work shook his head and clucked his tongue in disapproval, but said, “I’m praying for you anyway.” I totally believed that it would keep me safe. People will always be more concerned for your safety than they are for the success of your cause. You are personalizing the issues for them, and thus bringing it to their attention more dramatically. Your friends and family will read the paper and watch the news about the conflict situation where you are working with far greater attention while you are there than they would otherwise. And they will be praying for you in one sense or another every time. Most likely, someone will be the main provider of moral support the night before your departure. If you live alone, ask someone to be with you that night, even if you are not terribly anxious. It is a special time to share for both (or all) participants. They can take you to the airport, too; who wants to go by shuttle bus when it is such a dramatic trip! Peace travelers really need support when they come home again, too. At best, the return from the intensity of a conflict zone requires some deescalation; the re-entry from a war-impoverished country will involve some culture shock. At worst, the cross-border activist may have witnessed scenes of destruction and mayhem sufficient to cause post-traumatic stress syndrome. Some activists have spent many nights listening to bombs drop all around them, or stood many times in front of a loaded rifle. Your partner or a friend may be your best help, but you may also need a counselor less personally involved with you to help you deal with the traumas you have experienced and witnessed. In some cases, the sponsoring organization or your local church or peace group will be ready and willing to help you debrief your experiences.
Who will know or care? 55
E. Boardman
Logistical support Someone may act as a fundraiser — for you in particular or for all peace team members representing your peace group or church — while others will contribute funds. And since it is likely to cost something on the order of US $1,500 (in 2003 dollars) just to get there and back, plus more for expenses “on the ground,” the unsung heroes who fulfill these roles are really walking the walk. Although peace teams and accompaniment projects are never to be confused with humanitarian aide projects, travelers often carry medicine and equipment across the border to be helpful and/or as an act of political protest where there are embargoes. Often your local supporters will gather this Sunday School Project, November 2002 material for you before you leave; they may contact pharmacies to get medications, medical schools to get books and manuals, sport stores to get camping supplies and water filters for you and the people you will visit, and so on. Still other supporters will collect messages, cards, and photos of local people — church members, school children, others in your circle — so that you can carry them to their counterparts overseas. Some cross-border peace Poster Greeting for Iraqi children travelers will be very dependent
56 Taking a Stand
on friends who provide crucial technical assistance regarding the cameras, telephones and laptop computers they may take in order to enhance communications from the foreign land. What will work, given the power supply and technological systems in the area you will visit? Your supporters may help you learn more about these things, and they may also help you to acquire equipment at a discount from distributors who want to support your cause. If you do not know the language of your destination country, informal language teachers may emerge from among your friends to help you learn at least a few key words and phrases to use in your destination country. Prudence suggests (and some sponsors require) that someone be identified who will handle the stateside arrangements if you get sent home injured or ill. See how the numbers mount up, when all these people become engaged in your peace project? It takes a village! Publicity management What you want to accomplish regarding publicity is not to get your own image up in lights, but rather to get people to pay attention to the issues at hand in the conflict situation. By contributing your own picture and story, you personalize the story and attract attention to it. “Grandmother spends Christmas in Iraq!” “Three members of local church protest war in Sri Lanka.” “Local doctor goes to Israel to protest wall.”
Message from Iraqi High School Students, November 2002
Who will know or care? 57 E Boardman
The peace traveler needs people to help get media attention, distribute e-mail reports, produce photo exhibits and brochures, and arrange for speaking engagements after the trip. It is a good idea to share facts, insights, and concerns with your Baghdad Girls High School legislators as well. It is best to have at least four people to fulfill these roles, each of which takes considerable effort. 1.
You need a media contact person, hopefully one with experience and connections with local TV, radio, and newspapers. Your media person can help get publicity about your departure, especially if the conflict you are concerned about is partially caused by the US government. Your goal is to make more people aware of the fact that people are in danger and that human rights are being abrogated — and that it needs to be stopped. Your contact person will hook you up with the media, tell you where to go and what to do, and possibly help you prepare your press releases and remarks for the camera. It is a challenging role, but a creative volunteer can do it well.
Another aspect of support work that I like is trying to find ever new ways to disseminate the reports that are sent home. Newspaper and radio come to mind readily, but what about the policy makers that need ... new information fresh from the field? Then there are the student groups that are hungry for models of people standing for justice. - Trisha Lachman, August 2002
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2.
Your legislative contact can adapt and send stories to your representatives in Washington, and to the American ambassador in your focus country. Sending updates throughout your stay to these decision makers will help dramatize your concern. Probably you already have experience with letters to legislators, so we add only one additional remark: Your messages can be very short. For example,
Dear Senator Feinstein, re Iraq, it is so important to me that the world should turn away from war of every kind, particularly this one spurred on by greed, that I am going to spend $2000 of my own money to go to Iraq in three weeks, with a peace team. I am not an impulsive student. I am a grandmother and the director of a well-respected service organization in San Francisco. - Elizabeth Boardman, November 2002 3.
Your e-mail manager can help exploit the exponential power of the internet through e-mailed peace messages. Mary deLap helped me manage and update my e-mail address lists, and handled all distribution of reports to the list. Mary received and batched people’s responses while I was out of the country, and she was prepared to send news to them if I became incommunicado. She also maintained backups of reports and recipient lists. It is a big job - and a critical one. Your e-mail manager will help you with any hostile readers, possibly with editing your reports, and with technical problems you might have using the computer and the Internet. Some people play this role repeatedly for different travelers.
It is interesting that I often feel closer to the people I am supporting when they are in field than at home. But that is because I am their link and so we communicate deeply and often. I’ve been able to encourage them when I sense low morale or spiritual dryness, while at home they would not necessarily need that from me. So CPT support is definitely more than a receptionist job.
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There are some hard parts to being a CPT support person. It was very scary for me when Peggy was in Baghdad camping beside a water plant while bombs were falling on the city. It is also a struggle knowing that my son is going to a very risky city in Colombia at his age. I have an easier time with older adults taking on this sort of work. - Trisha Lachman, 2003 4.
And finally, a speaking tour manager can help you maximize the educational and political effect of your trip upon your return. You should talk about your experience to as many people as possible. In some situations, if your focus country is a hot topic, invitations to speak will flow in; in other cases you will need to market yourself. Your speaking tour manager will make your availability known, arrange bookings, help you prepare materials (photos, slide shows, posters, presentations, and so on), and will hopefully serve as your driver, escort and go-fer when you make speeches. I did not have this kind of help, and the speaking engagements after my stint in Iraq, added on top of a 40-50 hour work week, just about did me in. Peace Brigades International and Christian Peacemaker Teams are often able to provide support for this aspect of the work.
So many are involved To give you a clear idea how many people may be involved in your project, the table below totals up the possible number of active, supportive participants. Task - Publicity managers Media contact person Legislative contact E-mail manager Speaking tour manager
Quantity 1 1 1 1
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Task - Moral Support Moral decisions (family, friends, clearness committees) Preparing testimonials (individual and group) Keeping the home fires burning (at home and at work) Sharing your fears Praying for you Arranging a farewell party With you the night before you leave With you the day you come back
Quantity 12
Task - Logistical Support Fund raisers Major contributors People collecting medications and other materials People preparing messages to send Technical assistants (computer, telephones, cameras, etc.) Language tutor Medical emergency stand-by Total
Quantity 2 4 2
4 4 4 5 1 1 3
2 2 1 1 52
There could be more people involved in many of these tasks, or there could be fewer. If you insist on doing most of this by yourself, you may be depriving other people of the chance to be involved, the chance to learn
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about the issues and the peace team opportunity, the chance to take a stand themselves on the side of justice and peace. And if your spouse or partner is doing most of this for you, he or she may be working too hard! At the very least, they deserve explicit acknowledgment and much appreciation. Find ways to share the burden, the commitment, and the rewards. Others who care In addition to all the people who know and care and help with the work, there will be many others who know and care - and they’ll respond in a variety of ways. On the other hand, there will be some who have been caring friends, but are shocked and negative about your decision, especially if it is critical of American foreign policy.
I would say most of the response was positive, awed and appreciative. However, last night I called an old, old friend, an artist and his wife [about my trip to Iraq] ... She was cool, and he hung up on me, calling my politics screwball and worse. - Mary Burton Risely 2003 Many will be inspired to take a new stand themselves, to take the next step in their own career as peace activists, to write a letter, or send a contribution. When I decided to go to Iraq, my neighbors rallied. Mai helped me tell the others about it because I was shy and scared to tell. Jim got out his Viet Nam vet medals and wore them at a peace rally. Maureen got a “No War” bumper sticker for her car and explained it to her five-year-old:
Kate and I talked about the war the other night. ‘Do people really go out and try to hurt other people, and kill them?’ We talked about difficult abstractions like governments. I reminded her about the bumper stickers ... [She urged me:] “We have to put one on our car. We need to get another one for the Volkswagen.” She was great. - Maureen McKenna, November 2002
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Kevin corresponded with me honestly about the flags and decorations in front of his house after 9/11:
Elizabeth! Elizabeth! ... I went nuts with our holiday decorations all being red, white and blue! I know it was a visceral response to the Trade Towers attack ... I’ve always been proud of being an American ... Our flags do show our support of the Country, but most definitely NOT what the current administration has done, is currently doing or is contemplating doing in the future. I never thought about the interpretation of those flags as indicating we were supporting what is so obviously wrong. - Kevin Janssen, November 2002 People in the country you are visiting will know and care that you have come. Sheila Provencher reported from Iraq:
I spoke with five young students. One of them, Miriam, asked me very seriously if there would be a war. She said, ‘I am so afraid. Will they use nuclear weapons on us?’ Laith and Josee, two young men, asked very hard questions as well. “Why is the USA going to attack us? If American people are against the war, what about your democracy? Is it a real democracy?” We talked a long time - about a half-hour. At the end of the time, they asked me to write “memories” for them - like signing an autograph book. So we traded short notes to each other. Laith’s note to me said, “I’m just amazing to see and to meet some great persons - American persons who compassionate with Iraqi people. So - really I just glad to meet you and I love persons like you.” - Sheila Provencher e-mail, November 2002
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If we write to our legislators, to the President, to the American ambassador in the country we are visiting, they, too, will know that we are there. In some circumstances, especially if there are a number of us, if we are polite, and we tell them over and over again, they may come to care about our presence and our concerns as well.
Chapter 6
Learning about soldiers It is possible to participate in peace demonstrations and to sign MOVE-ON petitions on the Internet without knowing much about the warring activities in the country you’re focused on. During an American street rally, you don’t care much about the details of the military campaign and you don’t know much about the soldiers who are implementing it. However, once you actually plan to go to a place where guns are pointed daily at people (civilians and soldiers alike, innocent and guilty both), or where bombs may soon fall, you suddenly start paying a great deal of attention to every bit of military information you can find about that conflict. You may want to learn all you can about the motives, ideals and modus operandi of the men who truly believe in armed military force as a functional aspect of civil society. You may meet some of them, and perhaps you will be able to put a human face on them, too, as part of your public witness. Reading about soldiers When you are part of a peace team hoping to prevent a US attack on another country, it is the American military establishment — the American soldiers — that you will be thinking about the most. If your father or uncle was a soldier, what was it like for him? If you are a vet yourself, what is the same or 65
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different for young soldiers today? You’ll read the papers, watch the news, take in a movie, and read your e-mail to learn more.
“By joining a peace team, I have been forced to learn an amazing amount about war!” - Iraq Peace Team member, 2003 The second Gulf War, the “Iraq attack,” — presumably justified by the existence of terrorists and weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — took all the world’s attention in 2003. Below are some of the soldiers’ stories. Lt. Col. Bryan McCoy John Koopman was one of the reporters “embedded” with the US Marines during the Iraq attack. In his article of November 10, 2003, in the San Francisco Chronicle, he wrote:
[I] rode along with the Third Battalion, Fourth Marine Regiment [“the three-four”] as it loaded up in Kuwait and crossed into Iraq ....The unit was led by Lt. Col. Bryan P. McCoy. Radio call sign: Darkside. ... He’s an Army brat; his dad was an officer, two tours in Vietnam. But Army life didn’t appeal to the younger McCoy. He liked the spirit and energy of the Marines. He lives the life of a modern-day Spartan. He trains hard, runs marathons, hikes long trails. “Being a Marine is not something I do,” he once told me. “It’s what I am.” McCoy has studied the great generals. He can tell you whom he admires and why. William Tecumseh Sherman for his straight forward, no-muss, no-fuss approach to war. Rommel for his tactical mind. Patton for aggressiveness. Napoleon for the ability to spot a weakness and act on it. The Spartans for their warrior ethic. His favorite quote is from Sherman.
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War is cruelty. There is no use in refining it. The crueler it is, the sooner it is over.” Second favorite is Rommel. “When in doubt, attack.”.... Darkside is a Methodist. He believes that his profession and his religion are not at odds. As a Marine, he kills and orders others to kill. He sees it as a necessary evil. “In the world, there are sheep and there are wolves,” he says. “I like to think of Marines as the sheep-dogs. Someone has to know how to fight. If it weren’t for the sheep-dogs, where would the sheep be? Ravi Chand Ravi was a corporal in the US Marines Reserve who served in Kuwait and Iraq straight through the prime time of the second Iraq war. He sent eleven wonderfully detailed e-mail reports to his friends and family during the first four months of 2003, and they were forwarded far and wide, giving many an inside view of military life in the desert. He worried about the chickens kept at the base in Kuwait. Like canaries in a coal mine, the chickens would be the first to show signs that poison gases were in the air, but Ravi worries that they will die of the heat first — and later in fact, they did. Trained in business and psychology, he is an astute observer of his fellow soldiers. From Kuwait on February 17, 2003, during the hard, hot wait for the attack to begin, he wrote, “Our morale is decently high, but many are fearful of the future. They are almost all just kids as young as 18 … I love the bond already forming due to our shared hardships ...” Almost a month later, still waiting for the war to start, Ravi reported that often a US soldier knows no more about a military campaign than the ordinary TV watcher - or less, since TV reception is not always available on the front. And he comments on the demographics of the corps:
The Marine Corps holds a very diverse population. We have Harvard-educated officers who see our branch as either the best corporate executives or a crucially important elite group
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of fighters for democracy. Then we also have incarcerated folks who were given a choice either go through Marine Corps boot camp or back to jail. Gang members, high school dropouts, and vegan animal rights activists make up the rest ... But really, the behavior of Marines is so violent and pride-driven that I asked my friend, “What percent of Marines do you think were abused as children?” “Good point, Chand,” he said. “I’d say over 90%.” Finally the long wait was over and the shit hit the fan, as they say. Ravi reported how his mood changed and he became as fierce a fighter as any other Marine.
“TWO SCUDS NOW IN FLIGHT! GET YOUR FUCKING HEADS IN THE DIRT!” I dripped a drop of sweat every five seconds. I fumed with anger and fear. I couldn’t see the enemy, I couldn’t fight back, I couldn’t protect myself. … [There are four more paragraphs about this terrifying scene] Prior to this experience, I didn’t want to hurt anyone. Afterwards, to say I had blood thirst would be an understatement. The power that drove me to protect my life was overwhelming. - Ravi Chand, e-mail, May 2003 General Mejía Victores Years after they had first volunteered in Guatemala with Peace Brigades International (PBI) escorting members of the Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo or GAM (Mutual Support Group), Liam Mahony and Luis Enrique Eguren wrote a book about the accompaniment process. In that book, they report extensively on a long and fascinating interview they had with General Mejía Victores, previously dictator of Guatemala.
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To the GAM and the international solidarity and human rights communities, General Mejía is a mass murderer. As minister of defense for Rios Montt and then as president, he supervised the scorched-earth campaigns in the highlands, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths and over a million ‘campesinos’ driven from their homes. The family members of the GAM’s founder were all disappeared under the Mejia dictatorship. He controlled one of the most vicious and effective state terror systems in Latin American history. But Mejía’s defenders see a different man: a patriot defending the honor and Christian values of his country. To them, he was a general fighting a war, making all the terrible decisions of life and death that face generals doing their duty. He had to live with the political and moral consequences of those actions and defend them both to himself and to the world. The decisions affecting the GAM or PBI were made by a professional soldier with a lifetime of ideological and institutional training for the decision making of a head of state. The General’s exact words are quoted for pages. The authors conclude:
In part, the political confrontation between soldiers like Mejía and groups like the GAM was a clash of two different visions and experiences of the same national history. Mejía’s attitudes and beliefs were formed long before the military crisis of the early 1980s. Although dominated by the anticommunist national security ideology of the postwar period, his biases are also consistent with tendencies that appear throughout the historic development of the “professional soldier” in Latin America. - Mahoney & Eguren, 1997
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Presidents and oligarchies In an open letter to young soldiers which we quote in the next chapter, veteran Stanley Goff says vitriolic things about the guys in Washington D.C. “in their $5000 suits drinking champagne and scarfing caviar.” Perhaps he exaggerates in that line, but perhaps not when he says of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, “Bushfeld and their cronies are parasites, and they are the sole beneficiaries” of wars like the ones in Iraq. I also believe that people like them have been duping the American public for decades, as documented by Gore Vidal in Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta. Who can explain why these men behave like bullies on a global scale, apparently bereft of ordinary moral scruples? Carol Bly makes a good start at it in her book Changing the Bully Who Rules the World (see Resources). Bly encourages us to face up to the fact that there are individuals and even a class of people whom, because they are stuck at early stages of moral development, we should recognize as evil, as individuals and as a group, in their relation to the world. These “lucky predators,” as she calls them, are willing to monopolize all of the world’s power and resources, killing people as they go, and even to threaten the life-sustaining viability of the planet. Real soldiers and real guns If you are witnessing the effects of an occupation, or serving with an accompaniment project in another country, soldiers — who they are and how they operate — will be vital to your work as a volunteer. You will likely try to figure out the psychology of the occupying army, the guerrilla or rebel soldier, or the government army or police, whatever the case may be. Often members of the team are women; usually the soldiers are men. You may be separated by race, religion, culture, language, education, socioeconomic status, nationality (which includes international prestige), age. In addition, there may be a culture of pride, revenge or heroism at work among ordinary soldiers, which you probably do not share. If you can achieve insight and understanding about the needs and motivations of people so different from yourself, there is indeed hope for peace in the world.
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However, the psychological necessity to dehumanize the opponent described by Stan Goff in the last section is universal. US soldiers called their enemies “gooks” in Vietnam and “ragheads” in Iraq. Central American dictators in the 1980s and 90s called the local protestors “subversives,” and they called the members of Peace Brigades International “communists.” In 2004, the new generic term for anyone a government wants to get rid of is “terrorist.” And US peace activists are calling their government leaders “suits” and bullies and worse. An important role for the peace volunteer crossing borders is to bear witness — with pictures and stories — to the humanity of the enemy, the “bad guy” and the soldier, as well as that of the victim. Even the “My first wish is to see this plague of dictator, the president, and the members mankind, war, banished from the earth.” of the military-industrial establishment - George Washington, 1796 are human beings. Preventing harm While you keep in mind a clear human concept of the oppressor, you also must think more and more like a military strategist yourself. The fact that you are unarmed is simply one variable among many that may determine whether violence will occur. Whether you are trying to stop an attack from taking place, witnessing offenses during an occupation or accompanying activists in a distant country, you and your team will think strategically about how to circumvent or minimize the impact of the oppressor’s hostile actions. You will take into consideration history, politics, your own group’s capabilities, timing, and many other factors. PBI volunteers report using every possible source of formal and informal information, and spending great amounts of time assessing what the local oppressor’s strategy might be, where tomorrow’s danger is likely to come from, and what intervention is likely to be effective. Liam Mahony and Luis Enrique Eguren discuss these variables in detail in their book, Unarmed Bodyguards. Especially interesting is whether at any given political moment the oppressor cares about what international reaction to his actions might be. General Mejía, described in the previous chapter, claimed indifference to the presence of PBI and the reaction of international
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observers. However, the killings of GAM associates stopped under his leadership. Hebron Peace teams establish their own“rules of engagement,” and then make particular decisions about how to intervene as the need arises. The modus operandi of Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) these days is to “get in the way,” which requires getting right in the faces of the soldiers. Art Gish describes how this principle was translated into action in Hebron on one occasion.
Because of a settler van being shot at and three settler women being injured, the Israeli-controlled area of Hebron was put under curfew for a week. This was during Ramadan, and included the closing of the Ibrahimi Mosque. In response, a group of Palestinians, dressed in business suits, attempted a nonviolent march to the mosque to protest the collective punishment, challenge the curfew, and pray at the mosque. The leaders of the march were committed to nonviolence and insisted that no stones be thrown. CPT agreed to have a presence at the demonstration to help prevent any violence from occurring. Sara and Pierre were in the front of the group, prepared to tell any soldiers that the march was nonviolent and to intervene if there was any trouble. Suddenly, a group of Israeli soldiers came running down a side street and took up firing positions near the march. CPTers immediately jumped in front of the guns, shouting “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!” The soldiers did not shoot, but were quite frustrated with the CPTers and wanted to disperse the crowd. - Art Gish, in Hebron Journal
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Iraq CPT volunteers were also constantly getting in the way of American soldiers threatening Iraqis during the 2003-04 occupation. The following report, slightly reorganized, came from CPT volunteers Clausen and Milne by e-mail, the day after it happened.
BAGHDAD — On November 13, 2003, at 11:15 am, CPTers LeAnne Clausen and David Milne intervened peacefully at a potentially deadly checkpoint confrontation. US soldiers have killed many Iraqi civilians at checkpoints over the past several months. Human Rights Watch documented this phenomenon in their report of October 2003. CPT has also documented cases where soldiers opened fire on civilian vehicles. Often the checkpoints were poorly marked or unlit. [Clausen and Milne] were leaving Abu Ghraib prison camp in a car with two Iraqi men and their translator. As their car pulled up to the intersection of the four-lane highway and the gravel road to the prison, they came upon a makeshift US checkpoint. Only moments earlier, outside the prison, a young man told Clausen that four friends had been shot dead and another three wounded and detained when the driver of their van hadn’t been able to stop in time at an unmarked US checkpoint. One Humvee, parked sideways, blocked the passing lane just past the intersection. Another sat in the median twenty yards ahead. Three US soldiers stood in the passing lane and on the edge of the median in front of the Humvee. Traffic on the highway was heavy, including large trucks, and moving at high speeds. The soldiers had posted no signs warning drivers
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of the checkpoint and vehicles in the passing lane had to merge into one lane to avoid the Humvee ahead. As the driver of Clausen and Milne’s car waited to cross the highway, a black Jeep Cherokee approached the checkpoint. The driver had been following the vehicle ahead too closely and appeared not to have seen the soldiers. Two soldiers pointed their weapons at the vehicle, yelling for the driver to stop. As the driver braked, one soldier pointed his pistol at the windshield and walked toward the car, yelling and signaling for the Iraqis to get out of the car. Another soldier, aiming his M-16 at the vehicle, indicated the Iraqis should stay in the vehicle. While the driver looked back and forth at the two soldiers in confusion, the soldiers stationed on each Humvee also trained their machine guns on the car. Clausen began taking pictures from the car as the soldiers paused and both gestured with their weapons for the vehicle’s occupants to get out. Three Iraqi men quickly exited. The soldiers ordered them to put their hands on their heads and stand in the median. One soldier frisked the men while another soldier searched the vehicle. By this time Clausen and Milne were out of their car. Milne walked slowly to the shoulder of the highway where he could observe and also be visible to the soldiers conducting the search. A soldier noticed Clausen taking pictures and ordered her to stop. Clausen lowered her camera. The soldiers were clearly aware of the CPTers’ presence and were treating the Iraqis less aggressively. Shortly thereafter, the soldiers allowed the men to return to their vehicle and drive away.
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CPT also circulated as much as possible the news about what the US occupying army was doing in Iraq in 2003. Imagine young GIs, hot and exhausted and scared, perpetrating these evil deeds, often under orders whose reasons were not fully explained.
The following statement was recorded by CPT members LeAnne Clausen and David Milne in a neighborhood heavily affected by US house raids in Baghdad. The family has asked that the 16- year-old youth who gave the testimony not be identified because his relatives are still detained. At 2:30 a.m., US troops came to our house and ordered our entire family outside. They ransacked the house searching for something, but they didn’t tell us what they wanted. They broke the locks to our cabinet [a large storage chest and display case along one wall of the front room] and threw the contents onto the floor, even though our father gave them the cabinet key so they wouldn’t have to do this. They took our money and a gold wedding necklace belonging to my mother. My father, cousin, older brother, and I were tied and taken away. We were not told why we were being taken. We were taken to the soldiers’ military base at a palace within this district and kept in a small dark room. We were tied at our wrists with plastic ties behind our backs the entire night. In the morning, we were put out into the sunlight, as a type of punishment. The soldiers were verbally abusive towards us. We asked for shade, but the soldiers refused. We were squatting in the sun all day. [Temperatures at the time were 110-120 F]. When I was taken, I was only wearing my underwear because I was sleeping. I was embarrassed. These were my only clothes during the time I was in custody.
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The first day, our hands were still tied behind our back with the plastic ties. Because of this, we were unable to drink any water. We explained this to the soldiers, and they refused to re-tie us so we could drink. We asked if just one of us could be re-tied with his hands in front of him so that he could help the rest of us to drink. The soldiers refused. The soldiers re-tied us with the plastic ties in front of us on the next day. The water they gave us for drinking was also kept out in the sun with us. This way it was too hot to drink. Another day I asked a soldier for water, because I hadn’t had anything to drink for the entire day in the sun. He beat me on my back and chest, while another soldier kicked me in the back. Both were verbally abusive towards me during the beating ... We were treated like animals ... [The son asked his mother to leave the room so he can tell the CPTers something privately.] My brother asked for some water. The guard gagged him and began beating him around his mouth until blood started flowing from his mouth. My brother screamed in pain. We also screamed in protest, and to encourage him to scream so they would stop this abuse. We were then beaten also, for advising him to scream. We were beaten in the neck, back, and behind. [The boy demonstrated how and where he was beaten. He indicated that his buttocks were held apart and he was kicked in the anus.] It is because of this beating that my father is now suffering from a heart condition.
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I was released wearing only my underwear and forced to walk back to my home in broad daylight. I was humiliated. Also, everyone thought from my dress that I had been caught stealing. I was also badly sunburned from my time in detention without shade ... I am in shock now from this treatment, and I can never forget it until I die. When I got out, I behaved as though I was crazy, like I was lost .... The boy’s mother said, “The US has a hypocritical policy. They speak all the time about human rights, but they don’t believe in it themselves ... Since this happened, I am lost now. I don’t know what I can do.”... The family was only able to get information about their relatives’ locations through lists provided by Christian Peacemaker Teams working with the mosque in their district. The three detained relatives still remain incarcerated at various prison camps throughout Iraq. - CPT e-mail release, November 2, 2003 Three weeks later, the Christian Peacemaker Team in Baghdad announced they would “... distribute human rights leaflets to Coalition soldiers in ... Baghdad. CPT-Iraq members will hand leaflets to soldiers at military bases, checkpoints and patrols throughout [the] area . … The leaflets, printed in both English and Arabic, encourage Coalition soldiers to abide by international rights laws in their interactions with Iraqi citizens. The leaflets cite passages of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Convention, and the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority — the temporary government of Iraq in 2003) Office of Human Rights and Transitional Justice.” - CPT e-mail release, November 2003.
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In May 2004, stories about the abuses perpetrated by US Occupation Forces at Abu Ghraib Prison finally reach international headlines and reforms were initiated. Colombia At least in Israel and Iraq, soldiers are uniformed and it is clear who is who. In other countries — some South and Central American countries, for example — this is far less clear. Peace volunteers must try to figure out who the soldiers or paramilitary are, how to recognize them, what their motives are, where they are likely to show up, and how to prevent them from hurting anyone. Chris Moore-Backman reported that in Colombia, although volunteers with the Fellowship of Reconciliation could sometimes talk with military leaders in offices in the capital, in the village areas it was rarely clear which men were with the government army, the right-wing paramilitary, or the left-wing guerilla insurgents. The groups functioned very much like gangs, with secret signs and signals, often operating by stealth and in the dark. An individual man might change allegiance from one group to another voluntarily, under duress, or for pay. All parties were suspected of being involved in the drug trade. Peace volunteers were present to protect members of the peace communities from all of the military groups. The peace communities wanted it known that they refused to cooperate with any military or paramilitary group, but they were suspected by each “gang” of cooperating with another. It was sometimes hard to know which group was responsible for the disappearances and killings, but these events seemed to happen less often when foreign observers were around. Weaponry Peace team member or not, many people in the world with an interest in international affairs in 2003 got to thinking about whether there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq other than those the US brought in. In any battle scene, knowing the capacity of different weapons makes a difference to your
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safety. It is the war veterans who can best help the lifelong pacifists learn something about weaponry. Peace team members who stayed through the attacks on Iraq learned a good deal about different kinds of missiles and grenades, guns and explosives as the hits came closer and closer to the places that had originally seemed safe due to the presence of international witnesses. In Iraq, in Kosovo and in the Philippines, peace volunteers have had to worry about the depleted uranium (DU) used in US weapons, struggling to understand, through the haze of confusion, how dangerous DU is. This confusing haze of contradictory reports seems to be made up of equal parts US government denial and activist hyperbole. And in the Middle East in late 2003, the issue became what kind of explosives can be used in cars or trucks that can be crashed into buildings as part of suicide bombings. Pacifists do not generally know how to talk about SCUDS and mortars, about AK-47s and M-16s. Perhaps it is high time. Soldiers for peace Among the soldiers that cross-border peace volunteers meet are other peace activists who are veterans of earlier wars. No testimony against war is so convincing as that offered by veterans who have had solid experience of the enduring damage done by a war, not only to the enemy army and civilians, but also to the soldier himself. A soldier who survives action in the field still must cope with damage to his body, his health, his psyche, his family, his whole life for the next six decades. In a keynote speech at the 2003 national convention of Veterans for Peace, the organization’s president, David Cline, said that the White House was afraid of veterans and their organizations — and well it should be. “When you take away the humanity of another, you kill your own humanity, Telling it like it is Stan Goff is one of the more vehement You attack your own soul because it is veterans who has become a peace activist. standing in the way.” - Stan Goff Although he decries the death and injury
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caused by wars, his main concern, expressed in his November 2003 letter published by Counterpunch, is for the life of the soul. Here are excerpts from his impassioned letter. Hold on to your Humanity: An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq
Dear American serviceperson in Iraq, I am a retired veteran of the army, and my own son is among you, a paratrooper like I was. The changes that are happening to every one of you — some more extreme than other — are changes I know very well. So I am going to say some things to you straight up in the language to which you are accustomed .... I changed over there in Vietnam and they were not nice changes either. I started getting pulled into something — something that craved other people’s pain. Just to make sure I wasn’t regarded as a “fucking missionary” or a possible rat, I learned how to fit myself into that group which was untouchable, people too crazy to fuck with, people who desired the rush of omnipotence that comes with setting someone’s house on fire just for the pure hell of it, or who could kill anyone, man, woman or child, with hardly a second thought .... It was all an act for me, a cover-up for deeper fears I couldn’t name, and the reason I know that is we had to dehumanize our victims before we did the things we did. We knew deep down that what we were doing was wrong. So they became dinks or gooks, just like Iraqis are now being transformed into ragheads or hajjis. People had to be reduced to “niggers” here before they could be lynched ....
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So we used these words, these new names, to reduce them, to strip them of their essential humanity, and then we could do things like adjust artillery fire onto the cries of a baby .... So here is my message to you. You will do what you have to do to survive, however you define survival, while we do what we have to to stop this thing. But don’t surrender your humanity. Not to fit in. Not to prove yourself. Not for an adrenaline rush. Not to lash out when you are angry and frustrated. Not for some ticket-punching fucking military careerist to make his bones on. Especially not for the Bush-Cheney Gas and Oil Consortium. ... They are your enemies .... Come home safe, and come home sane. The people who love you and have loved you all your lives are waiting here, and we want you to come back and be able to look us in the face. Don’t leave your souls in the dust there like another corpse. Hold on to your humanity. Walking the walk While the Stan Goffs of the world write fervently, other veterans join peace teams in the territories where new conflicts are brewing. Writing from Baghdad for United Press International in April 2003, Nicholas Horrock described one of these activists protesting the bombing of vital infrastructure.
Charles Liteky lay in the al-Wadah water treatment plant in the darkness listening to the B-52s, and his mind drifted back to Vietnam and to the night he had lain in darkness listening to the giant bombers blast the ground. “It took me back to Vietnam in a big way, to feel the rumbling of the ground and the horrific noise. I began to feel sorry for the Iraqi soldiers beneath all of that,” he said ....
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Now 70, with a piece of shrapnel still in his foot, Liteky spent 20 days living at the Baghdad water plant under the coalition’s bombardment because “it seemed the place to be.” Liteky long ago became a committed peace activist and sent his medal of honor back to then-president Reagan because the leader supported CIA wars in Central America. Just before the 2003 attack on Iraq, Ellen Barfield was also in Baghdad with the Iraq Peace Team sponsored by Voices in the Wilderness, trying to prevent the attack from happening. She is national vice president of Veterans for Peace, and has traveled with peace teams several times. In June 2003, Ellen wrote a report on her recent trip back to Korea for the Internet’s Eleventh Hour Stories:
It is most peculiar to find yourself back again where you were half your life ago, and with an entirely different agenda. I was 23 years old and quite naive when I traveled to South Korea under US Army orders in January 1980. At age 46 this May, I found myself again traveling there, this time to testify at the commemoration of the Gwangiu uprising and massacre of 1980, as a guest of the Korea Truth Commission. Because the ordinary US soldier is never told the whole truth about the campaign he or she she is part of, Ellen did not realize until years later that she was participating in an occupation that systematically suppressed the civil rights of South Korean citizens. Now she is eager to share the truth — and her regret — with South Koreans. And she is sharing her new understanding of how the US military establishment works with all who are willing to learn. Jaime Vasquez was part of a Veterans for Peace delegation visiting a Vietnamese group called Veterans Association of Vietnam (VAVN). He described them in an e-release on September 8, 2003:
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The Veterans Association of Vietnam is one of the premier groups leading the efforts to normalize and better relations between Vietnam and many other countries around the world. VAVN, with more than 1.8 million members, is the catalyst behind the children’s hospital at Friendship Village. We were received with open arms and considered brother veterans. In contrast to this welcome, Jaime remembers how the Vietnamese were described to him and other Marine recruits in 1967. The instructor told the men to look at the guys to the left and the right in the training hall.
“In three weeks,” he said, “one of those two men will be dead. Dead! He will have his balls cut off and stuck in his mouth. His throat will be slashed from ear to ear and he will be gutted, with all of his intestines hanging out. All ... compliments of the Vietnamese.” “Don’t worry about your girl friend, fiancée, or wife,” the instructor continued, “... The draft dodgers [will] be there to sexually satisfy your women.” [Then a paragraph about how their mothers would suffer …] “... All compliments of the Vietnamese.” Two days later we landed in Vietnam with the impressions that the instructor had planted in our brains. [But] this feeling of hate and anger towards the Vietnamese dissipated after a month or so in the country …. You realized that the Vietnamese were just like everyone else, trying to survive in the middle of a war any way that they could. I didn’t realize for many years that what had occurred in that classroom was a “psych-op” (psychological operation) perpetrated against our own troops. They had to give us a reason to hate the Vietnamese.
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Now Jaime Vasquez and his Vietnamese counterparts have no hatred for each other. Jaime brought “250 pounds of medical supplies and about thirty pounds of candy (I was a kid once also)” and an apologetic heart to Friendship Village. There are 130 children and about 20 Vietnamese veterans at the hospital. And, says Jaime, “All of these vets were seriously affected by the war. More than one was covered with rashes caused by exposure to Agent Orange. The rashes are itchy and painful. I have it on my knuckles; I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have it all over my body.” Soldiers’ families After the Iraq war turned into a chaotic, out-of-control occupation plagued by Iraqi resistance to US dominance, a new phenomenon in peace movement history developed: family members of US troops began to protest. In November 2003, Global Exchange led a delegation of people whose relatives were then in the US military in Iraq or had died in the course of their service. A Global Exchange press release read, in part:
One mother, disabled and traveling to Iraq in a wheelchair, has not seen either of her two sons in a year. Some are angry wives of servicemen who have no idea why their husbands are still there and when they will be coming home. One young wife living in Ft. Bragg signs all her letters, “God Bless the Troops, Bring Them Home Now.” One father, who lost his son in Iraq, says the only way he can find meaning in his son’s death is to do whatever he can to stop others — Iraqis and US troops — from being killed. The group will go to Iraq to meet with and listen to Iraqis, to the troops and to US officials. On their return, they will release a report on their findings and recommendations, and will travel to Washington, DC for meetings with Congress, the administration, and the press. Finally, they will travel to New York to meet with UN officials and be present at the
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United Nations on December 15 when the US government is scheduled to propose its transition plan to the world community. Members of the delegation explained in advance why they were planning to go:
My name is Nicole. I am 23, and my husband, who is in the 82nd Airborne Division, is currently deployed to Iraq .... There are so many lies and contradictions circulating about this war. I want to learn firsthand what is really going on and listen to what the Iraqi people want. In the last two months, I have learned how to speak some basic Arabic so I can better communicate. I am ... the mother of a beautiful 4-year-old son. My name is Fernando and my son Jesus died serving his country in Iraq. My son will not return but I want those other children to return to their families. I cannot bear the thought of my son dying in vain. This is why I want travel to Iraq with a group of other military family members to send a message to the Bush administration that our daughters and sons must come home now. I also want to extend to the people of Iraq, especially the children, a message of peace and love on behalf of the American people. In fact, I am bringing hundreds of letters from American schoolchildren. My name is Anabelle. I am a part-time school-teacher from Tucson, Arizona and a military mother. I have a 24-year-old daughter, Giselle, and a 22-year-old son, Chuveny, serving in Iraq. They were told they would be in Iraq for 6 months and now it’s been 8 months and I have no idea when they are coming home. The pain I am going through is terrible; not
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one day goes by that I don’t agonize over the health and safety of my children. I am saddened by all the violence in Iraq and I feel for every mother — the mothers of our troops and the mothers of Iraqis who are suffering. My name is Sean Dougherty. I am a merchant mariner and my 22-year-old daughter Kelly is in Iraq. She was just one semester short of graduating .... I am also a Vietnam veteran, and I know the horror of war for both the troops and local people. When I heard about Global Exchange’s delegation of military families, I knew I had to join other concerned family members to talk to the troops and the Iraqis, and then come home to speak out against the occupation. This group was not called a peace team, but in fact they traveled, studied, saw scenes in Iraq with their own eyes, and came back to report about it on TV, in the press, and through speeches, just as conventional peace teams do. Perhaps, though, their credibility was enhanced by the fact that they were so close to the soldiers whose situation they were concerned about.
Veterans for Peace annual conference banner
Chapter 7
Christian Peacemaker Teams Overview The best introduction for this dynamic group comes from one of CPT’s own pamphlets, printed in March 2001.
Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) arose out of a call in 1984 for Christians to devote the same discipline and selfsacrifice to nonviolent peacemaking that armies devote to war. Today, CPT places violence-reduction teams in situations of crisis and areas of militarization both locally and around the world. CPT embraces the vision of a lamb’s war waged by committed peacemakers ready to risk injury and death in bold attempts to transform lethal conflict through the nonviolent power of God’s truth and love. Initiated by the historic peace churches (Mennonites, Brethren, and Quakers) with growing ecumenical participation, CPT’s ministry of Biblically based and spiritually centered peacemaking emphasizes negotiation, 87
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protection of human rights, creative public witness, and nonviolent direct action. A strategy developed thoughtfully over the years has taught us that: • Trained, skilled teams from “the outside” can work effectively to spur and support local efforts toward nonviolent peacemaking. • “Getting in the way” of injustice through direct nonviolent intervention, public witness, and reporting to the larger world community can make a difference. • Peace team work engages congregations, meetings and support groups at home to play a key advocacy role with policy makers. In recent years, CPT has had “violence reduction projects” in Hebron, Chiapas, Colombia, Afghanistan, and in Canada, in northwestern Ontario, and New Brunswick. CPT members have been active in Iraq. Additional work has been carried out in Haiti, Bosnia, Chechnya, and several American cities plagued by drug-related violence. The Mission of CPT
Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) offers an organized, nonviolent alternative to war and other forms of lethal inter-group conflict. CPT provides organizational support to persons committed to faith-based nonviolent alternatives in situations where lethal conflict is an immediate reality or is supported by public policy. CPT seeks to enlist the response of the whole church in conscientious objection to war, and the development of nonviolent institutions, skills and training for intervention in conflict situations. CPT projects connect intimately with the spiritual lives of constituent congregations. Gifts of prayer, money and time from these churches undergird CPT’s peacemaking ministries.
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Organization CPT involves volunteers in a variety of groupings that, functioning in tandem, make for a very effective organization. Paraphrasing from their own pamphlet: Peacemaker Delegations: Short-term teams travel to crisis settings to protect human rights, engage in public peace witness, and report to churches in North America. Violence Reduction Projects: Peace team presence of three months or longer in specific conflict settings at the invitation of local peace workers. Peacemaker Corps: A body of trained peacemakers available full time to staff CPT’s violence reduction projects. Reserve Corps: A pool of individuals available to join CPT projects and delegations for two weeks to two months each year. Training While some short-term CPT delegations require little or no formal preparation, members of the regular CPT core groups must go through careful training. There are four-week programs offering intensive preparation for Corps members and Reservists, and regional trainings for 10-15 Reserve Corps applicants from specific geographical areas. The understanding is that a regional group forms in conjunction with a regional training and that members will have opportunities to get together periodically. The application process The CPT application is available on the web (see Appendix), and provides lots of information about the organization and the work. Full-time and Reserve Corps members commit to three years of work and are paid a small stipend. Reserve Corps members must be prepared to travel upon request two or more weeks a year for several years. CPT, like Peace Brigades International (see Chapter 9), does not choose its volunteers until after the required training sessions, which provide an opportunity for both parties to get to know one another. People who will join the full-time CPT Corps are required first to participate in a delegation (a
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guided short-term trip to a target country), and to attend a four-week intensive training session in Chicago. Reserve Corps applicants also participate in a delegation and then in a training session in Chicago. When there is sufficient interest (at least ten applicants from a particular area), a regional training may be held for Reservists. CPT asks about your age and health, your experience and family, your work, and your ability to raise money. They ask about your participation in local peace activities and in a local congregation, and they ask for the address of your pastor or Friends Meeting. I especially like an item in the application that asks “What roles do you most often play when decisions need to be made? (Check as many as apply.) Lead the group? Mediate? Follow directions? Retreat? Come up with new ideas? Confront? Look at all options? Other?” Applicants are asked to sign a statement of basic understanding that includes the concept that “love is a central quality of the Christian faith and becomes the basis for our relationship with all people regardless of race, color, sex, religious views, sexual orientation, age or ability.” Clarifying that the CPT mandate is not missionary outreach or humanitarian aide, the statement of personal responsibility that applicants sign reads “I also understand that CPT’s mandate does not include Relief or Development work or other outreach ministries of the church and that while participating in the CPT program, members will not engage in providing financial assistance or aid in any form so as not to undermine the long-term work of peacemaking.” At the end, there is a dense paragraph in legal language in which applicants — and all who are connected to them — are requested to “release and hold harmless” CPT and everyone associated with CPT from liability of any kind. And finally, CPT requires members to be 21 years of age or older, and requests that you sign the application in the presence of two witnesses.
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What CPT provides The application process alone may be difficult to complete, and you will also need to raise some money from your church and other sources. In return, CPT provides spiritual, social and logistical support for the peace-making work you are called to undertake, work that cannot be done on one’s own, even by a person of strong beliefs. How this all plays out in a conflict situation is well described in Art Gish’s book, Hebron Journal, a must-read for anyone thinking of joining CPT. Art describes both good times and bad in the life of the peacemaker community responding as a group to the ongoing occupation and violence in the West Bank town of Hebron. Language CPT asks in the application what languages you know but does not require that you speak the local language of the country in which you serve. However, whatever you can learn of the local language is always helpful. Room, board and guidance In the places where they work, CPT usually maintains a modest apartment, or rooms in a small hotel where there are cooking privileges. Peace team members generally share a room, the cooking, and the housekeeping. One room is used as the local office. Working out the household arrangements is one of the peacemaking challenges, and the process helps to coalesce individuals into a mutually supportive unit. The in-country team usually has from two to six full-time Corps members, supplemented by two to four Reservists. There is a team coordinator, but team decisions are arrived at through collaboration and consensus. Short-term delegations Short-term delegations usually include 5 - 12 people and last for 10 - 14 days. Usually, one person on the in-country team takes on the tasks of making arrangements, setting up appointments and being the point person for the delegation. The purpose of such delegations is to educate people
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about the issues underlying the conflict, and about nonviolent peacemaking. Each delegation member will take this information back to his or her own congregation, peace group, or community. Sometimes delegation members will also press policy makers on the issues. Expenses and spending money Full-time Corps members have their expenses paid and are given a small stipend for personal use. In general, keeping track of team finances is one of several roles shared by team members. Reservists raise enough money in advance to cover travel and personal expenses, but room and board are covered by CPT. For all participants, health insurance is their own responsibility, and it may not apply if the country where they are working is at war with the United States. Civil disobedience CPT members commit civil disobedience by deliberately breaking laws they feel are morally insupportable. For example, peace team members went into Iraq in defiance of the international trade embargo, sat on the rooftops of homes about to be demolished in Hebron, and got arrested for nonviolent actions in Vieques, Puerto Rico. Such behavior can be punished by fines or jail, but the support of the churches and peace groups standing behind peace team members may have a mitigating effect on what a judge or other official is likely to require. Danger CPT members can be very assertive about “getting in the way” of threatened hostilities. In Hebron Journal, Art Gish describes how scary — and how effective — this intervention can be. (Also see Chapter 4.) Art’s wife, Peggy, with a CPT group in Iraq in the fall of 2003, sent back stories about confronting US soldiers in Iraq when their treatment of Iraqi people was inhumane. Eventually, CPT took a dramatic stand regarding US abuses in Iraq by circulating a flyer among American soldiers (see Chapter 6).
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Sharing the news: Sending information back home Although CPT is not focused on getting media attention and creating photo ops for TV cameras (as Voices in the Wilderness needed to be (see Chapter 8), CPT still puts a good deal of emphasis on reporting back to voters and policy makers in Canada and the US about what they are witnessing. On a regular basis, well-prepared materials come from the field through the main office in Chicago by e-mail, to be distributed to lists of readers according to topic and region of interest. (See Appendix.) Peace church congregations, especially in the mid-western states and provinces of the United States and Canada, are actively involved in receiving these reports and supporting the work. Corps members are expected to send e-mail reports from in-country sites, and to speak about their experiences when they return home. The backers at home help distribute the writings, and arrange and manage audiences for the speakers. Headquarters At the time of this writing, the CPT headquarters office is in Chicago, with an adjunct office in Toronto. Demographics Most peace team offices — staffed substantially by volunteers and hard pressed to fulfill the basic mission — place a low priority on tasks such as gathering statistics about its volunteers, and CPT is no different. However, I was able to get printed trip lists from CPT regarding short-term delegations teams deployed between January 2000 and June 2003. The CPT data describes the travelers with each trip — a total of 440 individual trips — but it is not entirely clear how often each individual traveled during that period. We do know that ten leaders went on two trips during this period, and one person led four trips. Others may also have gone more than once — remember that Reservists are expected to devote two to three weeks a year, and the study period covered two and a half years.
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Place of origin The first thing of note in CPT demographics (as compared to Voices or Peace Brigades International), is that many CPT volunteers come from Canada, and that it is the mid-western states and provinces that are most heavily represented. Marital status During this period, 14 members were on the trip with their spouses, and 133 times a married person left a spouse at home (or on another trip) in order to do this work. Interesting numbers, given the stereotype that says you have to be single, young, and fancy-free to be a radical, resist the Establishment, or adventure around the world. Age As the table shows — even noting that some Age Quantity people served on more than one team during Teens 9 this period and so are counted more than Twenties 77 once — a fairly equitable representation Thirties 61 was seen from all age groups. Forties 66 “Teens” are people aged 18 or 19 who Fifties 73 were accompanied by relatives. The greatest representation was from Sixties 89 people in their sixties; presumably many Seventies 43 were recent retirees finally free to take a Eighties 3 dramatic stand for peace and justice. If this Undeclared 19 foreshadows a trend, we can hope for a substantial increase in volunteers for peace teams as the Baby Boomers begin to retire in the not-too-distant future. Delegation leaders were often young adults; out of 19 leaders whose age was reported, 10 were in their twenties and thirties, with the others distributed more or less evenly upwards of that. The oldest reported leader was 71.
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Previous experience From among the study group, 20 had previously attended protest demonstrations at the School of the Americas, and 6 had been involved with the Catholic Worker. Other affiliations were varied and impressive, including the Peace Corps, Mennonite Central Committee, Brethren Peace Fellowship, Fellowship of Reconciliation, Habitat for Humanity, PBI, Witness for Peace, and others. Religious affiliation Members of Mennonite congregations constituted over a third of this group of peace team travelers, partly because their members most often went on more than one trip during the period reviewed. Catholics, Quakers and Brethren represented from 9 to 11 percent each. Presbyterians and non-specified Christians made up most of the rest of the group; non-religious/sectarian peace activists made up 5 percent. Since the application materials stress the strong Christian principles and practices of the teams, it is interesting to note that these others were accepted and hopefully comfortable in the group. Gender Judging by name only, 199 trips were made by women, and 238 by men. In two cases, gender could not be determined from the name. Frequency of travel Many of these people went on more than one delegation or peace team assignment. Most stayed only a week or two; many went back a second or third time to a country, and a good number went to more than one country.
Location
Number of Trips
Total Participants
Chiapas, Mexico
7
59
Vieques, Puerto Rico
9
76
Columbia
7
50
Middle East
19
183
Iraq
7
76
North America
4
32
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Destinations Between January 2000 and June 2003, CPT organized 53 short-term delegations in 6 different countries. CPT staff provided a breakdown of the total number of visitors to each of these locales.
Chapter 8
Voices in the Wilderness Many of the peace teams deployed in the last two decades have worked in situations of civil war in the Middle East, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Haiti. Their task was to get in the way when opposing factions threatened one another or, in the accompaniment projects, to literally stand as a silent observer, with local activists to dramatize that outside eyes are watching how the people are treated. Voices in the Wilderness (Voices), fulfilled a notably different role in Iraq. For six years, the primary mission was to protest, even to the point of civil disobedience, the immorality of the economic sanctions against Iraq fostered by the US and the UN. The second was the work of public education with the goal of lifting the sanctions. The sanctions constituted an embargo preventing travel and trade between the US and other UN countries and Iraq, an embargo that had serious negative repercussions on all aspects of the Iraqi economic and social health. 97
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Then, in the six months before the second Gulf War took place in the spring of 2003 Voices initiated the Iraq Peace Team. The goal was to galvanize the international peace movement in its resistance against the war. Getting the word out in every way possible to US citizens and other Westerners was the mission throughout both phases. Therefore, it was effective to have many peace team members come through Baghdad, Basra, and other cities in Iraq, armed with cameras and laptop computers, sending many messages home to huge e-mail lists during a relatively short stay. It was important for peace team members to return to communities all over the US and other countries to publish articles, give speeches, show pictures, and inspire others to take a stand, first against the sanctions and then against the impending war. While an accompanier in Colombia might stay in a quiet backcountry village for months, a peace team member in Baghdad in January 2003 had the opportunity to wave banners and give fervent speeches for international TV cameras — for example, in front of an electric power plant threatened by the US Air Force. Because it was illegal to travel to Iraq, the possibility of fines or even jail lurked in the background for members of the delegations, who were deliberately committing civil disobedience — CD, as the old-timers call it. Overview Voices was launched in 1996 by a group of ten experienced peace activists, several of whom are also active with Christian Peacemaker Teams. The founders of Voices in the Wilderness were Chuck Quilty, Simon Harak, SJ Rev Bob Bossie, Br. Paul Bossie, CLR, Anne Montgomery, Jim Douglass, Karl Meyer, Gene Stolzfus, Bradford Lyttle and Kathy Kelly. They issued their first press release on Martin
Kathy Kelly
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Luther King’s birthday in 1996. Rick McDowell became deeply involved within the next few months. Kathy Kelly, in her forties when the group was founded, became known as the lead public representative for Voices. For six years, the mission of Voices was to call American and international attention to the extreme hardships caused by the US-UN trade sanctions against Iraq, sanctions that outlawed travel and most imports and exports to and from Iraq. Then in the fall of 2002, Voices created the Iraq Peace Team (IPT), with the intent of preventing a US invasion of Iraq. Background Kathy Kelly was a part of the daring team of people who, in 1991, camped in the Iraqi desert at a military border post between Iraq and Saudi Arabia at the time that the first Gulf War was launched. Their experiences — some very dramatic — are well described in War and Peace in the Gulf: Testimonies of the Gulf Peace Team, which brings together writings of several participants.
It was impossible to see your hand in front of your face in some places ... I found myself ... shivering on the uneven terrain at the camp perimeter and gazing up at the truly apocalyptic scene as bombers and cruise missiles traversed the sky in wide formation. ... An Iraqi driver who had left his seven children in Baghdad to bring us our food supply for the week was sobbing as he watched vast payloads of death pass overhead towards Baghdad and Kerbala ... Soon we had more light than we needed as Kerbala glowed on our horizon whenever it was hit. Strong vibrations could also be felt in the ground and the air all around ... - Martin Thomas,War and Peace in the Gulf A different kind of trauma for the peace camp rose from within the group. As Bela Batia and Jean Dreze explain in War and Peace in the Gulf:
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[The Gulf Peace Team included] 73 volunteers (45 men and 28 women from fifteen countries, aged 22 to 76) [who] came from highly diverse backgrounds. They included a train driver, a restaurant owner, a Buddhist monk, a cartoonist, two economists, and a sprinkle of priests and nuns, to mention a few ... The camp also had its share of difficult personalities. Why a project of this kind attracts more than a fair share of persons with special psychological needs is itself an interesting question ...Those who are already on the margin of society may find it easier to take positions of dissent, such as opposing a widely supported war. The fact remains that several members of the Gulf Peace Team suffered from varying degrees of inner confusion or agitation. It is perhaps to the credit of the team that it gave space to such people. Yet their presence represented a heavy moral responsibility for the peace camp. It also made group processes very difficult. [Two examples are described in Jack Lomax’s contribution in the book.] An extreme case of disruptive behavior pertained to an individual named “Baba,” who developed a habit of standing aside during camp meetings and showering the audience with colorful invectives (“cockroaches” was one of his favorites). He upheld that habit at our first press conference in Amman after the Gulf War, making us a laughing stock of the world media. This was one of the lowest points of the Gulf Peace Team. One answer to this problem, in principle, is better screening of volunteers prior to joining the camp. Screening and training procedures were, in fact, used in several countries, but their practical effectiveness was far from clear. Baba himself passed a long interview … with flying colors.
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The Application Process This experience led the founders to think carefully about how to screen applicants for in-country work when they initiated Voices in the Wilderness in 1996. Refined over the years, in 2002 the application questionnaire was notable for two characteristics. On the one hand, there were no queries about your education, your job, your title, or your income — i.e., no interest in your socioeconomic status. In our class-conscious world, this indifference was gratifying. On the other hand, there were stiff requirements for references and endorsements from groups and individuals who would testify to your ability to cooperate productively with others in a peace team situation. Voices preferred that at least one of your references be someone they knew, and they talked to references by phone as well as receiving their letters. In addition, two established groups had to endorse you — it could be a committee from your church or peace group, perhaps people from your work place or commune, a women’s group or a support group. You also were required to have commitments from individuals for different roles: an e-mail distributor, a media contact, a health aide ready to get you off a plane in a basket if necessary, and a fund raiser, if you needed financial assistance. If you could not get this kind of support, then Voices had an indication that you might be a sort of maverick disinclined to seek consensus with others about appropriate actions in a foreign country. In a war zone, cooperation becomes a vital matter of safety for all concerned. On the other hand, when bombs were threatening to drop, it was precisely the most courageous, independent, and adventurous spirits who were willing to sign up for the team. Despite the danger, hundreds of people applied to join the Iraq Peace Team just before the war. The selection panel (Kathy by e-mail or phone from wherever she was, and one or two staff members in the Chicago office) took their chances sometimes. Training The application asked about your age and health, and about your background in pacifism, training in nonviolence, and experience in other peace team
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projects. Voices in the Wilderness did not provide training or much orientation, looking instead for people who were committed pacifists with substantive prior training or experience from other sources. Some VITW team members were experienced participants in Christian Peacemakers Teams, for example, or had come up through Quaker, Mennonite, or Catholic peace programs. Some people working with Voices in the Wilderness over the years stayed for many weeks or even months at a time. But the real push was to get a great variety of people to come through on short stints, getting educated and aware so that they would send news back to their contacts, especially in the United States, about the negative impact of sanctions on a country already devastated by the 1991 war. Some fifty teams of six to eight members each traveled to Iraq with Voices between 1996 and the fall of 2002. Often the length of stay was determined by the Iraqi visas, which were usually short term and had to be renewed constantly. When the focus shifted and Voices established the Iraq Peace Team in October 2002, it remained true that the most effective work was to bear witness to the situation in Iraq, to send back to the western world a different story from the one presented by commercial media sources. Iraq was hardly the evil threat to the United States George Bush claimed. It had no nuclear weapons, or any other weapons of mass destruction. It was impoverished by sanctions. Its people were dying of cancer, perhaps related to DU. It was dreadfully short of strong young men because many had died or left. Many Iraqis claimed that its different religious groups were cooperative with one another. Saddam Hussein had brought the country almost to firstworld economic status in a short ten years, and the education level especially was very advanced. The US government was seen as the enemy — but not its people. Iraqis thought that, because the US was a democracy, its people would be able to prevent the threatened US invasion. Saddam Hussein himself appeared to hope for that outcome, which is why he allowed peace team members to tour around his country. Since the goal was for as many people as possible to learn all this and take the news back home, short term stays of two to four weeks continued to be appropriate and common for IPT members.
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Language Perhaps the weakest aspect of VITW’s work in Iraq was that almost no peace team members spoke Arabic. While many Iraqis learned English as part of the universal education introduced by Saddam Hussein in the period before sanctions, the schools were now suffering from reduced funding and many educated people had left the country. A few Iraqis who spoke English graciously offered hospitality and answered the same questions over and over as new groups of Americans came every few months during the sanctions years, and every week or two in the months before the war. Peace team members generally could not read the local papers or understand what was on the TV. A most interesting side effect of this language barrier was that the government “minders” assigned to accompany peace team members when they went any distance from the hostel — in an effort to ... in order to control what they saw, keep them out of trouble, and assess whether they might be spies — became important translators for the volunteers. As tour guides, the minders could do a top-notch professional job. As translators in diplomatic situations - say, with imams at mosques or doctors at hospitals - it sometimes appeared that they were editing or deleting as they translated. Room and board In Iraq (and in Jordan during the trip in and out of Baghdad), Voices in the Wilderness for several years used the same small hotels at about $10 a night for peace team members. In 2000 and 2001, Kathy Kelly and five others were able to spend several weeks in Iraqi homes in Basra. As the pre-war tension increased, things changed. By December 2002, even short visits to a local home by any American triggered an Iraqi government investigation of that household within hours after the visitor left. Half the rooms in the little Al Fanar Hotel in Baghdad looked out over the Tigris River and the parks along its banks. The Arabian-style tearoom and the modest western-style restaurant downstairs were quite charming. The menus were limited, but the breads and hummus, kebabs and olives were great, and the special tea made from whole dried lemons and served
in tiny gold-rimmed glasses was a local treat. About half the team would congregate at breakfast and dinner in the restaurant to share plans and news. Others ate cold food from the marketplace or went to other nearby eateries. At the Al Dar Hotel down the street, members of the team shared a kitchen with a couple of other guests and did their own cooking much of the time.
E. Boardman
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Iraqi “minder” Zaid
Expenses and spending money In 2002, peace travelers with Voices in the Wilderness paid for their own airfare to Amman in Jordan (from the Chicago office it cost Iraqi 250 dinar note about $1.000), and put $900 cash into a kitty for a month’s commitment, or a little more or less depending on the length of the stay. Raising this money, plus enough for ground travel and preparation expenses in the US, was the responsibility of the traveler. Of course, all needed funds were supposed to be in hand before you left the US; it caused some hardship for Voices when people announced once they were in Iraq that their money had run out. Carrying cash was a radical experience for people used to the relative safety of checks and credit cards. I wrote this to my e-mail list:
I had heard that one peace team member lost $800 cash on the way to Iraq, so I pinned my $800 in a little velvet bag
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under my right arm. Even at the airports where they went all over me with hands and wands, they didn’t notice it. I don’t think it got too sweaty! I was glad to hand it over in Baghdad, and was awed by the bravery of Michael, an ordinary peace team volunteer who undertook to be the manager of all our money. When dollars were converted into Iraqi dinar, they became an enormous wad of bills, each worth about four cents, as I recall. I did not dare to ask what kind of safe or other security was available when twelve of us at once had handed in $800-900 each. When we needed cash, we would go to Michael, like a six year old: “Daddy, can I have more money, please, please?” He would give us a huge stack of bills, no questions asked. Out of the pooled money, Voices paid all our hotel bills (except laundry, shoe shine and tips), our travel to other Iraqi cities, our room and board expenses, and lots of touring around sites in Baghdad and other places. We used the cash doled out by Michael only for taxis, non-hotel food and drink, sundries and tips. We used our own money (dollars often were accepted) for gifts to take home. There seemed to be no close accounting of whether any one took more out of the kitty than he had put in, except perhaps if someone had put in less than the requested $900 per month. - Elizabeth Boardman, Iraq 2002 The $900 was supposed to be enough to leave some residual amount to be used for the administrative expenses of the Voices in the Wilderness office in Chicago. It couldn’t have been much, and contributions from supporters were another vital source of revenue for the work.
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Civil disobedience Voices in the Wilderness always operated on the barest of cash budgets deliberately. Since they deliberately broke the laws of the US and the UN by ignoring the sanctions against Iraq, they wanted no substantial bank account that could be seized by the courts or the US Department of Treasury. Although Voices is not a humanitarian aide organization, the leaders saw the acute need for medications in Iraq and were glad to involve many western citizens in the work. So VITW travelers almost always went into the country carrying cartons containing thousands of dollars worth of antibiotics, vitamins, and other drugs and supplies donated by hospitals, drug companies, medical schools and individuals in the US. Going to Iraq in itself was illegal under sanctions, but it was the “importing” of tangible goods that triggered the imposition of fines by the US government. In 1998, Voices was issued a pre-penalty notice imposing $50,000. in fines for breaking these inhumane laws. VITW refused to pay and waited for the consequences. After years of silence, the Department of the Treasury finally insisted early in 2003 that $20,000 was still owing. In a brilliant stroke, Voices offered to pay in Iraqi dinar:
As payment for these fines, we have included 6,750 Iraqi dinar. Prior to the Gulf War and economic sanctions, these dinar were valued at approximately $20,000; today, they are worth roughly $3.33. - VITW letter, Feb 2003 Danger Being in Iraq became very dangerous once the invasion began. Some IPT experiences during this period are reported in Chapter 4. The chaotic situation that emerged in the months following the war was even more hazardous, and the Voices presence there was radically reduced after July 2003. It was hard to celebrate the end of the sanctions, so long the goal of VITW, when it had come at the cost of a massive bombardment, the destruction of the Iraqi infrastructure, and an occupation that appeared designed to enrich American
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corporations. Both Christian Peacemaker Teams and Global Exchange sent groups to Iraq to bear witness to the problematic aspects of the US occupation. It was a time of transition for Voices in the Wilderness, whose future role was not yet clear.
E. Boardman
Sharing the news: Peace movement as pyramid scheme During the intense pre-war period early in 2003, the volunteers in the Chicago office were also organizing the fast-moving e-mail reports from Iraq Peace Team (IPT) volunteers and sending them all across the US. Every volunteer had a stateside e-mail manager who would forward his or her reports on to an e-mail list numbering from tens to hundreds. The Chicago office also would send the most dramatic reports to these list managers to distribute to as many people as possible. Of course, the best reports would then get forwarded by the first cadre of recipients to their own friends and colleagues. This whole pyramid scheme became an important segment of the alternative media, encouraging protest and political action in the US and other western countries. Often the stories sent back by Iraq Peace Team members featured impoverished communities, barren schools, struggling hospitals, or Gulf War bomb sites that were still not repaired twelve years later because the sanctions had prevented replacement parts Iraqi physician in oncology ward from reaching Iraq. IPT members made huge banners, camped out for days at sites they insisted should not be targeted by the US, and got the international TV stations to interview them as often as possible. For months - October 2002 through March 2003 - the whole world was hoping that the UN weapons inspectors would be able to resolve the issue
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of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and prevent the invasion from occurring. The peace team set up a presence at the UN headquarters in the outskirts of Baghdad in order to encourage the inspectors. A major role Iraqi mother and child in pediatric cancer ward played by Kathy Kelly, who was herself in Iraq during most of the six months preceding the invasion, was to use her well-established connections with the Iraqi government to get visas and make arrangements for delegations and groups coming to Iraq under the auspices of other organizations. Church groups, doctors, education specialists, and political representatives came and went. A delegation of Nobel Peace Prize winners was arranged. The most famous visitor who came in under Kathy’s umbrella was actor Sean Penn, for a very short but much publicized visit in December 2002. Headquarters For a long time, the headquarters of Voices in the Wilderness was in Kathy Kelly’s own second floor apartment on Carmen Avenue on the north side of Chicago. Often staffed mainly by volunteers while Kathy herself was in Iraq or elsewhere, it was a jumble of desks, phones, and computers, with stacks of sorted papers lying on beds that might be needed at night by peace travelers or out-of-town volunteers. The general sense of grubby chaos seemed consistent with the mission of an organization challenging the materialistic aims and values of the Establishment, and is found in many peace and justice offices. In her absence, Kathy’s own bedroom was often available for volunteers. It was a tiny cell-like room with only the narrow bed, a crooked floor lamp and an electric heater as furniture. The walls were pale and blank. But the
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single window was covered with a bright, multi-colored swath of cloth, and the light on the Chicago street below was vibrant. Demographics There are references to Voices in the Wilderness and observations by its volunteers throughout this book. The list of contributors in the Introduction describes some of people who volunteered in Iraq with Voices. We tried to choose for that list a representative sample of the men and women, clergy and lay people, older and younger folks who went to Iraq from all over the US and Canada. Voices, like other peace team sponsors, does not have the manpower to produce polished statistical reports, but this picture of the eighty participants who went to Iraq between January 2000 and June 2003 gives a general sense of who goes on ventures of this sort. Place of Origin: Chicago, where the home office of Voices in the Wilderness is based, produced a few more volunteers for the peace teams than other US cities, but not by much, and probably mainly because they had moved to Chicago to work there. People came from all over the country — Maine and Massachusetts in New England; New York City and New York state, Philadelphia, Maryland and Washington, DC in the mid-coast area; Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana in the south; Iowa and Indiana as well as the Chicago area; Minnesota, Wisconsin, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas further west; and California. Additionally, 7 of the 80 volunteers in my survey came from countries other than the United States: 3 were from Canada, 1 was from Ireland, 1 was from Australia and 1 was from England. The largely North American composition of Voices in the Wilderness and Christian Peacemaker Teams stands in marked contrast to the international make-up of Peace Brigades International. Marital status: Also interesting is that many volunteers, including those in their thirties and forties, were married but traveled in the cause without their spouses. More
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than once, the spouse was on an accompaniment project in another country, and three married couples served together with Voices during the period covered by the study. Age Age Quantity In contrast to Peace Brigades International, Twenties 4 which tends to recruit people in their late Thirties 6 twenties and thirties who can commit the Forties 24 required year of service, Voices volunteers included a broad range of ages, with the Fifties 17 greatest representation (24, or 30%) being in Sixties 10 their forties. Seventies 1 These findings surprised me because I Eighties 4 thought that people in their prime child-raising Unknown 3 years would not be likely to participate in risky activities like going to a country on the brink of war. It turned out, however, that many of the volunteers in the thirties and forties did not have children. Sometimes a couple in a second marriage was able to leave children safe at home with another parent. (See Chapter 3, “What will people say?” regarding leaving children at home.) Previous experience: Some volunteers had been on trips of this sort before. Two had participated in the original Gulf Peace Team in 1991. Others had traveled with Veterans for Peace or the International Solidarity Movement. Several had participated in actions at the School of the Americas. Individuals mentioned being active with Peace Action, the Catholic Worker, Habitat for Humanity, the Nonviolent Peaceforce, the Mennonite Central Committee, Jews for Equal Justice, the Middle East Children’s Alliance, and the American Friends Service Committee. (Nobody spoke of having worked with the Peace Corps or Peace Brigades International.) A special cadre in Iraq with Voices just before the war were people with Christian Peacemaker Teams, which has a special commitment to
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participation in scenarios where they can prevent harm. Predominantly Mennonites, they had their own coordinator in Baghdad. (See Chapter 8) Another special delegation that came to Iraq under the Voices umbrella during this period were six to eight members of Peaceful Tomorrows. This was a group of relatives of victims of the 9/11 disaster, who vowed not to react to their losses with hatred or revenge, but instead to work more vigorously for a peaceful world. Religious affiliation: In proportions greater than their numbers in the general population, clergy and other religious people were represented in the peace teams. Of the eighty in this little survey, nine identified themselves as priests, pastors, or nuns. Others had deep religious motivation for joining. While the tiny peace churches — Quakers, Brethren, and Mennonites — produced a high number of volunteers for their size, there were also many Catholics, Jews, and liberal Protestants of various affiliations on the roster. And many participants described no religious affiliation. Gender Of the eighty, judging by their names, 36 were women, 43 men. The gender of one name was unclear. Occupation: Half of the 80 travelers identified themselves with peace and justice organizations in their home community, and in many cases, the connection was clearly their regular paying job. Voices did not require it, so not everyone listed his or her paid job. Among those who did, there was a wide range of employ: nurse, janitor, health care administrator, lawyer, photographer, paramedic. Close to a quarter of peace team members were retired and several were students.
Chapter 9
Peace Brigades International Peace Brigades International, known among its friends as PBI, is one of wellestablished accompaniment projects currently at work in the world. While CPT’s motto is to “get in the way,” PBI is committed to “making a space for peace.”
Peace Brigades International (PBI) is an innovative non-governmental organization (NGO) which promotes the transformation of conflicts by peaceful means. It does this by providing an unarmed international presence in regions where there is oppression and conflict. PBI’s teams of volunteers provide moral and physical support to (local) human rights defenders and organizations working for social change and the development of civil society, whose lives and work are threatened by violence. Overview Like other peace and accompaniment projects, PBI moves in and out of countries depending upon the need, the likelihood of being effective, and the level of danger. But they have spent 16 years in Guatemala, 10 years in Colombia and 9 in Sri Lanka. Peace Brigades International has also worked 113
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in Haiti, El Salvador, North America, and the Balkans. In 2004, PBI had active projects in Guatemala, Colombia, Mexico, and Indonesia, and was cooperating in a SIPAZ (Servicio Internacional para la Paz/International Service for Peace) project in Chiapas. PBI introduces itself this way on its web site in 2004:
Peace Brigades International (PBI), founded in 1981, is a low-overhead, non-profit, non-partisan, non-sectarian, nongovernmental, international network of unpaid volunteers and a few paid staff. Inspired by Gandhi, PBI uses direct nonviolent action to help deter violence and expand space for human rights activism in areas of civil strife. So what does all this mean in real life? It means that volunteers should be willing to adhere to the main operating principles of PBI, as described below. The first is nonviolence. You will never carry a gun, you will not fight, and you will not use verbal abuse in your interactions with other people. The second is nonpartisanship. Even when you are well aware of who abuses power in the country where you are working, your stand will be not against that party, but against violence. This also means that PBI does not involve itself in broad policy questions. The third is nonintervention. Your task will not be to solve local problems or run local projects. Your task is only to “expand the space” in which local activists can do their work, by standing with them as a witness and a reporter with international contacts in case there is any threat of violence. You will also agree to decision-making by consensus within your team of volunteers. Based on Gandhian and Quaker principles, consensus decisionmaking is slow and difficult — and essential to the safety and long-term strength of the team.
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Finally, PBI is committed to transparency — to being very open and public about what they do. PBI alerts all the relevant authorities and uses the correct visas. Organization PBI waits to be invited before they establish a project in any conflict situation, and they carefully assess the situation before they send an accompaniment team to any locale. Experienced volunteers or staff members respond to an invitation with an advance trip, during which they assess both whether an accompaniment team could be effective and also relatively safe. An excerpt from the 2003 PBI annual report gives a good sense of the process:
After providing protective accompaniment in Guatemala for 16 years, PBI withdrew its team in 1995. In the last 2 years, numerous groups suffering renewed threats have called for our return. In April 2003, an advance team was sent to Guatemala to begin laying the political and logistical groundwork for the official reopening of the team. They met with Guatemalan government officials and members of the international diplomatic corps to announce the return of PBI to Guatemala. They secured PBI’s official legal status and began coordinating with other international accompaniment organizations. - PBI/USA Annual Report 2003 One person requesting accompaniment was Marielos Monzon, a journalist investigating government involvement in illegal adoptions and other human rights issues. Monzon fled to Uruguay because of threats and intimidation, and requested accompaniment so that she could more safely return to Guatemala. A Guatemalan federation of labor unions defending worker rights also requested accompaniment. These people know what they want to accomplish and have a strategy for doing it. They may tell you their plan, but it is not your role to design or alter
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it. They just need the accompaniers to stand by them and watch what happens as they pursue their own strategies with business and government officials. Background According to the 2003 annual report, that year’s budget for the Washington, D.C. office was about $160,000, while PBI as a whole was doing its work with a budget of about $2.5 million in 2003. They needed more; not for salaries or benefits or perks, but because the requests for service in conflict areas continued to come in. There is no question that PBI is an efficient organization made up of dedicated and generous people. Is it effective? Sometimes it seems as if very little progress is made in reducing violence and greed in war-torn countries like Colombia and Indonesia. But individual lives are saved. PBI has accompanied hundreds of human rights workers in Columbia who have active death threats against them, and none of these people have been killed while accompanied by PBI. Peace and justice activists call for people from other lands to come to stand by them. Most who respond to that call find it very important to know that they have done the right thing, been true to their own ideals, have taken a stand. You only have one life. The application process PBI is looking for adults who are intelligent, emotionally stable, and mature, who can speak the language of the target country (or are willing to learn it before the trip), who are willing to study hard the history and politics of the country, and who can write reports on meetings and events in English. PBI looks for men and women from anywhere in the world who are over 25 years of age, can commit a year to the project, and are willing to accept a minimal stipend and paid expenses (including health insurance). PBI needs people who are willing to share space with several others in a modest apartment or house set up by PBI. It may be in a major city or in a small, isolated town. PBI has country offices that support the work of the organization in many western countries. (See next section, Backup and support.) But information and applications are most easily obtained on the Internet. (See Appendix)
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Training PBI offers orientation and training sessions several times a year in the US and in other countries according to interest. Participation in these sessions is part of the application process. It is only after you and PBI representatives have spent time together in these activities that a decision will be made as to whether you are a good match. What PBI provides An important resource for PBI volunteers in the field — and for the people they accompany — is the Emergency Response Network. These are the people on PBI’s e-mails list in Western countries who are ready to write to policy makers about emergency situations that in-country volunteers report on. Here is an example from October 2003:
As you might already know, PBI has returned to Guatemala. In April of this year, we established a new team in Guatemala City and recently began to once again accompany courageous individuals and organizations in Guatemalan civil society. The intensifying threats against them are becoming physical attacks. We are activating our grassroots Emergency Response Network because of the serious threats against human rights defenders working with one of our client organizations. The CERJ is an organization with which we have a long history of accompaniment and that we have accompanied recently on September 18 and 21. They were carrying out reparations workshops that were then facilitated for victims of Guatemala’s internal conflict. Eusebio Macario, father of Angelica Macario, one of the defenders PBI is currently accompanying, was assassinated on September 27. CERJ believes that those
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responsible are possibly ex-civil patrollers and individuals with links to the FRG (Guatemalan Republican Front), the political party currently in government. The PBI Guatemala Project sees this assassination as a direct threat against the CERJ leaders and fears similar attacks. Please take action today by writing to the Guatemalan Consulate in your country or the Guatemalan government directly. Addresses and sample letters are available at www.peacebrigades.org/ern/ern03-09.html. Your support is extremely important as PBI works to protect the brave members of CERJ and other Guatemalan human rights groups. Language Andrew Miller, co-director of PBI, explains that:
Solid communication skills are critical to the success of PBI’s presence, since so much of the work is relationship building. Therefore, volunteers need to be conversant in Spanish for work in Latin America, and willing to study the local language in other cases, such as Indonesia. In general, language training is financed by the volunteer him or her self. PBI can help raise the funds if necessary. - Andrew Miller, in an e-mail, June 2004 Room, board and guidance The goals of Voices in the Wilderness and CPT can be accomplished by volunteers who spend three weeks to three months in-country — Iraq, Israel, Colombia, Vieques, etc. Because deep knowledge of the local language and politics increases the effectiveness of an accompanier, and considerable advance training is involved, PBI looks for a minimum one-year commitment.
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Part of the package, therefore, is a kind of intentional communal living experience that gives members a chance to live for a year in close quarters with an international team of half a dozen men and women. Most will be in their twenties and thirties, but they will not all have the same temperament or social and emotional needs, so good opportunities for practicing peace keeping will undoubtedly arise right at home! Remember, decisions are made by consensus; the process is often slow, but the outcome is a solid decision and a strong community. Because PBI operates on tight budget, accommodations are tight and team members will often share bedrooms. Housekeeping is shared, too, though in some cases local help will be affordable. The team office is likely to be the front room of the house. For much of the time, team members are out and about at meetings, at other PBI sites, and with local activists, although there are also opportunities for parties and entertainments of various sorts. However, as PBI volunteer Denise Cauchi told me, volunteers are essentially on the job all the time and anywhere they go, because they are inevitably visible as foreigners and deliberately visible as international observers. The job of the volunteer can change quite dramatically over time. When a country office is first being established, or when members are new to the project and are learning the ropes, the work might seem extremely difficult. At other times, it might seem that volunteers just sit and wait while the person they’re accompanying completes his or her business. Making something positive out of this fluctuation is a good challenge. Because it involves so much new learning, such hard cooperative work, such deep personal commitment, and such close companionship, serving as a PBI volunteer for a year will certainly have a major impact on your worldview and your life decisions. It will put you on a path that will run far into the future and most likely will connect you to good work and good people all your life. Returning to your homeland after a year in Colombia, Indonesia, or Chiapas (for example) can be quite a novel experience. You will have a new set of eyes for the old familiar scene. And you will have a story to tell to your
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own people — people who have no background at all yet for understanding what is going on in Indonesia or Mexico or Guatemala (for example). PBI has developed effective support for returning volunteers — debriefing opportunities, orientation to the new tasks of this phase, help with organizing written and photographic materials, and assistance in arranging opportunities to speak about your experience. Also part of the PBI network are the country groups that exist in thirteen European countries, India, Canada and the US. These groups are organized to offer information and support for the work of activists in the field. Some have an office, others just a desk in a kitchen corner, or the back of another NGO office. All have members including PBI alumni and supporters of all ages and stages — writers, fundraisers, office managers, trainers, etc. These people will be there for you on your return home, as they were before you left. And finally, in addition to regional gatherings, a general assembly is held every three years, bringing together PBI activists and members from around the world. Danger There is always danger in an accompaniment project, but the danger is mainly for the local advocates for peace and justice. PBI reports that there were 4,900 political homicides and 734 “forced disappearances” in Colombia in 2002, as well as massive internal displacement in which thousands of people yearly are fleeing from their homes. PBI wants to stand by these people. In mid-2004, PBI was considering requests from civil society organizations in Nepal and Zimbabwe. A UN official stated:
The presence of PBI in the city of Barrancabermeja is extremely important. The local paramilitaries have made it clear that the international support provided to human rights defenders is the only reason why they have not assassinated more of them. - PBI Annual Report, 2003
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Regarding this high level of danger, PBI Colombia volunteer Lizzie Brock admitted in a private conversation to “a certain amount of denial that we ourselves were in danger — because we focused on the danger to the Colombians we were with.” Because the volunteers studied so hard the politics of the local scene, they “got very intellectual about danger,” Lizzie said, mostly focusing on how to protect their charges from getting harassed or hurt. Success for PBI is when nothing bad happens and the local activists feel empowered. The director of a legal aid foundation in Indonesia said:
PBI makes us brave, which is very important for our job. Sometimes we have to go to dangerous places and the existence of PBI makes us more secure. PBI really helps us ... do our job defending people without fear ... - PBI Annual Report, 2003 If the team is successful, there will be no outward drama. Your time of services will not be boring, however, for you will be constantly observing how a rich complex of political, economic, and historical factors plays out in everyday life in a society in crisis. Headquarters The US office of PBI is in Washington DC (see Appendix). Demographics PBI is indeed international — not only in the service it provides, but also in the area from which it draws its volunteers. While Voices and CPT activists are primarily American and Canadian, PBI attracts activists from many different countries. According to their annual report (2003), of 38 volunteers in Colombia, only 5 were Americans. In Indonesia, 1 of the 15 volunteers was American, and in Mexico, 1 of the 10 volunteers was American. During the whole of 2003, 10 out of 70 volunteers worldwide were Americans.
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While most volunteers in the field are in their twenties and thirties, the country groups and other supporters include people of all ages, participating in the work in many different ways. Liam Mahoney, who has been associated with PBI since 1987, did accompaniment work in Guatemala and co-founded the PBI Haiti Project. Later he collaborated with Luis Enrique Eguren to write a book called Unarmed Bodyguards (see Resources). Eguren is a doctor in Spain who has participated in accompaniment projects in El Salvador, Sri Lanka, Colombia, the Balkans and Guatemala. Edith Cole, according to PBI’s annual report, is a Quaker grandmother whose support of PBI has been “a primordial force.” About PBI volunteer George Willoughby, the annual report says “To me, he models what a practical visionary looks like: someone who can dream the bold dream and also support his fellow-dreamers in tackling the gritty tasks.” Lizzie Brock, an experienced in-country volunteer and coordinator in the PBI-Colombia project, has been working with Michael Nagler of UC Berkeley on a book that will elucidate the theory of nonviolent resistance. Patricia Beetle is a wise elder who supports PBI, and is the person who designed the fund-raising T-shirt that reads “I will not teach my child to kill your child.” Others share in the fund-raising, the office work, the organization of outreach and orientation activities, the coordination of the regional and international gatherings, and — always on call — the emergency response network.
Chapter 10
Other travelers, other work New peace teams will continue to emerge in response to armed conflict and threatened military attack around the world, and accompaniment teams will continue to serve as vital witnesses to situations of persistent political violence. Also, trends suggest that more and more tourists from Western countries will want to participate in study tours and educational delegations. A number of organizations and projects are already at work to fill these needs. Following is a brief description of some of them, and contact information for them can be found in the Appendix. International Solidarity Movement ISM works in Palestine and Israel, campaigning nonviolently against Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian lands. The group was founded in 2001 after the US veto of a UN motion that would have sent UN observers in to Palestine. Sometimes ISM activists, like members of CPT, do “get in the way” of threatened violence, which is how it happened that young Rachel Corrie, standing in protest between a bulldozer and a Palestinian home, was crushed to death in 2002. ISM draws its volunteers from all over the world for relatively short stints, sending them home again with poignant stories and fervent concerns about the humanitarian abuses going on in the Israeli-occupied territories. 123
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Witness for Peace Witness for Peace has been running accompaniment projects in Central America since its establishment in 1983. The early work is described in a comprehensive book by Ed Griffin-Nolan, called Witness for Peace: A Story of Resistance. (See Resources.) In the 1980s, Witness for Peace took thousands of short-term volunteers to Nicaragua, to accompany the local people in a war zone. Most of the volunteers came home, told about their experiences, and helped organize grassroots opposition to the US’s support of the Contras. Their efforts succeeded in changing US policy. Friends Peace Teams In response to requests from activists in Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda and Colombia, Friends Peace Teams (FPT) has developed a special role in providing formal training in conflict resolution as developed by the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP). Many men in these countries have been raised in a culture of violence that pervades their personal and social lives, so that learning a different way of Ad in Fellowship Magazine, February 2002 operating is quite a challenge for them. They have found the AVP program to be useful. Founded in 1993, FPT has organized a good bit of their work as the African Great Lakes Initiative (AGLI). But they also recruit for work in Colombia. American Friends Service Committee The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) places paid staff and
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occasional volunteers in conflict situations to witness abuses and testify to the Western world about events and issues that escape the mainstream media. During the American occupation of Iraq, several AFSC staff people filled this role, cooperating with volunteers from other organizations. Their observations helped to uncover the US military abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons. Fellowship of Reconciliation Similar to AFSC, the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) places both paid staff and volunteers in places like the remote “peace communities” of Colombia — villages whose residents have vowed not to cooperate with any armed group. In December 2003, the FOR Task Force on Latin American and the Caribbean distributed an e-mail report on another dramatic project with which they had assisted:
A caravan of more than 3,000 women from throughout Colombia reached embattled Putumayo Province on November 24 in a demonstration organized by Women’s Peaceful Path Against War. Traveling over barely passable roads, the caravan’s 96 buses were met in each town by local residents waving white handkerchiefs and shouting, “Thanks for coming!” The women rejected President Alvara Uribe Velez’s offer of an armed escort, instead calling for leftist guerillas and right-wing paramilitaries to respect the caravan route as a “humanitarian corridor” and requesting accompaniment by journalists and international observers. [The women represented] 315 organizations from 8 regions of the country [and included] traditionally dressed indigenous women, professionals from the major cities, Afro-Colombian women from the Pacific Coast, and peasant leaders. The women joined forces under the organization’s motto: “Not one woman, not one man, not one dollar more for war.”
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...The caravan aimed to draw attention to the effects of [USbacked] anti-coca spraying, drug trafficking, and warfare on women and their families and the local economy ... 79percent of Putumayo residents have incomes below the poverty line, compared to about 38 percent nationally. - FOR e-mail, 2003 Andrew Miller
Servicio Internacional para la Paz The Servicio Internacional para la Paz (SIPAZ), is a joint project of several peace organizations founded in 1995 to support efforts to establish peace between the Zapatistas and the government in Chiapas, Mexico. Heike Kammer, after PBI stints in four other Central American countries, became a SIPAZ staffer in Chiapas. Heike, a German national, described her work in late 2003: Volunteers in Mexico
An important task of the SIPAZ team is to gather, analyze and spread out information about this situation taking [into account] all different points of view. [We] publish a newsletter and a website, and receive visitors in the office in San Cristobal. I am [in charge] of international accompaniment and presence in conflict areas. Together with another team
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member, we visit indigenous communities where the conflict caused politically motivated violence between those who support the government and those who support the Zapatistas. Any time the violence can arise again, just because of rumors, political and religious divisions, and fear. We move on local pickup trucks or just walk [Heike herself rides a bicycle], getting to know villages you never find on any maps. People receive us with hope, curiosity and happiness, but sometimes mistrust. People begin to trust getting to know us, learning who we are, coming to share some time of life together. I listen and remember words like, “It’s good you come to visit us. If you visit us, we cannot be repressed so easily because the world hears about it.” Sometimes we are asked to mediate in local conflicts. We are talking and creating relationship with all different actors, catequists and pastors, political parties and Zapatistas, community leaders, teachers, leaders of groups accused of perpetrating violence, victims and victimizers. For me, it’s an experience to recognize the human being in everyone, and so many people are actor and victim at the same time. I would like to resolve all the conflicts, but I have to tell the people: “I cannot resolve your problems. I cannot do the reconciliation for you. I can accompany you, support you in your own efforts for peace — but you are the actors. Our talks can give example and maintain a space for respect and peaceful conflict transformation, that’s all.” - E-mail message, November 2003 Individual initiatives Of course, there are other ways to travel and work for peace, and many have emerged spontaneously.
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Pilgrimage Husband and wife Elias Amidon and Elizabeth Rabla Roberts reported in an e-mail in May 2003 how the way had opened for them:
Four years ago, the two of us sold our house and left on an open-ended “pilgrimage” expanding on the work we had been doing to include more direct service and engagement with the social and environmental issues affecting the world today. Our pilgrimage follows from a decade of university teaching and 30 years of peace and justice work in the United States and abroad .... Like many of you, we are disturbed by the current US administration’s warlike statements directed at Syria. We have visited Syria several times as part of our pilgrimage and recognize that the lack of contact and understanding between the Arab Muslim world and the West only increases the chances of suffering and war. In an effort to bridge this lack of understanding, we have initiated a program of Interfaith Pilgrimages of Peace to Syria. The first took place in May 2002, and two more pilgrimages are being planned for the fall of 2003 and more in 2004. You can find details about these journeys on our website. (See contact information in the Appendix.) While the slayings of more than 300 young women in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, have sparked much international attention, Guatemala’s killing spree didn’t capture much notice until actress Jane Fonda traveled to Guatemala City in December 2003, called a press conference, and promised to return in late 2004 with an “army” of female activists to “stand beside Guatemalan women to say to the world what is going on here.” - San Francisco Chronicle, Dec 30, 2003
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Reality tours and delegations Many commercial entities organize tours to exotic countries, and often college alumni offices arrange for similar trips oriented around specific group interests. The Reality Tours initiated by Global Exchange and now including destinations all over the world also have a particular focus, as described below:
The idea that travel can be educational and positively influence international affairs motivated the first Reality Tour in 1989. Global Exchange’s Reality Tours are not designated to provide immediate solutions or remedies to the world’s most intractable problems, nor are they simply a kind of voyeurism. Rather, Reality Tours are meant to educate people about how we, individually and collectively, contribute to global problems, and then to suggest ways in which we can contribute to positive change. ... Reality Tours give participants a new vantage point from which to view — and affect — US foreign policy. - Global Exchange website, 2003 Many people with growing concerns about the impact of corporate greed and military initiatives in the world cross borders for the first time with a reality tour or similar type of delegation. More and more, study trips are arranged for health care professionals, teachers, professors focusing on the destination country, activist groups, or church assemblies. These delegations are usually trips of eight to nine days duration that are legal and safe and intensively scheduled. Instead of highlighting ancient art and history, exotic scenes or animals, however, they will educate participants about the politics and economy of the destination country, about the way it is impacted by international corporations and organizations. In 2003, Global Exchange hosted reality tours and delegations in Afghanistan, Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, India, Iran, Ireland, Jamaica, Laos and Cambodia, Mexico, Palestine/Israel, South Africa, Tanzania, US-Mexico Border, Venezuela, and Vietnam.
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All of the peace groups we discuss in this book cooperate in a variety of ways in the destination countries. Global Exchange and the Fellowship of Reconciliation co-sponsored a peace delegation to Colombia in the fall of 2002. An unidentified member of the group reported by e-mail:
We are a varied lot, led by two young women from San Francisco, one working for FOR and one with Global Exchange. The other eight members of the group are diverse, some from the Atlantic coast and some from the Pacific. We include three Buddhist young women, two middle-aged professionals, and three stubbornly vigorous elderly men.
Some of the Global Exchange trips and other activities are especially designed for teenagers under their Youth Leadership Program. And Global Exchange also operates a speakers’ bureau so that people returning from trips can share their experiences with others.
E. Boardman
We have visited and met people in cool and cloudy Bogota, in Medellin with its eternal spring weather, and now we meet them in the really tropical, rainy season of the Uraba region ... It has been an impressive time for us and we have learned that many of our typical US preconceptions about Colombia simply are not true. - E-mail from FOR Delegation
Linda Stuart went to Cuba with Global Exchange in 2003
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Humanitarian aid The number of organizations that arrange peace teams and accompaniment projects is very small. The number who run programs that offer humanitarian aid or development assistance in developing countries is very large. Many of the projects are modeled on the Peace Corps. Food First in Oakland, California, publishes a directory of such organizations that is updated every year. Working with one of these projects is a very good way of learning about Tom Cahill in Iraq, 2003 the language and the culture of a country — without the stress of facing random violence or opposing repressive policies — as peace teams and accompaniment projects do. Radical fringe The concept of the “human shield” became known during the Iraq war when a band of Europeans and Americans deliberately placed themselves at likely target sites for US bombs in defiance of the military intention to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq. Because their behavior was illegal, dangerous, and seen by some as anti-American, they were controversial even within the peace movement. Tom Cahill was one of them, a blunt and radical guy with time for the work because he is past retirement age. He sent many e-messages about his experience in Iraq. Here is part of one:
Are the human shields being effective? Nah! We’re just a bunch of ridiculous and of course naive idealists. But, funny thing: a water treatment plant, an electric power station, and a food storage site were bombed in Basra where there were
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no human shields. Around Baghdad, where about 60 shields from more than twenty nations are living at similar sites, none have been bombed although most have received near misses. What’s it like living under bombs from planes you can’t even see or hear? Surreal! Stressful! Most unpleasant, especially when you know it’s your own under-educated and over-trained country-persons pressing the buttons. - Tom Cahill e-mail, April 2003 Code Pink is another Iraq-wartime development also working in Israel/Palestine, a spin-off from Global Exchange roughly modeled on The Ruckus Society, members of which “raise a ruckus” during peace rallies and demonstrations. Code Pink’s more formal title is Women’s Preemptive Strike for Peace. Its members attend activist training camps, wear pink, and design dramatic actions featuring that color. For example:
In response to Bush’s latest speech and countless atrocities committed by his administration, we will be handing out pink slips. On September 28, Rumsfeld will receive the giant pink slip, announcing him dishonorably discharged! - Code Pink e-mail, Sept 2003 Code Pink also took delegations of women to Iraq. Their purpose, they said, was “to report on the Iraqi struggle for democracy in the face of ongoing US and British occupation.” Also new during the war in Iraq was the emergence of a group or two who did not identify themselves as peace activists but still worked together as a team to resist that particular war. Military Families Speak Out went to Crawford, Texas, in August 2003 to challenge President Bush in his own hometown. Another group of military families went to Iraq in December 2003 to protest the continuing occupation. Their trip was arranged by Global Exchange.
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And Peaceful Tomorrows, made up of relatives of those who died in the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, refused to take a vengeful attitude and instead, among other actions, took part in a peace delegation to Iraq just before the war. Voices in the Wilderness handled the arrangements. Other work For every person who crosses international borders in the name of peace and justice, there is an assortment of solid workers who are supporting the project from the home base. Most of the work is done by volunteers gathered together or taking on individual tasks. If you are not yet ready to cross borders for peace and justice, get involved in the vital support work at home. Fundraising is an obvious first priority, since many peace team members cannot pay the expenses themselves. Organizations like Christian Peacemaker Teams raise money from peace church congregations and other sources all year long. In other situations, the single traveler needs help raising money for his or her one trip. Fund raising involves identifying costs, preparing written information, sending letters, making calls, making visits, keeping accounts. Often it includes answering a lot of the questions addressed in this book. Recruiting resources often includes assembling materials the traveler will take to the destination country: medicines, books, and journals on disk, school supplies, materials for citizens in the destination country; and office and medical supplies needed by the peace team office abroad. Recruiting new team members takes focused effort. Often the alumni of prior trips are especially well suited for this. The effort includes developing flyers and mail lists, planning orientation sessions and exhibits. As part of the effort, some alumni write articles and books about the experience, hoping to answer the questions new recruits will have. Of course the primary recruiting tool these days is the web site. Development and updating of web sites and their links, the management of eaddress lists, and the handling of e-mail response programs are at the core of communication about peace work across borders. For every one traveler, these projects need two or three technical experts to do this part of the work.
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Newsletters distributed by mail are still a staple, though computers will be used for the layout, for incorporation of pictures, and for addressing the snail mail list. If you can write or edit, this is a place for you. If you have a digital camera and a good eye, there is a role for you here. Distributing information about the focus countries is a huge part of the work. Peace team and project members on site will send back stories and reports by e-mail, but getting those stories to home country contacts, media, and government decision-makers should rest primarily on supporters at home. PBI’s Emergency Response Network is currently the most effective model for this function. It is not always just a matter of letters and phone calls. Sometimes you need to organize a group to visit a legislator, or even to stage an action with the media invited, in order to get your information and your concerns noticed. The organization of speaking tours for team members returning to their home country is a big project. It includes marketing the speaker, booking the engagements, preparing slides, exhibits and speeches adapted to the needs of each audience, and getting to and from the speaking venues. It works best when much of this work can be handled by someone other than the speaker. A manager for this function serves a really important role in the work. If the sponsoring organization does not fill this role for you, you should try to recruit such assistance yourself. Voices in the Wilderness demonstrated how some of these functions can be rolled into one when they launched their Wheels for Justice project in the fall of 2003. They loaded up a bus with people and materials and sent it driving back and forth across the United States, relying on organization members to set up and participate in presentations for audiences in cities all along the way.
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“What I Learned From Noah Everything I need to know, I learned from Noah’s Ark ... ONE: Don’t miss the boat. TWO: Remember that we are all in the same boat. THREE: Plan ahead. It wasn’t raining when Noah built the Ark. FOUR: Stay fit. When you’re 60 years old, someone may ask you to do something really big. FIVE: Don’t listen to critics; just get on with the job that needs to be done. SIX: Build your future on high ground. SEVEN: For safety’s sake, travel in pairs. EIGHT: Speed isn’t always an advantage. The snails were on board with the cheetahs. - Found on the Internet, 2004
Chapter 11
The Way of the Future There are many challenges for cross-border travelers to deal with. Weaknesses exist within the sponsoring organizations. Burnout is a constant hazard for the most dedicated. And questions constantly arise about how effective peace teams and accompaniment projects really are. In this chapter, I will address these questions — and explain my conclusion that more and more people will find it essential to their own wellbeing to participate in such projects, to take a full-time, physical stand for peace, despite the dangers, for at least some period of their lives. In this chapter, we will describe the Nonviolent Peaceforce and how it is building on the experience of all these other peace teams to create a substantial, trained, paid, cadre of “soldiers for peace” ready and willing to stand in the way of violence where ever it occurs in the world. These peace soldiers will provide safety for the local peacemakers and human rights workers to do their work, and will protect civilians in conflict areas. Challenges and rewards The challenges which face a peace team or accompaniment participant have been the subject of this book. To get into this work, you’ve got to have courage, be determined, find time, raise money or spend a good chunk of your savings, leave your family, master a lot of new information, travel in a strange place, 137
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do without many amenities you are used to, live in crowded circumstances, be on the job all the time, and sometimes risk your life and safety. Despite all this, however, people constantly speak of it as the greatest experience of their lives. Many peace volunteers involved in cross-border interventions go on many trips — whether with the same sponsor or different ones — every year or every other year, always finding that the rewards outweigh the efforts. The issue of burnout may arise, as it does with any job, especially one that challenges you to give your all. Then even a stalwart regular will take a break. “Yes, I will go again,” said Lizzie Brock of PBI and Colombia, “ but not right away.” The rewards are more subtle: adventure, learning new things, making new friends, earning respect in some quarters, and — most important — feeling that you are walking the walk where it matters, at least for a while. When the burden of helplessness and guilt which so many of us feel is lifted, even for one or two of us, even for a short time, it is a move in the right direction. The peace team experience is likely to change the course of your life in wonderful ways. But beware: it may mean that you continue to take on peace and justice challenges for the rest of your life. Questions about effectiveness • Is the work of the peace team effective when the US bombs the country you were “protecting” anyway? If you could not stop the war, perhaps you did stop some kinds of indiscriminate bombing. • If you did not prevent the bombing, perhaps you did invigorate the peace movement at home. • If your trip did not accomplish much this time, perhaps it inspired three people to take such a stand next time — and after them, it will be nine people. • Is the work of the accompaniment project effective when the local government continues to condone the paramilitaries, continues to fight the zapatistas? But perhaps six soldiers, complaining among themselves about the things you said, find that your words reflect their own
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experience of violence, and stay with them. Perhaps they eventually lay down their guns. • Was your presence worth a thing if a village organizer, a “Maria Santana” got killed anyway? Perhaps it was only Maria, and without you it would have been four other people as well. • Is the effort a failure if local people are killed again the moment your organization pulls out of the region because of the danger? Perhaps it will take that new death to make people on both sides of the internecine conflict realize how effective your presence was. Often, the issue is courage. Lots of times, I pretend that I cannot change things, or even try. When I have been pretending, the serenity is not forthcoming. When, with all my courage, I stretch to do what seemed too hard, too dangerous, too hopeless even, then the serenity comes more easily when I turn to accept the things I cannot change. Organizational weaknesses The organizations running peace teams and accompaniment projects are far from perfect. Running an efficient and effective organization is hard to do, especially if: • you are an activist with no training or experience in management; • organizational decisions are made by consensus; • participants are independent thinkers of all ages and temperaments; • participants come from all over the country or the world; • the work is being done in far-flung and sometimes dangerous places; • you don’t have enough money and have to rely on volunteer labor, often inconsistent; • you are practicing civil disobedience, i.e., breaking a law; and/or • team participants are sometimes anxious and frustrated, and take it out on you. Sometimes success makes it even harder, as the organization gets larger and more complex.
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People are ready to help; they are also ready to criticize. Criticism transformed into actual hands-on, consistent help that fits the organizational culture is the most useful. At any given time, the organizations that sponsor peace teams and accompaniment projects are in a state of change themselves, expanding or contracting, changing their focus or size, building up or closing down. New organizations emerge as old ones are laid down. The Haiti Cry for Justice campaign is over; the Nonviolent Peaceforce sent its first teams into the field in Sri Lanka in 2003. The sponsoring organizations work with one another in different countries, at different times, and in different ways. In 2003, Peace Brigades International, Witness for Peace, Christian Peacemaker Teams, Friends Peace Teams and the Fellowship of Reconciliation were all working in Colombia, fulfilling slightly different roles in different areas and cooperating on particular projects. In Iraq in summer 2003, Voices in the Wilderness was ratcheting back, while Global Exchange initiated a new Occupation Watch program. Individual volunteers often serve stints with different sponsoring organizations in the same country or region, or in different parts of the world. The role of technology One reason it seems inevitable that cross-border interventions will continue, and continue to be effective, is that the Internet makes it possible as never before to communicate readily all around the world to many people at once. If the American consul in Bogota and the Department of State in Washington DC, will learn within hours about paramilitary death threats toward a peasant leader in a village in Colombia, the effectiveness of the accompaniment program is far greater than it would have been back in the days when it took three or four weeks for any news to reach such destinations. When an ordinary peace team member can use a laptop computer to tell one hundred people all over Canada about a street battle in Hebron within hours, and forty of the hundred pass the news on to another forty within
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another few hours, the impact can “One man’s feet can’t walk the road to peace, be enormous. Two men’s feet can’t walk the road to peace, Cell phones will be used But if two and two and fifty make a million, increasingly in developing countries. It is exciting to read in Howard We’ll see that day come round. Rheingold’s book, Smart Mobs, We’ll see that day come round.” about the GPS (global positioning - Alex Comfort & Pete Seeger system) function of the cell phones of the future. This innovation may make accompaniers and their charges in outlying areas increasingly safe, since it will be possible to ascertain at any time exactly where they are. A supporter of the Nonviolent Peaceforce is developing technology that will allow a person with a video camera to send video footage of scenes of danger and harm, via satellite, directly to CNN or anywhere else. New ways for team members, accompaniers, and supporters at home to have their concerns counted by decision makers in the US and other western countries will develop in the near future. The ways in which democracy functions are being radically changed. The way of the future: The Nonviolent Peaceforce David Hartsough of San Francisco is a life-long peace activist and executive director of Peaceworkers, an organization which helped give birth to the global Nonviolent Peaceforce. David described the basic concept to a Buddhist publication, Turning Wheel, in the fall of 2003:
The Peaceforce is an outgrowth of Gandhi’s call for a Shantisena or “nonviolent army,” more than seventy years ago. We want to develop a trained international nonviolent group of civilian peacemakers who would be available, at the invitation of local peacemakers or human rights workers in areas of conflict, to go in as supporters of those local peacemakers.
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It’s similar to the work that Peace Brigades International, Witness for Peace, and Christian Peacemaker Teams have been doing, and doing very well, but our project is on a larger scale. In Yugoslavia in 1999, for example, NATO and our government leaders said the only alternatives were to do nothing or to bomb. But we know from our own firsthand experience in Peace Brigades that there is an alternative that most of the world doesn’t know about yet. Peaceworkers all over the world often feel all alone: “I’ve only got this tiny little candle in this terrible darkness!” We want to build a network of people from around the world who share this vision and are committed to making it happen. So, part of our motivation is to bring effective nonviolent peace-making to areas of conflict. But part of it is to get world attention, so that after a few years of some successes, the United Nations and regional organizational bodies will say, “That’s a much more effective and less expensive way of dealing with conflict.” Our vision is to start with a couple hundred peacemakers in a pilot project in a particular place — Sri Lanka, Colombia, Ecuador, or the Middle East — where both local peacemakers and we as outsiders feel that the Peaceforce can make an important contribution. - David Hartsough in Turning Wheel, 2002 David emphasizes that the organization is international and based outside of the US so that it is not dominated by Americans. Organizers are hired from the global South — India, Latin America, and Africa — and
Nonviolent Peaceforece
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people for the Peaceforce are being recruited from all over the world. Years of planning and research had already taken place when the Nonviolent Peaceforce was launched at an international conference in November 2002. An extensive compendium of information about all existing past and present peace teams and accompaniment projects was David Hartsough of the prepared for Peaceworkers by a team Nonviolent Peaceforce of writers coordinated by Christine Schweitzer. The first Peaceforce team set to work in Sri Lanka in the fall of 2003.
It is on the basis of our “We’ve got Buddhist monks from preliminary visits that Cambodia who walked with our team chose to locate Maha Ghosananda through the our office in the village of war zones. And we have groups Valachchennai. The Batti in the Philippines who have been district and the east of the doing nonviolent training since island in general have seen before the overthrow of Marcos.” a lot of violence between - David Hartsough, 2003 Muslim and Tamil residents since the cease fire .... On Main Street in Valachchennai, every house and shop to the west side is owned by a Muslim and every home and shop to the east is owned by a Tamil. It is on this street that we are opening our office. It has been burnt down in previous riots, and inhabited recently only by animals. We picked the office location ... [because it is] where an active presence might have the most impact. - E-mail from Linda Sartor, November 2003
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Other stories about the earliest days of the team in Sri Lanka came from Angela Pinchero:
The kindness I’ve been shown since coming here has been incredible. When I was ill, I received absolutely loving care from an older woman where I was staying. She prepared concoctions for me hourly, felt my forehead, humming and hawing every few minutes. When I was robbed, I was offered help and money. Anytime I’ve mentioned needing something in my first weeks living in Batti town, someone has insisted on helping me get it. If I don’t mention what I need, they ask. Home, bike, a refrigerator. I’ve actually had to stop my landlady from bringing me tea and breakfast every morning, although I’m a sucker for her homemade cakes and samosas. I’ve been offered rides by local activists and strangers, in passing trucks, 3-wheelers or bicycles. I know a lot of people from this region have left to Canada. I had no idea how many. “Where are you from?” is a favorite question of my new neighbours and unsolicited escorts home. “Oh, Canada! My brother is there ... ”, “My children are there ... ”, “My friend is there.” I try out my little Tamil: “You to school in Batti go?” They try out their little English: “Peace in Canada?” - Angela Pinchero, November 2003 In an exciting development in May 2004, the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement in Sri Lanka (see Sarvodaya on the Web) wants to join forces with the Nonviolent Peaceforce to create a larger Rapid Deployment Force.
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The basic idea would be for NP to train or help train 50-100 Shanti Sena peaceworkers to...go into conflict areas when things seem to be getting hot, to help defuse the conflict and prevent … violence .... [They believe] this could multiply our effectiveness many fold and would supply a good number of Sri Lankan peacekeepers and peacemakers fluent in the local languages ... They would have a deep commitment to nonviolence and would be there for the long haul. - E-mail from David Hartsough, May 2004 The Nonviolent Peaceforce received invitations from a dozen countries before they chose Sri Lanka as their first focus. Perhaps later they will expand their work to one or more of these countries: the Philippines, Burma, PalestineIsrael, Burma, Korea, Indonesia, Colombia, Ecuador, Zimbabwe, Uganda and Tibet. Check their web site for current information (see Appendix). A radical innovation compared with PBI: The members of the Peaceforce are paid! About $30,000 per year is budgeted for one person’s expenses, medical insurance, and wages. “To fund a peace force of 200 full-time peace workers and 400 reserves will cost about eight million dollars a year — less than what the world spends on the military every hour,” David Hartsough told us. Some peace organizations (FOR, summer 2003) have unpaid volunteers waiting in line for a chance to participate in action projects. But for other willing people, the possibility of getting paid for the work will make all the difference. It will mean that more people can afford to take a stand for peace in conflict situations. It will mean that there is more hope for peaceful resolution to conflict as the way of the future.
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Interest in nonviolence is higher and deeper than ever before. And more people seem eager to let their time and resources follow their interest in it. Keeping up with the demand is actually a ... problem now ... Combined with other trends and actions, it does seem to be saying something. There is a stirring in the world. A stirring in the souls of many. A stirring that is still just beginning, but one that may come to wipe the absurdity of war out of the world in this century. - FOR Witness, Summer 2003
Appendix
Contact Information Christian Peacemaker Teams In the US: Box 6508 Chicago IL 60680-6508 773-277-0253 www.cpt.org
In Canada: P.O. Box 294, Stn. ‘P’ 704 Spadina Ave. Toronto, ON M5S 2S8 416-423-5525
Fellowship Reconciliation (FOR) Box 271 Nyack, NY 10960 858-358-4601 www.forusa.net Friends Peace Teams Box 141 Hyattsville MD 20781 877-814-6972 www.friendspeaceteams.org Global Exchange 2017 Mission Street, #303 San Francisco, CA 94117 415-255-7296 www.globalexchange.org 147
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Nonviolent Peaceforce 425 Oak Grove Minneapolis, MN 55403 612-871-0005 www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org Peace Brigades International 428 8th St S.E., Second Floor Washington DC 20003 202-544-3765 www.peacebrigades.org SIPAZ — Servicio Internacional Para La Paz Box 3584 Chico CA 95927 530-892-0662 www.sipaz.org Spirit in Action Pilgrimage Elias Amidon and Elizabeth Roberts C/o Boulder Institute for Nature and the Human Spirit 18679 W. 60th Street Golden CO 80403 303-216-2294
[email protected] Voices in the Wilderness 1460 West Carmen Chicago ILL 60640 773-784-8065 www.vitw.org Witness for Peace 707 8th Street, Suite 100 Washington DC 20003 202-547-6112 www.witnessforpeace.org
Annotated Resources Books Ackerman, Peter and Jack Duvall, A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict. Palgrave, 2000. A detailed history, with pictures, of effective nonviolent campaigns for justice. Arnove, Anthony, Editor, Iraq Under Seige: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War. South End Press, 2000. Leading voices document the tragic effects of sanctions on the Iraqi populace and economy between 1991 and 2003. Bhatia, Dreze, and Kelly, Editors, War and Peace in the Gulf: Testimonies of the Gulf Peace Team. Gulf Peace Team, 2000. Eye-witness essays by participants in the 1991 Gulf Peace Team. Bornstein, David, How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas. Oxford University Press, 2003. Describes how the fastestgrowing segment of society, especially in prior dictatorships, is the nonprofit sector, which is “increasingly stepping in to solve problems where governments and bureaucracies have failed.” Bly, Carol, Changing the Bully Who Rules the World. Milkweed 1996. A brilliant analysis of why bullies in any arena behave the way they do. Draws on classic social theory, poetry, and short stories. Chodron, Pema, The Places That Scare You. Shambhala Classics, 2002. A Buddhist guide to replacing fear with open-heartedness, by the author of When Things Fall Apart. 149
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Collins, Joseph, DeZerega and Heckscher, How to Live Your Dream of Volunteering Overseas, Penguin Books, 2002. Covers volunteer opportunities all over the world, profiles more than 100 volunteer organizations, provides short, medium and long-term volunteer options, contains information on travel safety and contact information. Danaher, Kevin, and Jason Mark, Insurrection: Citizen Challenges to Corporate Power. Routledge, 2003. Dramatic stories “chronicling the accomplishments of the budding corporate accountability movement.” Dominguez, Joe, and Vicki Robin, Your Money or Your Life? Penguin, 1993. A challenging discussion of values underlying career choices. Ehrenreich, Barbara, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class. Pantheon Books, 1989. A provocative analysis of why the middle class sits paralyzed while big business makes of America a “casino society” based on trades and gambles which fail to produce any new value. Gish, Arthur, Hebron Journal. Herald Press 2001. Detailed, honest, and moving excerpts from Gish’s journals during trips to Hebron in Israel with Christian Peacemaker Teams between 1995 and 2001. Griffin-Nolan, Ed, Witness for Peace: A Story of Resistance. Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991. A dynamic description of Witness for Peace work in Nicaragua from 1983-1991. Loeb, Paul Robat, Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in a Cynical Time. St Martin’s Griffin 1999. Sensitive, inspiring and important guide to overcoming cynicism and depression, and finding effective ways to promote peace and justice. Has an extensive bibliography. Mahoney, Liam & Luis Eguren, Unarmed Bodyguards: International Accompaniment for the Protection of Human Rights. Kumerian Press 1997. The classic, academic study of cross-border intervention, focused on Central American. Moore, Michael, Dude, Where’s My Country? Warner Books, 2003. This brilliant, good-humored muckraker exposes the greed and arrogance of corporate America and its puppets in Washington.
Annotated Resources 151
Moser-Puangsuwan and Weber, Nonviolent Intervention Across Borders. Spark Matsunaga Institute for Peace 2000. The major description and analysis of accompaniment projects in print to date. Move-On, 50 Ways to Love Your Country. Inner Ocean Publishing, 2003. MoveOn.org chose fifty from the thousands of inspirational stories provided by members when asked how they have acted as “a catalyst for change.” Moyer, Bill, Doing Democracy. New Society Publishers, 2001. “A lucid model of the eight stages through which social movements typically evolve, and ... the four roles that activists play in fostering social change”. (From the book jacket) Nagler, Michael, Is There No Other Way? The Search for a Nonviolent Future. Berkeley Hills Books, 2001. Traces the Ghandian legacy of nonviolence through a century of social and economic conflict. Powell, Joan, Editor, Alternatives to the Peace Corps, 9th Edition. Food First Books, 2000. Accessible and informative description of hundreds of worldwide service opportunities, with contact information. Prokosch & Raymond, Editors, The Global Activist’s Manual: Local Ways to Change the World. Thunder Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2002. Essays by many activists about local and international ways of working for peace and justice. Rheingold, Howard, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Basic Books, 2002. An exhilarating discussion of innovations in technology that will continue to revolutionize the world and will make it harder and harder for people to lie about where they are and what they are doing. Roth, John, Choosing Against War: A Christian View. Good Books, 1989. A Christo-centric argument for peace activism based on Biblical mandates. Schell, Jonathan, The Unconquerable World: Nonviolence, and the will of the People. Henry Holt, 2003 Schirch, Lisa, Keeping the Peace: Exploring Civilian Alternatives in Conflict Prevention. Life & Peace Institute, 1995. A concise review of the logic for and experience of accompaniment projects worldwide through 1994.
152 Taking a Stand
Sharp, Gene, Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential. Sargent, 2005. Tongeren, Paul, People Building Peace. European Center for Conflict Prevention 1999. Vidal, Gore, Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta. Nation Books, 2002. A scathing report of how American administrations repeatedly dupe the gullible citizenry in order to justify war profiteering. Ware, Ann Patrick, Editor, Naming our Truth: Stories of Loretto Women. Chardon Press, 1995. Essays by members of the Loretto Sisters about their work in many places in the world, and their communal struggles. Zunes, Stephen, with Lester Kurtz and Sara Beth Asher, Nonviolent Social Movements: A Geographical Perspective, Blackwell Publishers, 1999. Inspirational and well-researched case studies from around the world on the power of nonviolent action to overthrow autocratic regimes, establish democracy, and promote social change. Zunes, Stephen, Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism, Common Courage Press, 2003. A critical overview of US foreign policy in the Middle East, the origins of contemporary conflicts, and ideas for a more ethical foreign policy that can also make the US more secure. Pamphlets Barker, Debi, and Jerry Mander, Invisible Government: The World Trade Organization — Global Government for the New Millenium. International Forum on Globalization, no date. A professionally researched analysis of corporate globalization and how it effects people around the world. Brock, Lizzie, Seven Steps to Peace. A work in progress. Hare, Paul, Editor, Cyprus Resettlement Project: An Instance of International Peacemaking. Ben Gurion University, 1984. A detailed description of the project. Hudson, Wade, Baghdad Journal. Inlet Publications, 2003. Personal journal covering Hudson’s participation in the Iraq Peace Team in Baghdad from March 5 through April 17, 2003, including the “shock and awe” bombing by the US military establishment.
Annotated Resources 153
Morton, Peg, Walk With Me: Nonviolent Accompaniment in Guatemala Pendle Hill Pamphlets, 1997. A personal description of Morton’s participation in a Witness for Peace delegation to accompany a return of refugees from Mexico to Guatemala in 1994. Peavey, Fran, On War and Peace. Personal essays, no date. Includes pieces on Peavey’s experience as a member of a peace team in Pakistan in 1987. Schweitzer, Christine, Coordinator, Nonviolent Peaceforce Feasibility Study. Nonviolent Peaceforce, 2001. An extensive compendium of the experience of peace teams and accompaniment projects worldwide to date. Video A Force more Powerful. Peter Ackerman and Jack Duvall. Six powerful stories of successful nonviolent movements in the 20th century. Available by calling 800-257-5126.
Index A accompaniment projects: characteristics, 22–26; dangers, 47, 128–129; definition, 5; goals, 7, 38; racism, 39–40; training, 132; see also Peace Brigades International (PBI); Witness for Peace activism: see peace activism affordability: see financial issues African Great Lakes Initiative, 3, 20, 132 age issues, 29 air travel, 30 Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP), 20, 132 American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), 132–133 Amidon, Elias, 3, 11, 136 Anderson, Carin, 4 application process, 33, 59, 97–99, 109–110 B Balkan Peace Teams, 21 Balkans, 18 Banas, Cynthia, 2, 112 Barfield, Ellen, 3, 89 Barker, Paul, 6 Batia, Bela, 108 Beetle, Patricia, 130 Bell, Derrick, 30 Bishop, Adrian, 3, 25
Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta (Vidal), 76 Bly, Carol, 76 Boardman, Elizabeth, 15, 24–25, 34, 64, 113 Boardman, Emily, 4, 28, 60 Bode, Lyn, 23 Brandow, Karen, 3 Brinson, Thomas, 25 Brock, Lizzie, 3, 129, 130, 146 Burroughs, Sel, 22, 38 Burundi, 20, 25 C Cahill, Tom, 4, 139, 140 Cauchi, Denise, 3, 19, 127 cell phones, 149 Chan, Paul, 2 Chand, Ravi, 4, 73–74 Changing the Bully Who Rules the World (Bly), 76 children, leaving behind, 32–33 Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT): application process, 97–99; demographics, 101–104; expectations, 65, 101; goals, 20; in-country support, 99–100; overview, 95–97; risks, 100–101; strategies, 21, 50, 78, 84; time commitment, 19; training, 97 civil disobedience, 19, 51, 100, 114–115 Clausen, LeAnne, 79–81
155
156 Taking a Stand clearness committees, 33 Clemen, Steve, 3, 14, 15 CodePink, 140–141 Cole, Edith, 130 Colombia: aid to, 10; experiences in, 47–48, 138; military, 84–85; peace caravan, 133–134 communication: e-mail, 36–37, 101, 115, 125–126, 142; technology, 36–37, 61, 142–143, 148–149 community support, 27–29, 33 computers, 36–37, 148–149 Corrie, Rachel, 21, 50, 131 costs: see financial issues D Dance, Rosalie, 3 dangers: carrying cash, 113–114; decision to withdraw, 52; examples, 49, 50, 52–53, 115; fines and jail, 51, 100; harassment, 21, 47–48; health issues, 18, 29, 46–47, 50, 60–61; language barrier, 111–112; leaving family behind, 30, 32–33; physical risk, 19, 21, 29, 115, 128–129; traffic accidents, 51; travel precautions, 46; warzone junkies, 31 delegations: characteristics, 19–20, 37, 100; definition, 5; examples, 97, 132; examples of, 97, 132; reality tours, 137–139 depleted uranium (DU), 18, 24, 46–47 Dreze, Jean, 108 E Edwards, Martin, 2, 15 Eguren, Luis Enrique, 74, 77, 130 Eight Actions for Peace, 54–55 e-mail: reporting by, 101, 115; use of, 36–37, 125–126, 142 Emergency Response Network, 125–126, 142 equipment and supplies, 61, 142, 149 expenses, 30, 35, 100, 112–114, 153–154 F family, leaving behind, 30, 32–33 Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), 24, 47–48, 84, 133–134
financial issues: expenses, 30, 35, 100, 112–114, 153–154; fund raising, 35, 61, 141–142 fines and jail, 51, 100, 114–115 Fippinger, Faith, 51 flyers, open letter to GIs, 87–88 Fonda, Jane, 136 Friends Peace Teams (FPT), 3, 20, 132 fund raising, 35, 61, 141–142 G Gish, Art, 3, 15, 26, 49, 78–79 Gish, Peggy, 3, 101 Global Exchange, 19, 91, 137 Goff, Stanley, 76, 77, 86–88 Griffin-Nolan, Ed, 132 Guatemala, 74–76, 136–137 Gulf Peace Team, 108–109 H Hartsough, David, 4, 149–150, 151, 153 health insurance, 29, 100 health issues: depleted uranium (DU), 46–47; trauma, 50, 60–61; and travel, 18, 29 Hebron Journal (Gish), 49, 78–79, 99, 101 housing, 22, 99, 112, 127 Huck, Gabe, 3, 19 Hudson, Wade, 2, 15, 19 “human shields”, 5, 50, 140 Hussein, Saddam, 111 I Indonesia, 10, 53–54 International Decade for the Culture of Peace, 55 International Solidarity Movement (ISM), 20, 131 Iraq: Ameriyah shelter, 23; during the bombing, 49–50, 52–53, 140; depleted uranium (DU), 18, 46–47; sanctions against, 21, 105, 106–107, 114–115; US occupation, 48, 79–84, 101, 115; US war, 8, 9, 21, 106, 111 Iraqi people, narratives, 24–25, 63, 69, 81–84 Iraq Peace Team (IPT): goals, 21, 106, 107, 110–111; members of, 2–3; time
Index 157 commitment, 19 Israel-Palestine: death of Rachel Corrie, 21, 50, 131; and foreign aid, 11; military actions, 49, 78–79; Palestinian people, 26 J Jackson, Charlie, 8, 38 Janssen, Kevin, 28, 68 K Kammer, Heike, 3, 134 Kelly, Kathy, 3, 106–107, 112 Kindy, Cliff, 3, 49 Kubalik, Theresa, 3, 19 Kysia, Ramzi, 112 L Lachman, Trisha, 64, 65 language: barrier, 111–112; requirements, 99, 124, 126; skills, 18, 61–62 Lau, Hazel, 28 leaflets, use of, 84 Lederach, Paul, 46 letters of reference, 59 Liteky, Charles, 2, 88–89 Lockhardt, Donna, 34 Loeb, Paul Rogat, 12–13, 31 M Mahony, Liam, 74, 77, 130 Mahony and Eguren, 38, 39, 40, 75–76 Makhamra, Soraia, 25 McCoy, Bryan, 72–73 McGivern, Mary Ann, 4, 23 McKenna, Maureen, 68 McMechen, Alice, 3, 23 media coverage: attention, 35–36, 40, 58; celebrities, 107, 136; dealing with, 32, 37–38, 109; news reporting, 101, 115– 116; stage-fright, 45; see also publicity management Mejía Victores, General Óscar Humberto, 74–76, 78 Mexico, 134–135, 136 military: in civil war, 84–85; dehumanize the opponent, 77, 87–88, 90; tactics, 47–48, 79–84; weaponry, 85–86; see also soldiers
Military Families Speak Out, 141 Miller, Andrew, 126 Milne, David, 79–81 Monzon, Marielos, 123–124 Moore-Backman, Chris, 4, 19, 48, 84 Morton, Peg, 7, 14 N Naar-Obed, Michele, 3, 23 Nagler, Michael, 130 Nicaragua, 21 Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP), 145, 149–151, 153–154 O Oliver, Mary, 54 organizational issues, 147–148 P Palestine: see Israel-Palestine participation: advice, 33–35; arguments against, 29–33; decision process, 12–13, 27–29; impact of your decision, 33; personal needs, 13–14, 31, 108–109; time commitment, 19 peace activism: challenges, 19, 29–33, 145–146; effectiveness, 32, 37–38, 146–147; Eight Actions for Peace, 54–55; humanitarian aid, 139; individual examples, 14–15; motivation for, 7–12, 32; nonpartisanship, 38–39, 85, 122; organizational issues, 147–148; participation, 12–14, 19, 27–35, 108– 109; rewards, 128, 146; soldiers’ families, 91–93, 141; values, 6, 31–32; see also peace travelers; support network peace activists, support by, 33, 34–35 Peace Brigades International (PBI): application process, 124–125; demographics, 129–130; in-country support, 125–126, 127–128; language, 124, 126; overview, 121–124; risks, 128– 129; role of, 22–23; strategies, 53–54; time commitment, 19, 65; training, 125 Peaceful Tomorrows, 141 peace teams: characteristics, 20–21; definition,
158 Taking a Stand 5; goals, 37; public witness, 37–38, 71, 77; see also specific organizations peace travelers: application process, 33, 59, 97–99, 109–110; experiences of, 23–26, 43–44; fear and grace, 44–45; preparations, 40–41, 46, 61–62; preventing harm, 77–78; public witness, 37–38, 71, 77; training, 97, 98, 110–111, 132; see also support network Peaceworkers, 35 Peavey, Fran, 4 Penn, Sean, 107 Pinchero, Angela, 4, 152–153 Pitt, William Rivers, 9 Post, Fran, 29 preparations: logistical support, 61–62; travel, 46; work load, 40–41 Provencher, Sheila, 17–18, 68–69 public attitudes, 35–36 publicity management: e-mail manager, 64– 65, 142; legislative contact, 64, 69; media contact person, 63; public speaking, 36, 40; speaking tour manager, 65, 142–143; see also media coverage public speaking, 36, 40, 65, 142–143 public witness, 37–38, 71, 77 Puerto Rico, 24 R racism, 39–40 radiation exposure, 46–47 reality tours, 137–139 Rheingold, Howard, 149 Risely, Mary Burton, 2, 67 Roberts, Elizabeth “Rabia”, 3, 52–53, 136 Roy, Arundhati, 9 Rwanda, 20 S safety issues: see dangers Sartor, Linda, 4, 152 Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement, 153 Scheer, Robert, 8 Schweitzer, Christine, 151 September 11, 2001 attack, 7, 141
Servicio Internacional para la Paz, 134–135 Shristi, Micah, 2, 49 skills and interests, 18 Smart Mobs (Rheingold), 149 soldiers: experiences of, 72–76; families of, 91–93, 141; Iraq occupation, 79–84, 101; open letter to GIs, 87–88; psychology, 76–77, 90; radiation exposure, 46–47; understanding, 71–72; see also military South Korea, 89 spies, 47 Sri Lanka, 25, 151–153 Stuart, Linda, 139 support network: debriefing process, 61, 128; different groups, 33–36; donations, 35; fund raising, 141–142; inspiring others, 67–68; logistical support, 61–62, 142; moral support, 27–29, 58–61; publicity management, 62–65, 142–143; sample, 66–67; variations, 57–58 surveillance, 47 Syria, 136 T teenagers, travel, 139 Thomas, Martin, 108 time commitment, 19 training requirements, 97, 98, 110–111, 132 translators, 111–112 travel precautions, 46 U Uganda, 20 Unarmed Bodyguards (Mahony and Eguren), 77, 130 United States: bomb testing, 24; Bush administration, 8, 9, 76; foreign aid, 10, 11; Iraq War, 8, 9, 21, 106, 111 US soldiers: Iraq occupation, 79–84, 101; open letter to GIs, 87–88; radiation exposure, 46–47 V Vasquez, Jaime, 89–90, 91 Veterans Association of Vietnam (VAVN), 89–90
Index 159 veterans perspective, 86–91 Vidal, Gore, 76 Vieques, 18, 24 Vietnam, 89–91 Voices in the Wilderness (VITW): application process, 109–110; demographics, 117–120; expectations, 21, 115–116; in-country support, 112; language, 111–112; overview, 105–109; risks, 51, 115; strategies, 50, 143; training, 110–111; US fines, 51, 114–115 volunteers: see peace travelers
W War and Peace in the Gulf: Testimonies of the Gulf Peace Team, 107, 108 Weber, George, 51 “What I Learned From Noah”, 143 Willoughby, George, 130 Witness for Peace, 21, 132 Women’s Preemptive Strike for Peace, 140–141 Wright, Jeanne, 28 Y Youth Leadership Program, 139
About the Author Raised by activist parents, the eldest of six in a Quaker family, Elizabeth Boardman has always included peace advocacy as part of her busy life. During her child-rearing years (she has four children), Elizabeth lived in India and Pakistan, participated for five years in weekly vigils opposing the Viet Nam war, and was a war tax resister. Professionally, Elizabeth has worked for thirty years starting and managing services for frail elders. Currently she is developing her eighth adult day health center, a pioneering combination of housing and health services in the inner city of San Francisco. Elizabeth is spending increasing amounts of time in activist pursuits and writing. She is deeply involved in the San Francisco Friends Meeting. Any net proceeds and royalties from the sale of the book will go to peaceworkers for the advancement of peace team work. 161
