Author: Helena

Remembering Rachel Corrie

    The courageous, visionary Israeli peace organizer Gila Svirsky delivered a moving address/homily at an event the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions held to mark this week’s one-year anniversary of the killing of U.S. peace activist Rachel Corrie. A friend sent it to me today, and I’m very happy to share it here with you:


I was not present in Rafah that terrible day, but I have frequently replayed in my mind the events leading up to the moment when a bulldozer rolled over Rachel Corrie. I think to myself: What compelled this young woman, neither Jewish nor Palestinian, to travel 10,000 miles from home, to throw in her lot with a family not her own, a people not her own, and ultimately meet a death that came suddenly, swiftly, in an instant of shocked comprehension.
In the biblical book of Ruth, we read of Naomi whose two sons have died, leaving two young widows. Naomi chooses to depart from the land of Moab and return to her home in Judah. She encourages her daughters-in-law to remain in Moab, their own land. One daughter-in-law kisses Naomi and bids her farewell. The other, Ruth, chooses to accompany Naomi to the distant climes of Judah. Why does Ruth go? “Entreat me not to leave thee,” says Ruth, “for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God, my God.” And she continues, “Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: if the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me”.
The biblical figure of Ruth journeys to her new people, expecting never to return, but to be buried in foreign soil.
The modern figure of Rachel journeyed to her new people, expecting to return for the start of the school year, and never to be buried, or to be buried at some vastly distant unimaginable future, but never to find her death in the soil of her chosen destination…

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Ignatieff’s “mea not-quite-culpa”

Thoughtful human-rights theorist Michael Ignatieff has a one-year-after piece in the NYT mag today. He starts off with an apparently frank and engaging admission:

    A year ago, I was a reluctant yet convinced supporter of the war in Iraq. A year later, the weapons of mass destruction haven’t turned up, Iraqis are being blown up on their way to the mosque, democracy is postponed till next year and my friends are all asking me if I have second thoughts. Who wouldn’t have?

Later, he writes that in the run-up to the war his view had been that,

    While I thought the case for preventive war was strong, it wasn’t decisive. It was still possible to argue that the threat was not imminent and that the risks of combat were too great. What tipped me in favor of taking these risks was the belief that Hussein ran an especially odious regime and that war offered the only real chance of overthrowing him. This was a somewhat opportunistic case for war, since I knew that the administration did not see freeing Iraq from tyranny as anything but a secondary objective…
    I couldn’t see how I could will the end — Hussein must go — without willing the only available means: American invasion, if need be, alone…
    So I supported an administration whose intentions I didn’t trust, believing that the consequences would repay the gamble.

But then, in his most serious (if still not totally explicit) admission of error yet, he writes,

Escaping from atrocious violence

I have been cerebrating quite hard on writing the book on Violence and its Legacies. At least, that’s how it feels to me.
Last Wednesday, as part of that work, I posted up here Martha Minow’s list of 8 meta-tasks that societies might think they need to accomplish (and to prioritize) in the aftermath of atrocious violence. I invited readers who had lived in post-atrocity societies to comment on the list. Nobody did, which was a bit depressing. Maybe I cast the invitation too tightly. Does anyone out there have any comments?
Anyway, I’ve been writing about Mozambique. Oh, where on earth to start?? I have so much incredibly rich material from my two (admittedly short) visits to the country and from all my reading!
But then I thought, Helena, you’ve got these three very diverse situations you’re studying. (Mozambique 1992, Rwanda and RSA 1994: for details of the whole project go here.) You need to find a way to explore that diversity in an analytically fruitful way rather than let it just pull the whole enquiry quite apart. (“So just what do apples and oranges have in common, Mr. Darwin?” “Funny you should ask that question, friend…”)
So here’s what I’ve come up with so far– and really, I came to this from a writerly perspective which is one special kind of an analytical/intellectual perspective, namely: how in heck to put words, sentences, chapters etc together in a linear way that actually makes sense and reveals something worth revealing??

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North Carolina peace activists threatened

A letter from Chuck Fager at Quaker House, Fayetteville NC
Dear Friend,
I’m writing you today to express my deep concern about the campaign being mounted on “FreeRepublic.com”, a militantly conservative website, against the large peace rally we’re planning in Fayetteville on March 20, the anniversary of the Iraq invasion.
Quaker House, you may recall, is a faith-based project that does peace work and counsels soldiers and sailors seeking discharges from the military. It has been pursing this mission here in Fayetteville for 35 years since its founding in 1969.
Quaker House is part of a coalition preparing for this march and rally. We believe this will be the largest peace gathering in Fayetteville since May 17 1970. On that day several thousand protesters, including hundreds of GIs, gathered in a city park, to hear Jane Fonda and other speakers denounce the Vietnam War.
That 1970 rally was peaceful, but the aftermath wasn’t.
Three nights after that rally, on May 20, 1970, the original Quaker House was firebombed, and had to be abandoned…

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From Maria, in Madrid

JWN reader Maria, from Madrid, has posted a very moving Comment on last night’s post.
Please, everyone read it.
Dear Maria, thanks for connecting with us and describing that wonderful interpersonal solidarity as you did, on what must have been such a terrible day for you.
… It is not only Spanish people who feel they were all on that train. I feel I was, too.
I have only been in Madrid once. I’m almost certain I rode the trains there. It was March 1993. I had been in Cuenca helping to organize the first-ever meeting between human-rights activists from Israel, Arab countries, Palestine, and Turkey. The meeting was very, very moving. (Cuenca had been a center for the Spanish Inquisition, a fact that kind of helped bring all our participants together.)
Afterwards, I had a day or two to unwind in Madrid. I went of course to see Picasso’s Guerníca. I stood in front of it crying. Tears literally poured down my chest.
My friend Sylvia Escobar, who’d helped to organize the meeting, had told us how Picasso had said he’d allow the painting to return to Spain only after Spain became democratic– and how its return in 1981 had given so many Spanish people the confirmation that this was really at last happening…
It took 44 years for Picasso’s hopeful dream to be fulfilled. But it happened.
Maria, we are all with you, your family, and your community.

Horror in Madrid; stunned silence in Bilbao

How ghastly, how world-shattering for Madrilenos today’s multiple bomb attacks were.
It is still quite unclear if these were Basque radicals, or Islamist extermists, or some new coalition between those forces.
What struck me on the BBC TV news tonight, after all the grisly footage and anguished interviewees in Madrid, were scenes of a massive silent gathering of people in downtown Bilbao. They looked so thoughtful, so sad. In their just silent getting-together, they seemed clearly to be repudiating those in their midst who might have (as I assume they judged) committed those outrages.
If it was indeed Basques who did it, and if that repudiation in Basque-land was really so widespread, then surely some Basque people will start to give some tips or leads to the police.

    This is all part of my theory of fighting terrorism by changing the minds of those who condone terrorism. But I don’t want to jump on any “bandwagon” of the horrific events of today in order to propound a theory. I truly want to let the horror and the sadness just stand, and be silent. Being silent together on occasion is something we Quakers find very powerful.

CSM column on Gaza, Arafat

Here’s a link to my column in Thursday’s Christian Science Monitor. I had to do huge rewrite right up against deadline, for reasons I shan’t go into here. So it’s a little ragged. Plus the headline they put on is a tad ambiguous…
Oh Helena, just stop explaining and apologizing. Just let the people just read it and decide for themselves.
Next installment next week there. I’ve already talked with them about doing at least two columns in April on the Rwanda and S. Africa decennials. And today I heard from PBS ‘Frontline’, which wants me to do something for a big special they’re putting together about Rwanda for April 1st. That’s good.

Meta-tasks after atrocious violence

Today, I got back seriously into doing what I should have been doing for ALL of the past year: writing my book about post-atrocity policies with special reference to three countries in Africa. Here is a link to the project of which this book will be the principal product.
All this Middle East stuff has been WAYS too distracting.
I have all this great material from the work I’ve done on the Africa book. Today I organized and fussed around with all the material I have for the Mozambique chapter, so tomorrow I can start writing it.
The more I have thought about this book, the more I have decided that the list that Harvard Law Prof. Martha Minow produced in 2000, of “meta-tasks” that societies struggling to escape from atrocious violence need to prioritize among, should form a major organizing principle for it. Not that I totally agree with Martha’s list. I would have drawn up a slightly different list (and probably shall, in the “Conclusion” to the book.)
But hers is an excellent starting point, a good object for the book’s interrogation. In the hope that some of you folks out there who read JWN might have your own experiences of having lived in post-atrocity societies, maybe some of you have some ideas on the value of her list?
Here it is:

    After mass violence, a nation or society needs to address at least eight goals:
    1. Overcome communal and official denial of the atrocity; gain public acknowledgment.
    2. Obtain the facts in an account as full as possible in order to meet victims’ need to know, to build a record for history, and to ensure minimal accountability and visibility of perpetrators.

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Iraq’s Transitional Law: Sistani does okay

Okay, I still think that Iraq’s Transitional Administrative Law is “illegal…
pointless and diversionary… and divisive.” Sadly, events already
seem to be bearing me out on that last judgment. (See
here
and elsewhere on that. For my earlier reasoning on the TAL, see
here
and here
.)

However, the TAL, with all its faults and evident imperfections, is now with
us. For how long? Who knows. According to
Juan Cole, Ayatollah Sistani has issued a fatwa spelling out his view that:

    any law prepared for the transitional period will
    not gain legitimacy except after it is endorsed by an elected national assembly.
    Additionally, this law places obstacles in the path of reaching a permanent
    constitution for the country that maintains its unity and the rights of its
    sons of all ethnicities and sects.

(Juan wrote that this text is available at Sistani’s website. However,
after a few minutes picking my way around the Ayatollah’s sacred rulings
on anal intercourse, temporary marriage, etc., I still couldn’t find it.
I’ll take Juan’s word for it.)

But anyway, the point of this post is to record a few things that I noted
after reading through
the text of the TAL, which fortunately is fairly short, having only 62 Articles.

Personally, if I were Ayatollah Sistani– which, contrary to some indications
I am not– I would be pretty pleased with the progress made so far in the
following directions:

  • Blocking the Bushies’ attempts to foist a SOFA onto an unelected ,
    quasi-puppet leadership in Iraq,
  • Securing a substantial role for the UN in key aspects of the transition,
  • Getting a strong basis for national-level control of oil revenues,
    and
  • Generally, making my influence felt.

It’s true, he probably has not gotten everything he wanted so far, especially
with regard to that pesky [from his point of view–HC] “Kurdish veto” issue (Art. 61-C.) But he’s doing pretty well, all things considered.

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Happy International Women’s Day!

Happy International Women’s Day to all my women and men readers!
This is truly a good day to think about the position of women in society– in all societies, and in the world.
I’m reading the UN’s Human Development Report for 2001, the most recent issue that I have to hand. On “Gender Empowerment Issues” the US is ranked 10th, behind–in rank order–Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Finland, Canada, New Zealand, Netherlands, Germany, and Australia. Personally, I find that being behind Australia, with what I think of as its macho culture, and Germany, with its echoes of Kinder, Küche, Kirche, fairly shocking. (UK = #16.)
But more to the point, I urge all of you to head on over to Yvette Lopez’s great blog, “A Taste of Africa”, and read this March 7th post. In it, Yvette, a Filipina community organizer who’s doing some skill-sharing in Somaliland with Somali counterparts, describes some of the planning for International Women’s Day that she got involved in with a women’s group in Gabiley District.
Ya know, I’ve always enjoyed reading Yvette’s blog, and I have a link to it up on my Main page here on JWN. But today, reading that post, I thought, Wow, Yvette is not only an extraordinary, spunky, and inspiring individual– she also has a real talent as an engaging and vivid writer in English.
(Yvette, how many languages do you speak?)
So head on over there, and leave her and her Somali friends a Comment! I’m going to.