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.

April 2004: two big African decennials

For millions of people in southern and central Africa, April 1994 was a very momentous month; and the ten-year anniversary of it is coming up.
In Rwanda, at the beginning of the month, President Habyarimana’s plane was brought down, setting into train the long-planned, long-prepared horrors of the country’s anti-Tutsi genocide. During the thirteen weeks that followed, some 14% of the country’s entire population was wiped out: around 800,000-1,000,000 people killed. Eighty percent of the dead were Tutsis, the rest, Hutus who tried to shield them or otherwise to resist the hate-fueled bloodlust of the killers.
In South Africa, meanwhile, April 1994 was a month of hopes laced with great trepidation and tension as the country made the last preparations for its first-ever democratic election, scheduled for the end of the month. Everyone was wondering: Would the Inkatha Freedom Party participate, or would it try to make the country ungovernable and thereby force the postponement or cancellation of the election? And then, there was the threat of disruption from the White extremists, who also had good connections in the country’s security forces….
In South Africa, the negotiations over the terms on which the security forces would continue to provide security for the elections continued until the second or third day of the elections themselves… It came that close to not working out… In the end, the ANC and its allies had to commit to providing some form of amnesty for perpetrators of apartheid-era atrocities, in return for having the elections conducted under conditions of general (though not total) public security.

    A footnote: something similar may well also have to be negotiated with the US occupation forces in Iraq.

But back to my main story here…

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Salam/Pax survived

Salam/Pax, the cosmos’s most famous Iraqi blogger, survived the Karbala bombing, and also has written beautifully (though oh too briefly) about the whole experience of having been there for Ashoura.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Riverbend wrote a lovely and to me very heartening short post about the after-effects of the Ashoura bombings…
I meant to get the ref to her post up here earlier. Sorry about that. I seem to recall that both she and Salam have written in the past that they have “mixed”, Sunni-Shiite heritages. Maybe I’m wrong about her.
What burns me up is that in the midst of all that emotional period– Ashoura, the bombings, their aftermath, Sunnis and Shi-ites trying to figure out how to get back together again, etc– Paul Bremer was out there pursuing his inherently divisive agenda of trying to get everyone to sign off on his pointless little interim constitution.
Has he no cultural or emotional sensitivity? (Silly question.)

Why I was not sitting on the edge of my chair…

“Hot” news out of Baghdad today about the failure of the Iraqi Governing Council to sign what, it turns out, was to have been called the Transitional Administrative Law… Poignant pictures of the table all ready for the cermony with the 25 pens lined up down each side of it… The children’s choir members eagerly awaiting their turn on the stage.
I’d like to quote Macbeth:

    … it is a tale
    Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
    Signifying nothing.

See this post from last Saturday (Feb. 28th), in which I argued that the attempt to ram through this law right now was “illegal… pointless and diversionary… and divisive.”
So let’s hope they quit banging their collective heads against that particular brick wall once and for all. Let’s hope they turn instead to the playbook so beautifully sketched out in the report that Lakhdar Brahimi presented to Kofi Annan last week.
The focus there is on how credible, legitimate elections can be organized in a country in a situation as complex as Iraq’s, in order to start to generate a credible, elected national leadership there.
That national leadership will then, at some point down the pike, deliberate on the issue of the Constitution. And on the Status of Forces Agreement (if any) with the US. And on federalism, and the role of women, and everything else.
Who gets to run the country in the meantime?

Continue reading “Why I was not sitting on the edge of my chair…”