April 2001

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

From the editor's desk

As we write this, twelve people are sitting around a table in Springfield, Massachusetts engaged in the unusual activity of deciding whether or not a homicide should be committed. Although Massachusetts doesn't have a death penalty, the US government does, and Kristen Gilbert was found guilty of Federal charges. Her jury is deliberating whether she should live or die.

This April Peacework is bracketed by murder. April 4th is Martin Luther King's deathday. Jim Douglass attended a trial that found the US government complicit in King's assassination. Whether or not you agree, it is clear that King had become a threat because he had begun to preach about poverty and power--the same issues that are being debated in the streets today, from Seattle to Prague to The Hague and now Quebec. We devoted our whole March Peacework to globalization and the FTAA. If you set it aside to read later, now is an excellent time. This month, along with notices of events (see page 23), we remind you through the voices of women and their wonderful Web of Solidarity.

The march to globalization and transcendent capitalism is deeply complicit in the man-made disasters that overtake those who live in the path of hurricanes or near seismic fault lines. Ben Wisner looks at two recent earthquakes and suggests what prudent planning and good stewardship might look like. Disaster also befell the great Buddhas of Bamiyan--disaster begotten by profound misreading of the teachings of Islamic law. The Taliban opted for summary execution. But the bombardment of the Buddhas was caused in part, Professor al-Hibri points out, by the poverty of Western foreign policy whose prime weapon these days is murderous economic sanctions.

Sanctions and bombs turn up again, a few mountain passes away, in Iraq. Dave McReynolds rehearses, one more time, the forgotten history and appalling arrogance of US policy in the Gulf. No jury of peers for the 5000 children who die monthly in Iraq. And in Palestine, land takings, closure, house demolition, deadly force are the instruments of choice for Israeli policy makers. Looming over the Middle East--and the rest of the globe--US military policy casts a long shadow. We asked David Culp at Friends Committee for National Legislation for an interim assessment of the Bush Administration's approach to nuclear weapons. While there is some good news, he finds much cause for worry and calls for a vigorous response. The real cost, always, of our national love affair with military power is measured in domestic spending. Along with his shiny missile shield George Bush wants a tax cut. Chris Hartman does the cost/benefit analysis; and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees and friends offer sensible budget priorities. Granny D weighs in on campaign financing.

Out of sight in the budget are society's outcasts, the graduates of America's prison industry. Nationwide, we are creating a huge underclass that will be the first to suffer from cutbacks in social programs. They are experiencing as well vindictive, and unconstitutional, abridgment of their rights. Among others whose rights have been abridged are the residents of the lovely Puerto Rican island of Vieques. The US Navy seized it during WW II, and has kept it ever since, dropping bombs on it, as if at war. Mar'a Reinat-Pumarejo explains exactly why so many otherwise law-abiding people have been hauled into court lately.

It was April 1975 when the fighting mostly stopped in Vietnam. There was no jury of peers before the US dropped Agent Orange and napalm on Vietnamese people and young soldiers died, in fact no Act of War, either. Fred Marchant's poems in Full Moon Boat confront that war, declared or no, showing, in the words of his reviewer, a "rich array of human moments set in the midst of often inhuman times."

If it wasn't war, what exactly was it we were engaged in, in Vietnam--"justifiable homicide?" That's what that jury in Springfield has been asked to commit; that's what the Taliban says happened to the offending statues. That's how Madeleine Albright dismissed the dead children of Iraq--"worth the price." That's what Israel says about the disproportionate number of Palestinian casualties. That'what budget cutters say about reductions in social services. Martin Luther King warned us about the war in Vietnam that would wreak such havoc in Indonesia, and leave such disarray in the US. King was murdered for his trouble. Is it ever justifiable?

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