June 2001

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

From the editor's desk

We opened the paper this morning to the image of Colin Powell joining hands with people with AIDS in Uganda. It's a great picture and ought to be a strong teaching moment. For starters, let's forgive the overburdening debt and address the devastating poverty that is Africa's heritage from European colonialism; let's stop lending support to brutal, corrupt governments just because they happen to be friendly brutal, corrupt governments; let's undertake our reasonable share of the work of peacekeeping on the continent, committing funding and personnel; let's shore up public health systems and facilitate delivery of life-saving drugs.

But faced with the unspeakable reality of the disease AIDS, and its ravages throughout Africa, Powell's handlers have come up with a promise of $200 million dollars. We live in a rich country. Our President wants to give many multiples of that sum back to wealthy people in the US over the course of the next decade; he proposes to build a many-billion-dollar missile defense system that almost surely won't work but nevertheless will cause grave mischief. So much for concern.

In this June Peacework we look at some aspects of problems in Africa. Staff at the Quaker United Nations Office in New York describe the endemic militarism and sketch out directions for resolving conflict and building peace. Two veteran community activists, one from South Africa, the other from Boston's Back Bay, ask us to face facts head on--the appalling numbers, the horror of HIV/AIDS in Africa. Three women talk about Sierra Leone where, as one of them says, "The UN team is on a peace-keeping mission. But there is no peace to keep."

A number of friends called us to say that they had heard important, indelible testimony to the present reality at a "Report-Back" from a Boston delegation that traveled to Palestine and Israel this April. Here we give you Martin Federman's description of their visit to Hebron. We also print a letter from the American sister of a Palestinian whose house and family in Ramallah happened to be in the wrong place. This is an "open letter" about one grieving family--you can write to them. There are also messages about the UN's take on the US and human rights, about indefensible missile defense, and about fossil fuels and common sense.

In response to growing worldwide condemnation of the sanctions on Iraq, Britain, with the United States' eager approval, now trots out "smart sanctions." A broad coalition of anti-sanctions organizations has produced a thorough critique with suggestions about possible responses and actions.

Last month we brought you an account of the Living Wage Campaign at Harvard written on a laptop from inside student-occupied Massachusetts Hall. This month, following an at least partial victory, our colleague Paul Shannon looks at this coalition of students and workers in the context of human rights, the global economy, community, and struggle shared across divisions of class and race. And for a balanced picture, we are grateful to our friends at United for a Fair Economy for a statement from Billionaires for Unlimited Inheritance.

Even in this country, it is not simply money. Two writers take a clear-eyed look at the phenomenon of school killings that has occupied editorial writers and analysts of late. They conclude that we're talking about privilege here--deep-seated assumption of privilege conferred by gender, privilege conferred by class, above all, privilege conferred by race. A number of our AFSC colleagues are in Geneva this week at a "Prep-Com," a preparatory conference for the UN World Conference Against Racism that will be held in South Africa later this summer, amid a telling lack of fanfare. This is the issue that undergirds the rest, and the world's leaders would prefer not to hear about it. Nevertheless, readers of Peacework will be hearing as we receive delegates' reports over the coming months.

Get out your magnifying glass. We've finally managed to squeeze in the Year 2000 Peacework Index this month. If you see an article you missed, we'd be glad to send you a copy, or you can check it out yourself and print it from our website (www.afsc.org/peacewrk.htm) where back issues are archived. And in case you thought Gary Troudeau made it all up for Doonsbury last week--that bit about a map-maker getting fired over caribou calving areas--we thought we'd share the source, a letter geologist Ian Thomas sent out last March, which has since been circulating on many email lists that come our way.

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