 November 2003
American Friends Service Committee Peacework Magazine Sara Burke, Managing Editor Sam Diener, Editor Pat Farren, Founding Editor 2161 Massachusetts Ave. Telephone number: Fax number:
pwork@igc.org Peacework has been published monthly since 1972, intended to serve as a source of dependable information to those who strive for peace and justice and are committed to furthering the nonviolent social change necessary to achieve them. Rooted in Quaker values and informed by AFSC experience and initiatives, Peacework offers a forum for organizers, fostering coalition-building and teaching the methods and strategies that work in the global and local community. Peacework seeks to serve as an incubator for social transformation, introducing a younger generation to a deeper analysis of problems and issues, reminding and re-inspiring long-term activists, encouraging the generations to listen to each other, and creating space for the voices of the disenfranchised. Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC. |
Rebuilding Iraq Ramzi Kysia is an Arab-American peace activist and writer. He is currently doing public speaking in Europe after having lived a year in Iraq with Voices in the Wilderness, www.vitw.org. Voices in the Wilderness is being fined $20,000 by the US government for taking medicines to Iraq. I have just left Iraq after living there for the last year. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed by Saddam's regime. Hundreds of thousands were killed during the war with Iran. Tens of thousands of Iraqis were killed as a direct result of the war with the US in 1991. Hundreds of thousands more died as a result of the devastation of that war, the draconian economic sanctions imposed by the US/UN, and the Iraqi government's diversion of the country's resources from smuggling to palaces, the military, and other repressive institutions. Where was the world when this happened? Where is the world today? We live in a pregnant time, and each of us in this world - through our action or our inaction - will have a say in what is born from the crisis of Iraq. Gandhi once said that "poverty is the worst form of violence," and the poverty and isolation deliberately created in Iraq by 20 years of war and sanctions has not ended. This was an act of genocide. I don't use the world lightly. Unemployment in Iraq today is still over 60%, and Iraqis today are just as poor and just as cut off from the world as they were before the war. They remain, living in disaster. Iraq is unsafe - for the 25 million people who call it home. The UN has all but pulled out of the country, and many NGOs have left entirely. Those that remain have massively scaled back their operations. We cannot let this trend continue. We must not forget these people yet again. If nothing else, the attacks of September 11, 2001, should have dramatically demonstrated the reality that for as long as any of us are unsafe in this world, all of us are unsafe. We have to realize, deeply realize, that our security cannot depend on the insecurity of everyone else. After decades of violence, of humiliation piled upon humiliation, we must begin to work for peace and reconciliation. After long years of isolation, we must engage. We cannot trust our governments. None of them has ever demonstrated a willingness to see the Iraqi people. If we believe in democracy, if we believe in peace, then we have to demonstrate it. These are not abstract ideals we can simply argue about, or protest for, and then go home to quietly forget. There is hope. But hope takes action. People are organizing on the ground, for example with the Union of the Unemployed and the Organization for Women's Freedom, in order to struggle for their rights. Others are beginning to build Iraq's civil society in other ways, forming groups to take care of orphans and the elderly, start schools, and rebuild the country themselves. For the past five months I've helped a group of young Iraqis to start a newspaper and independent media center called Al-Muajaha: The Iraqi Witness <www.almuajaha.com>. The Iraqis who are working on this paper are amazing, and they need our continued support. Some international activists have come together with Iraqis to help start an organization called "Occupation Watch" to keep track of the violence of the Occupation, and to put pressure on governments to stop violating human rights in Iraq. We should support them. We've also helped a group of Iraqi artists and teachers start their own art school for children, teaching theater and music and painting to children suffering from years of poverty and violence. We can work wonders when we work together. Peace and freedom - true freedom - are tangible realities that we can only build if we decide to stand up and be present. They take struggle. They require risks. It starts with the connections we make, today, right now, with each other and with all our sisters and brothers around the world. It is dangerous to oppose our governments. It is dangerous to acknowledge our deep responsibility to people living in disaster. It is dangerous to risk our liberty and our lives in opposition to violence. It's also dangerous not to, and if it weren't so dangerous it wouldn't be so necessary.
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