 December/January 2004-2005
American Friends Service Committee Peacework Magazine Sara Burke, 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. |
From the Editor's Desk What a midwinter it has been, and how startling it is, still, to have the images and words of our sisters and brothers around the world appear before us almost instantaneously - while many of the people we see on our screens have no way of communicating with each other if they are separated by a mile, or by a checkpoint. On page 5 of this issue is a terrible photo of a dead child in Falluja, one of several taken to allow identification by families still barred from returning to the city. As I bowed my head before these images here in my office, they were still being circulated, in a single album, among the refugees scattered in villages and makeshift camps. In midwinter, we yearn for spring - but we don't wait. We make our own fires, we keep moving, we make plans. In this issue you will find powerful words and breathtaking examples of love in action. We begin this issue with voices from Iraq, and from Americans who have stepped through the wall of our national shame to make connections with Iraqis. While international aid workers like Mary Trotochaud and Rick McDowell, and investigative reporters like Naomi Klein, provide us with invaluable witness, the work done by ordinary folks in their own communities is as important. Farmers in Western Massachusetts felt a special connection with farmers in Dhuluiya, Iraq whose fruit trees had been bulldozed. In a project called "Harvest Aid" they made that connection real both for the Iraqis and for their own neighbors hurt here at home by the same war. But you might want to start with the words of some of the inspired leaders our nonviolent movements have been blessed with: Martin Luther King, Wangari Maathai, and Bill Fletcher all sound rousing calls that will warm you up no matter how cold it is where you are, and give you hope no matter how cynical you thought you were. Throughout the issue you will find responses to those calls. As with Harvest Aid, people are making the vital connections between the local and the global. Louise Dunlap tells us about city mayors uniting worldwide for nuclear disarmament. Using a similar approach, activists in Vermont are mobilizing town meetings to raise their voices nationally against the continued drain of their National Guard members for an indefinite and unjustified war. From Nicaragua, Penn Garvin offers practical tools for community-based nonviolence trainers around the world. Ruth Benn reminds us that one crucial point of connection between our personal values and the actions of our government is in the taxes we pay - or don't. Members of the intrepid and creative Kensington Welfare Rights Union took over a military recruiting office in Philadelphia last month in what they called "Homes for the Holidays: Operation Bring the Money Home." Every single one of these actions is well-grounded, of real import, and easy to replicate and join in wherever you are. Several of our authors point out the jarring discrepancy between the perceptions ordinary citizens hold of the world's big conflicts, and the strange, idealized stories offered up to us about those conflicts in most news media. Naomi Klein on Iraq, Norman Solomon on nuclear threats real and perceived, and Keith Darden (and the scrappy, triumphant Internet collective called Maidan) on the Ukrainian power struggle all show that the real stories are less biased, more complicated, and much more interesting. You never know how they will turn out. And when is a story over? Nat Hentoff reports on the undoing of key provisions of the Patriot Act, a slow, imperative, collective task that may occupy our courts and civil liberties activists for years to come. Sometimes, as John Lamperti shows in his reconsideration of Pearl Harbor, and Arnie Alpert suggests in his reminiscence of the "Sofagate" arrests in the 1980s, it is worthwhile to examine an old, established story and see how it looks in the light of what has come since. In a beautiful pair of essays, a Serb and a Kosovar Albanian acknowledge the ways that knowing each other has been part of changing the fore-ordained ending of the stories they grew up with. With much at stake, Milica Koscica resolves: "I pledge my allegiance to the future." The days grow imperceptibly longer in one part of the world while they shorten in another. We tell the truest stories we can, and they change us.
- Sara Burke, Peacework Co-editor
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