 April 2005
American Friends Service Committee Peacework Magazine Sara Burke, Jaime Lederer 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 A few mornings ago, I held Sasha, our 16-month-old child, in my arms, soon after he had awakened. I opened the blinds and we saw a flock of starlings pecking at the thawing ground outside. I wouldn't have taken much note of them on my own, but Sasha became quite excited, cooing and "Ah ah ahing" at the first sight of birds this spring. Sasha changes my perspective in other ways as well. I can't help but picture us trying to hustle Sasha out the door before Israeli bulldozers, built by Caterpillar Corporation, demolish our house. I am concerned that he could grow up and be induced by a militaristic culture to join the active duty military or the National Guard. I'm inspired by the love and creativity of the members of Military Families Speak Out and Iraq Veterans Against the War. They've provided the backbone for both the effort in Vermont Town Meetings to challenge the exploitation of US National Guard troops, and the demonstration in Fayetteville, NC to end the war in Iraq. I now hesitate before personally engaging in additional acts of civil disobedience, thinking, "if I am sent to jail, how will I take care of Sasha?" As I ponder, activists across the country are participating in nonviolent direct action and signing the Declaration of Conscience in Support of Military Resistance to protest the US war against Iraq. Sasha is growing up in a country shredding the Bill of Rights and engaging in state-sanctioned torture. I hope we'll build a movement capable of protecting and expanding democracy so that Sasha will feel safe protesting whatever injustices he comes to perceive, without the threat of a President unilaterally declaring him, or anyone else, an "enemy combatant." The efforts of the lawyers and activists who argued the Padilla case helped move us one step closer. Walden Bello, in his analyses of global movements to resist US hegemony, sounds a hopeful note about the potential for creating movements capable, in coming decades, of creating a world system based on global partnerships instead of unilateral US military-political imposition. I would like to help raise a global citizen, not a de facto global conqueror. If I lived in a community besieged by the army, drug warlords, right-wing paramilitaries, and leftist rebel movements, I hope I would join or help create communities of nonviolent resistance, as peasants in Colombia continue to do in the face of massacres. But I wonder, would I, as a parent, have the courage to take such risks? The least we can do is protest here to try to make it safer for the peace activists there. We hope to raise Sasha to question traditional gender roles and assumptions, and I hope he'll decide to challenge violence against women in US society and around the world. In Mali, local activists, with the support of international human rights advocates, are successfully challenging the misogynist tradition of female genital cutting. I can barely imagine the panic I might feel if marauding rebels, and the armies chasing them, such as those in Uganda, were kidnapping children in my neighborhood. In this issue, Jeffrey Mapendere and Tom Crick describe the challenges facing would-be peacemakers in this war-torn region. I can't conceive the rage and grief that might engulf me if my child wasn't deemed worthy, by a global economic system based on exploitation and profit, of receiving the basic inoculations necessary to prevent his death. Millions of parents around the world are forced to experience this grief every year. To end these slow-motion atrocities, campaigns by advocacy groups, the WHO, and others are, on shoestring budgets, making impressive public health interventions, especially in western Africa. During the Jewish celebration of Passover, we are urged to put ourselves in the shoes of people who are enslaved, saying, "I was a slave in Egypt." Despite my historical and theistic qualms, the practice of trying to imagine ourselves enslaved, or watching our children become enslaved, is an exercise I find painfully valuable. What kind of world would we help create if we began to practice the idea that each child on earth is as invaluable as the children we love most? Sam Diener, Co-editor 
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