Love, Peace, Understanding, and...a Happening in The Hague

Joseph Gerson, New England AFSC Director of Programs, who between 1973 and 1975 worked in Western Europe as the Coordinator of the War Resisters' International, returned to Holland with the Global Hibakusha delegation to the Hague. Texts of the speeches made by these 12 nuclear weapons victims are available on the AFSC Peace and Economic Security Program website: www.afsc.org/nero/nepeace.htm or by mail from 2161 Mass. Ave., Cambridge, MA 02140. A video of their presentations will be completed in June. More information about the Hague conference and how to order audio tapes of many talks given there can be found at www.haguepeace.org

"UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan...led Saturday's closing plenary of the Hague Appeal for Peace, confronted by the same specter that wrecked the 1899 Hague peace conference-war in Europe.

-Farhan Haq, Terra Viva

"We are in the worst, most acute, most dangerous juncture since the Cuban missile crisis."

-Dr. Mary-Wynne Ashford, Co-President, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War

Amsterdam, May 23-It was a Happening! The five day Hague Appeal for Peace conference, held in a convention center that could have been anywhere in the industrialized world, was, by turns, inspiring, maddening, outrageous, and, ultimately, important (for good and ill) for the future of global peace and justice movements. Perhaps its greatest value was the passing of one international generation's visions, dreams and understandings of peace and justice on to the next generation.

I find that multiple articles, poems, and essays are needed simply to convey my fragmentary experience. The first is a fast paced overview after the style of the beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. It communicates sensory/mental overloads; the energy of 8000 activists, Nobel Peace Laureates, musicians, students, hustlers, prime and foreign ministers, diplomats, aspiring politicians, and bureaucrats-each with their own agenda.

This overview is exhilarating and hopeful, studded with the wisdom, visions, and energies of Kofi Annan, Desmond Tutu, Rigoberta Menchu, Jose Ramos Horta, Jody Williams, Joseph Rotblat, and Gil Scott-Heron (as interpreted by rapper Mos Deh), and scores of other conference speakers, artists, musicians, and peace marchers. It turns tragic, weighted with lost opportunities, as it points to the costs of popular movements collaborating with governments, the costs of refusing to openly address global dynamics of power and hegemony, of relying on "democratic" centralism to draft an ostensibly representative agenda for the 21st century, and of the imperial arrogance of an English-only "international" conference. The cadence stumbles into tortured text as the Dutch Prime and Foreign Ministers take the podium to rationalize the bombing of Yugoslavia, in the course of a conference organized "to end war."

The pace quickens with my private one-on-one confrontation with the Dutch Foreign Minister about the biological time bombs being created (in the tradition of the "apocalyptic" bombing of Iraq) by the destruction of Yugoslavia's electric grid and infrastructure. There are ear-splitting shouts of "Stop the Bombing" that shatter a false facade of civility. And there's a galloping list of the places from which we came (B is for Belgium and Bangladesh-but not Beijng!, P for Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Pretoria, and Pennsylvania). We shift to the manic, with titles from the 72-page conference agenda (from "Learn to Inspect a Nuclear Weapons Base" to "Facilitation with Conflicting Israeli Teens"), and the poem finally collapses through the cacophony of the headlines from some of the thousands of handbills and publications pressed upon us by representatives of a seemingly equal number of crusades into shelters of silence organized by some Quakers and women's groups.

Along the way, the poem is studded with snatches of incessant, almost random, conversations-greeting, informing, interrupting, and planning: Myrla Baldonado in the airport train station bringing me up to date on Philippine opposition to the Visiting Forces Agreement, Ehito Kimura and John Feffer on the upcoming anti-bases organizing in Seoul, a Russian emigre representing "Boston Group Against Ethnic Cleansing" who believes Russia is the source of all evil and should bombed out of existence, the Brooklyn Buddhist who'd like to colonize my mind.

The second article that could be written about the Hague is a reflective exploration of how Holland has changed since I lived in Europe 25 years ago. Given our minimal contact with the Dutch during the conference (there was an elegant six-block walk from hotel to convention center, plus waiters and the good-spirited but uninformed young volunteers who did their best to keep the conference running), this piece is necessarily impressionist and influenced in no small measure by a week spent in Amsterdam following the conference.

Between the omnipresence of 1970s anglophone Muzak and the consumer monoculture, the near-universal Dutch fluency in English, and the docile Foreign and Prime Ministers, I initially overestimated the extent of Dutch cultural, political, and economic integration into the US imperium. Let me report that the process is well advanced, but it is far from complete.

A generation ago the country was still freshly and profoundly marked by the Nazi occupation and resistance to it. As in much of the West, there was a clear and dedicated understanding of citizenship (and a complementary world view) forged in the crucibles of two world wars, resistance movements, and the contagious democratic spirits of American jazz and (yes) Mickey Mouse.

This article describes the nostalgia I felt throughout my time in Holland for people I had had the privilege of knowing. First among them was Hein Van Wijk. When I knew him, Hein was the representative of the Pacifist Socialist Party in the Dutch Senate. I once spent a remarkable night in Bonn with Hein, during which Hein described how he had followed friends into Amsterdam's rail yards at night to free Jews from cattle cars, how he was captured and dispatched to Dachau, and how he survived his imprisonment. Also present in their absence were Kees Knop, a school master who subtly taught resistance, and stalwart pacifist Cobi Molenaar; both took enormous risks to feed and hide those who had gone underground-Jews and resistance fighters.

The Holland I knew was grounded by tolling church bells that spoke of a time and culture before my own. It was a nation standing on and divided by three pillars: Catholicism, Protestantism, and Humanism. The bells are now rarely heard: in their place is a unexpectedly diverse society whose divisions parallel those of the United States: race and class.

My meditation on The Netherlands includes the Amsterdam teacher who explained that 20th century German occupations have led the Dutch to be generous hosts to Eastern European and Third World political refugees. He also explained how, with possibly a third of the city's population comprised of highly integrated Indonesian, Arab, East Asian, and African economic refugees, the government fell-victim of the debate on immigration policy and race. As progressive as Holland is, there are silences that speak of histories and crimes yet to be faced. Tour guides say nothing about the proximity the Old West Church to Anne Frank's attic sanctuary. Similar silence prevails at the Amstel River where an East India Company trading ship has been restored. First came the Roman Empire, then there was the Dutch East India Company.

This meditation on Holland concludes with a Delft tile merchant smiling in agreement at my off-hand remark about US colonization of Holland-the consumer monoculture subverts the Holland of Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and Hein van Wijk...and NATO is the enforcer.

The third article begins with a moment of completion and grace-a young Pennsylvania Quaker coming to the microphone during the last workshop of the Global Hibakusha delegation to read the "International Youth Appeal for Peace." She explains that the appeal was written after hearing the Hibakusha, and that a group of students from Russia, Norway, Haiti, Bosnia, England, and the US have organized a march from the conference center to the International Court of Justice to manifest deep concern over "the possible imminent use of nuclear weapons ...as a result of the conflict in Yugoslavia."

The article then moves to the exceptional experiences that my colleague Linyi Hsing, Taka Hiroshi of the Japan Council Against A & H Bombs, and I had as the principal organizers of the Global Hibakusha delegation to the conference-twelve people from six countries and colonies (see Peacework, Dec 1998/Jan 1999). The texts of their talks speak the suffering they have witnessed and endured. They communicate their commitments to nuclear weapons abolition with "human dignity beyond language."

The article intimates some of the historical, spiritual, emotional, and humorous terrain we shared with the Hibakusha as friends and organizers, during the course of four workshops and a core agenda session that moved and transformed those fortunate enough to find a seat or standing room. Eighty-two year-old Dr. Hida Shuntaro, who has been treating Hiroshima Hibakusha since August 1945, talked in sobering and terrifying detail, for far longer than permitted by our compressed agenda. Knowing that "the hour is getting late," he nevertheless had more important things to respect than conference time: life itself.

This is where I would describe Claudia Peterson, a Utah "down-winder," bringing herself and her standing room audience to tears, as she told of her father's, father-in-law's, daughter's, and sister's deaths from cancer and confessed that "the pain of watching loved ones die is so profound that I too wished for death to end the sadness within me." Then, like many Hibakusha, she continued-modeling courage and will: "Some of us may not be physically strong any longer, but the legacy of the losses we have endured brings us to great strength and understanding of why peace is so important."

Carletta Garcia followed Claudia, describing a similar pattern and showing nearly identical vulnerabilities and courage. Carletta is a Peublo Native American from New Mexico who grew up only a few hundred yards from the US' largest open pit uranium mine. She was standing in for her mother, Dorothy Purley, who was re-hospitalized with cancer two nights before the conference. Carletta strayed from her mother's text to tell us of learning that her husband was also fighting cancer. She spoke her mother's greatest hope: "that mankind will realize that we need to keep our Earth Mother as healthy as we can," and that "we do not need any more deaths and destruction in our world. We have had enough already. The only true way to live is through peace and harmony."

Other powerful moments in this article: Gabi Tetiarahi announcing that he expected to be arrested on his return to Tahiti for the "crime" of describing abroad the consequences of French nuclear colonialism; Choi Il Chul recounting how Japanese colonialism resulted in 100,000 Koreans being killed or scarred by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs; the pain and strength in Kazakh biologist Kulimhan Rahimova's eyes when she displayed photographs of Semipalitink's "jelly babies" and its children born with herniated brains, no brains, and missing appendages; Anthony Guarisco's barely contained rage when he described 300,000 US GIs being used as "test animals" for the US nuclear weapons program.

There are other articles I might draw out of The Hague. One connects the Global Hibakusha delegation, the continuing nuclear arms race, the US/NATO-Yugoslav war, and the international movement for nuclear weapons abolition. There's an essay about observing the increasingly savage war in and against Yugloslavia from a Western European vantage point, in the midst of Kremlin intrigues, Yeltsin's coup, and reported Russian military consideration of resort to nuclear weapons in a worst-case Yugoslav scenario. There is also an intimate meditation, which will probably go unwritten, that grows from my son's help with the Hibakusha delegation-on the pleasures and wonders of a father and son reconnecting on the lee-ward shore of adolescence.

The most compelling moment, for me? As I staggered out of the closing plenary, depressed, disgusted, enraged by Dutch Prime Minister Kok's defense of the US/NATO bombing, my senses were seized and my spirit inspired by the soaring harmonies and rhythmic drums of Papau New Guineans performing outside the auditorium. They were singing for their freedom, appealing for human solidarity, and like the Hibakusha their resistance conveyed "human dignity beyond language."