November 99

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

From the editor's desk

Our garden is just about put to bed; only the hardy greens and some carrots and beets are left now. We turn our clocks back tomorrow, and night will come too early.

So what about this last dark November of this last year, with all its nines and resonances? What do we notice? Huddled people, frightened people, people whose homes aren't there anymore come to mind. We could name 1999 the year of the refugee--last monument of an unlamented century.

The huge numbers of uprooted people--across Africa, in the Balkans, in Latin America, from an island near Indonesia... Uprooted by unnatural disaster and, increasingly, uprooted by war--they are scarcely mentioned by the politicians or the media, certainly aren't enjoying any increased aid from that fabled budget surplus. But our government's policies and our government's bombs have had enormous impact on these uprooted lives. We've had to get out our atlases and our history books. Forgotten lessons and chapters we skipped are pressing in on us. Some of the articles in this month's Peacework walk us through two of the histories--of the stateless Kurdish people, for example, and of Kashmir.

"It's all so sad," sighed the feisty editor of Kurdish Life, Vera Saeedpour, exhausted by 20 years of caring, during the course of one of our conversations concerning the article she wrote for us. There was little we could do but agree. Yet some are doing things to mend and reconcile, quietly, at a modest level--which is probably the only level possible, and a very practical one. We can take heart at their efforts; we can learn from their models. The Karuna Center for Peacebuilding with its Projekt Dijakom in Bosnia is one such.

Then there are the urban US refugees--the huge numbers of hungry people, struggling people, roofless people, the families who have disappeared from the welfare rolls in this rich land, who aren't featured in the "Living" sections of our morning papers.

Another refugee is abroad in the world--the fabric of civil society threatened by a bizarre notion of the inevitability and supremacy of "free trade." We put the phrase in quotation marks because the cost, of course, is enormous. Yet another Peacework article on the WTO and Seattle, you say? Yes. It's a life and death matter. There are far too many refugees from the economic and social and environmental degradation of that global market.

Hanging over all our heads is a catastrophe from which there will be no refugees--a nuclear explosion. Senior scholars and scientists took out a full page ad in the New York Times to detail the fatal problems with the nuclear industry, both civilian and military. Practical-minded folk have been taking matters into their own hands for some time now, drawing parallels and conclusions, conducting citizens' inspections, learning to live out the legal niceties of "necessity." In general such actions come with a price--arrests; fines; or, for the very determined, serious time in jail. Of the four examples of creative action which came to our attention recently, the scorecard is a draw: Bread & Roses were silenced in court and dispatched to the county jail; Helen John never got to finish painting her messages outside the House of Commons. But out in Washington state, a jury agreed that international treaties supersede local, state, and national law; and in Scotland, the sheriff found the deployment and intent to use Trident a threat to international and customary law.

Getting arrested as a form of advocacy is coming back in style. At the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, whose alumni have gone on to staff many of the world's most notoriously criminal armies, the numbers "crossing the line" have been swelling year by year, and the votes in Washington have been changing.

Do we get to hunker down now the garden's to bed--build a fire, read a novel? Of course, but it's an uneasy comfort. We must write our letters and send our faxes and emails first. And perhaps take an end-of-the-century excursion to Seattle or the county jail.