Stop the Next War Now (7 page)

During a regional security council meeting in late 1996, a nun revealed that 95 percent of the women in one community of Urabá had been raped.This ignited something deep within a few women activists in the city of Medellín. They called for an act of solidarity: a thousand Colombian women from women’s groups around the country to go to Urabá and put their arms around those who had suffered the humiliation of war.

Across Colombia, busloads of women departed for Urabá. Many traveled for several days. Some left their communities for the first time. Many did not have permission from their husbands or fathers, but went anyway.And when fifteen hundred Colombian women arrived in Urabá on November 25—the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women—they hugged their sisters.Thus was born La Ruta Pácifica de las Mujeres, or Ruta (Path).

After the first mobilization, women set out for other regions that were under the assault of war.They launched nationwide marches to Bolívar, Cartagena, Barrancabermeja, and Bogotá. On November 25, 2003, Ruta led three thousand women in a caravan of a hundred buses to the southern jungle department of Putumayo, the heart of joint U.S.-Colombian drug-eradication efforts that include the aerial fumigation of coca fields. Ruta denounced the “militarist policy of the current government, which favors the use of weapons and force to treat problems that are rooted in poverty,” and demanded that the “women and men of Putumayo be allowed to influence the decisions that affect their lives and health and those of their children, and the land which sustains them.”

In 2001, the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and the British organization International Alert awarded the Millennium Peace Prize to Ruta. Ruta accepted the award with the following words:

“We have told the warring men that we do not deliver children for war, and that we will not allow our hands and wombs to contribute to war. Our bodies will not serve as war booty.We demand that the arms race supported by the developed countries stop.We demand that not one more dollar be spent on war.”

It is Ruta’s unique solidarity—indeed, its sisterhood—that gives women the strength to march in the face of war and violence and authoritarianism. And it is their efforts to be coherent in word and action from a feminist perspective that make Ruta an unconventional movement so full of hope.

“There never was a good war, or a bad peace.”

—Benjamin Franklin

THE OPEN SPACE OF

DEMOCRACY

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS

Terry Tempest Williams is a writer who focuses on social issues and their relationship to the natural world.She is the author of
Refuge,Leap
, and
Red:Passion and Patience in the Desert
. Her most recent book is
The Open Space of Democracy
.A recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, she lives in Castle Valley, Utah.

My brother Steve was diagnosed one year ago with lymphoma. I see him sitting at the family dinner table after he has gone through an intensive cycle of chemotherapy that leaves his body ravaged and weak. I see him sitting next to his wife, Ann, in their living room with daughters Callie, Sarah, and Diane, and with Brook and me there at their side. My other brother, Hank. And our father. Gathered together to hear what Steve has to say. He speaks of healing, not cure. He speaks of gratitude for his life and his desire to be true to the integrity of his own voice. He has brought back a stone for each of us and passes a bowl of stones around the dinner table. And he talks about how, when he was walking at Point Reyes, he picked up only stones that had a hole in them. And he says, “I know we have had a hole in our hearts. We can look at this hole in our hearts as a wound or we can see it as a window. May we vow tonight as a family to see it as a window.”

In June 2003, I was invited to deliver the commencement address at the University of Utah, my alma mater. My niece Callie was graduating. You’ll remember George W. Bush stepping onto the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, announcing, “Mission accomplished!” This was the following day. And I thought, if I don’t have the courage to speak my own thoughts at this point in time to my own people, my own family, in my own community, at my own school, then I have no business being there. And I gave a very short talk, for fifteen minutes, about the open space of democracy. I said that in the open space of democracy there is room for dissent. In the open space of democracy, community is defined as the well-being of all species, not just our own. I was thinking about Thoreau when he said, “Cast not your whole vote, but your whole influence.” And I urged the students to question, stand, speak, and act. My talk was met with equal boos and applause. And what I saw was the split within our own country. How do we have civil dialogue when we are not even civil to each other?

After the talk, my senator, Bob Bennett, came up to me and said, “Terry, I just want to register my extreme dissent to what you said today. You’ve inspired me to write you a letter.”

I would like to share an excerpt of his letter and my response, because I think it has everything to do with how we bypass this political rhetoric that has diminished all of us in this country and find that point of humanity, our deeper selves. “Dear Terry,” Senator Bennett wrote, “as I listened to you outline things that are important to you, an interesting question popped into my mind. What would she be willing to die for?” And then he goes on to outline his concerns and thoughts. It was an incredibly thoughtful, provocative letter.

I’m embarrassed to tell you I was not able to answer his letter for months. I was haunted by what he had asked me. What am I willing to die for? And I realized for me, that wasn’t the question. It’s not what I’m willing to die for, but what I am willing to give my life to.

“Dear Senator Bennett: You asked me a critical question in your letter, one I have pondered for months. What am I willing to die for? After much thought, what I would be willing to die for and give my life to, is the freedom of speech. It is the open door to all other freedoms. We are a nation at war with ourselves until we can turn to one another and offer our sincere words as to why we feel the way we do, with an honest commitment to hear what others have to say. We will continue to project our anger on the world in true unconscious acts of terror. Democracy invites us to take risks. It asks that we vacate the comfortable seat of certitude, remain pliable, and act ultimately on behalf of the common good. Democracy’s only agenda is that we participate. If we cannot engage in respectful listening, there can be no civil dialogue. And without civil dialogue, we the people will simply become bullies in boots, deaf to the truth that we are standing on the edge of a political chasm that is beginning to crumble. We all stand to lose ground. Democracy is an insecure landscape.”

Democracy felt a bit more insecure when I received a call from Florida Gulf Coast University. I was to learn that the freshman convocation, at which I had been invited to speak, was being postponed until after the election. This decision was made by the university president, William Merwin (not to be confused with the poet), because of criticisms I had made against George W. Bush in print. He felt my partisan views would be threatening to the university and could be harmful to his students. He said, “If a hurricane is threatening my university, then I’m going to shut it down.” And I said, “But what if it’s only a tempest?” With all due respect, he didn’t think it was funny. We had a long conversation and he was very candid, to his credit. He said, “Let me be very clear. The Board of Regents of the state of Florida, my board of trustees at this university, are all appointees of Governor Jeb Bush. And my donors are supporters of the Bush brothers. In the name of political balance, I cannot allow you on this campus before the election.”

That same night, our family gathered in Salt Lake City to learn that my brother Steve’s tests revealed metastatic disease, that his lymphoma was progressing. He was no longer eligible for the stem-cell transplant we had all been praying for. With silence and with stillness, with sorrow and with love, we embraced the moment and each other and stood in the center of sacred time. Life. As T. S. Elliot said, “Turning shadow into transient beauty.”

The experience at the Florida Gulf Coast University was a painful one. But it has taught me that this is not personal. This story is not about me. It’s a shadow play where we are characters in an ongoing drama, a theater of democracy. The students rose. The faculties rose. And finally, the president and I joined the students and the faculty in a discussion of how to keep this open space exactly that.

I think together we’ve realized that what is most threatening to the status quo is dialogue. Because honest dialogue and deep listening require us to change, to give up the rigidity of our opinions for the sacred heart of stories, where we remember who we are and who we are not.

My brother has shared with us that his cancer is teaching him to act and speak from a place of honesty. To follow what he loves, not to be simply responsible for what he does. If you had told me one year ago that my brother, who’s a pipeline contractor, would be advocating for a labyrinth to be placed in the center of a new health care facility for cancer patients, I would not have believed you. If you had told me that his focus on pipeline had shifted to sculpture, to making a sculpture out of granite, cut and pulled and stretched, that he would call
Lymphoma Leaving
, if you had told me that alongside his Mormon scriptures he would be reading Emerson and Thoreau and Rachel Remin, I would not have believed it. The other day he said to me, “Terry, we are all terminal. How do you want to spend your one beautiful life?”

The human heart is the first home of democracy. It is where we embrace our questions. Can we be equitable? Can we be generous? Can we listen with our whole being, not just our mind, and offer our attention rather than our opinion? And do we have enough resolve in our heart to act courageously, relentlessly, without giving up, ever—trusting our fellow citizens to join us in a determined pursuit of a living democracy? The heart is the house of empathy, whose door opens when we receive the pain of others. This is where bravery lives, where we’ll find our mettle to give and receive, to love and be loved, to stand in the center of uncertainty with strength, not fear, understanding this is all there is. The heart is the path to wisdom because it dares to be vulnerable in the presence of power.

“I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask,’Mother, what was war?’”

—Eve Merriam

WARRIORS FOR PEACE

ROSE KABUYE

Rose Kabuye was raised in a Ugandan refugee camp following her parents’ flight from Rwanda because of Hutu-Tutsi violence. She later joined the Rwandan Patriotic Front, an opposition movement and guerrilla army. She was the mayor of Kigali after the 1994 genocide, was a member of Parliament for two years, and is a lieutenant colonel in the Rwandan army.

Rwandans throughout the country have been trying to bridge the divide between Hutus and Tutsis.Telling the truth. Healing.The government’s Unity and Reconciliation Commission sets up regular meetings for people of all ethnic groups where we learn about each other’s history, about the experiences of the other side.

Rwanda is coping not only with internal Hutu-Tutsi friction; there are also tensions between our country and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In 2000, I was part of a group of Rwandan and Congolese women who went through conflict-resolution training at Mennonite University in Virginia. At first, the Congolese women didn’t want to talk to us.When they did talk to us, they said,”You are aggressors.What are you doing in our country?” And of course, we said,”Why are you supporting the militias? These people, who killed our innocent people, are regrouped in the Congo.You are arming them.You are sending them back to kill us.Why do you support them?” In the beginning we listened to one another with a mediator. Later, we learned how to listen on our own.We also learned that each one of us had a point.We were already in a better place. And we tried to figure out a solution together: they couldn’t arrest the militia members in the Congo, but they could lobby the Congolese government to stop supporting them. And we could lobby the Rwandan government to pull out of their territory.When we went back home, I was able to talk to my leaders about what the Congolese and Rwandan women, together, thought might work.

In March 2003, CODEPINK marched to Congress highlighting the casualties of war.

Photo by Medea Benjamin

Some people think it’s strange that I work for peace, because I’m in the army. But others are glad.They say to me,”You waged war, and now you are waging peace!” I know how terrible wars can be.That’s why I want to leave behind a safer world for our children.

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot

drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate,

violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a

descending spiral of destruction....The chain reaction of evil—

hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars—must be broken, or

we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.”

—Martin Luther King Jr.

CHOOSING

PEACE

ELISE BOULDING

Dr. Elise Boulding is a pioneer in the peace movement. Professor emerita of sociology at Dartmouth College and a founder of the International Peace Research Association, she has written extensively on strategies for peace, focusing on indigenous cultures, the workings and possibilities of the United Nations, and family structure.

Apeace culture maintains a creative balance among bonding, community closeness, and the need for separate spaces. It can be defined as a mosaic of identities, attitudes, values, beliefs, and patterns that leads people to live nurturingly with one another and the earth itself without the aid of structured power differentials, to deal creatively with their differences, and to share their resources. Usually, we find coexisting clusters of peaceableness and aggression. Each society develops its own pattern of balancing the needs for bonding and autonomy.