Nadia Murad Bansee Taha at the state parliament in Hanover, Germany, 31 May 2016. Photo: Julian Stratenschulte/DPA/PA Images. All rights reserved.

Yazidi activist and ISIS survivor Nadia Murad has been named this year’s Nobel peace prize winner, along with Congolese gynecologist Denis Mukwege, for their efforts to end sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.

Nadia endured more than three months in ISIS captivity after her village, Kocho, was overrun by militants on 3 August 2014. Troops from the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) Peshmerga had left their positions all over the mainly Yazidi area of Mount Sinjar, in northern Iraq, to defend the city of Duhok after the fall of Mosul that June.

Her mother is believed to be buried in one of the mass graves found close to her village after it was retaken by the Peshmerga; she also lost brothers, sisters and nephews. Nadia’s niece, “sister and soulmate” was killed by a landmine whilst making her own daring escape from ISIS in 2016. Nadia took her passing particularly badly; by then she was safely ensconced in Germany and already advocating for rescues and aid.

Of the 331 individuals and organisations nominated for the Nobel peace prize this year, Nadia is absolutely the most deserved winner. I will freely admit my bias here: I met her first in the summer of 2015, during a trip to the UK with the AMAR Foundation. On this visit, she met the late Sue Lloyd-Roberts, whose last Newsnight dispatch before she passed away featured Nadia and two other ISIS survivors (all anonymously).

Yazidism, prior to the 2014 genocide, expelled those who had any sexual contact with non-Yazidis. Baba Sheikh, the religions patriarch, changed this when he said that those who had been in ISIS captivity should be honoured as “holy women”. This was hugely significant, removing some of the shame of speaking out about sexual violence and ensuring that ‘returnees’ were supported by their community.

In London, members of the Yazidi diaspora made long journeys from all over the UK to greet and honour Nadia and the two other girls, bringing small gifts, food and flowers. There was (almost) as much kissing and laugher as there were tears.

When Nadia talked, activists Ahmed Khuddiha and Mahar Nawaf and I struggled to retain the composure she kept throughout. Dressed entirely in black, she showed me scars still visible on her skin. Over the past four years, colour has slowly crept into her wardrobe and many of these wounds will have healed. But the toll of telling and retelling her story has left its own kind of mark.

Colour has slowly crept into her wardrobe and many of these wounds will have healed. But the toll of telling and retelling her story has left its own kind of mark.

Speaking out, Nadia explained that first day, is her way of fighting back. For her community, she has told her story again and again, expecting that assistance will follow. With notable exceptions including Germany’s Baden-Wuttenberg programme, that support remains largely elusive, inadequate, or in some cases, misdirected.

Inspired by meeting the survivors, I worked with Change.org and the brilliant Yazidi activist Rozin Khahil, a 17-year-old living in the UK, and in the middle of her A-levels at the time, to ask Theresa May, then Home Secretary, to help rescue 3,000 others still in captivity.

From Yazda activists, I received lists of missing people, including phone numbers (some of which still rang), and information about where they were being held. Yazda had shared this information with officials in Kurdistan, Iraq, the US and the UK, but no rescue missions were launched. They gave it to me in desperation, and I joined long email and whatsapp chains where people exchanged pictures of the missing and dead.

The advocacy and activism of Yazidi people in Iraq, and the diaspora, managed to free hundreds of those captured. In Duhok in late 2015, I visited camps where those freed from captivity lived, along with those displaced by the war. Conditions were appalling. I heard harrowing stories of sexual violence, torture and mass murder.

A woman stands in the Sharya refugee camp near the Northern Iraqi city of Dohuk, Iraq, October 2015. Photo: Stefanie Järkel/DPA/PA Images. All rights reserved.

The only groups I saw providing aid in the camps – a year after the genocide – were the United Nations and the Germans. The UK Foreign Office told me at the time that our government was giving “support to all victims and vulnerable persons, including Yazidis, rather than specifically to Yazidis or any other group”.

Though the Yazidis had been singled out by ISIS as a minority ethnic group, efforts to help them from the UK did not. The same sectarianism and discrimination that the Yazidis experienced in war, and had experienced in Kurdistan for generations, was also evident in approaches to assist them in the aftermath of genocide.

The UK gave to a pooled UN humanitarian fund, and said it supported sexual violence awareness projects in the region – but couldn’t give me many details, due to safety issues of local partners.

The same sectarianism and discrimination that the Yazidis experienced in war, and had experienced in Kurdistan for generations, was also evident in approaches to assist them in the aftermath of genocide.

Many Yazidis believe that money intended for them was siphoned off by the KRG to pay for the costly war their Peshmerga troops were, at the time, still losing. The PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) then consolidated their position in Sinjar, and took many Yazidis recruits within the ranks of their Syrian affiliate, the YPG. Some of these included ISIS escapees, to more tabloid fanfare.

Nadia’s resolve and furious eloquence in sharing her story soon turned her into a spokesperson of her Yazidi people. In 2016, at just 23, she was named the UN’s first Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking. She has been lauded by politicians and supported by celebrities – notably Amal Clooney, who wrote a moving forward to Nadia’s recently-published book, The Last Girl.

Nadia Murad with her book The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State, 2017. Photo: Luiz Rampelotto/SIPA USA/PA Images. All rights reserved.

When we met again in 2016, when Nadia spoke at the UK House of Commons at the invitation of MP Brendan O’Hara, she was being showered with gifts.
As she became more famous, her story and that of the Yazidi genocide in general became easier for me to pitch to editors. But her message, in my mind, began to get lost. The terminology used to describe her – sex slave, ISIS hostage, sexual violence victim – was muddy and de-emphasised her and other survivors’ heroism.

What was lost was the reason that survivors spoke up: their wider concern for their community. Each of the escapees I met all conveyed this very clearly. They had made a simple calculation, waging that telling their story would help their families. Despite the intense personal toll, they persisted.

But instead of the stories of heroism in escaping ISIS captivity, the media focus shifted to the forms of sexual torture they had endured. As a feminist and a freelance journalist, newly let loose from the comforts of the newsroom, I found this disempowering in so many ways.

I had so much information I was expected to hand over to big-name media partners I knew well enough not to trust. Relationships I spent months building, with people I cared about, I was expected to hand over for a pat on the head and a day rate. I knew they wanted to make sexual victimhood horror stories and I felt complicit. If I couldn’t see the impact, what was the point? By that stage, no one could say they ‘didn’t know’.

If I couldn’t see the impact, what was the point? By that stage, no one could say they ‘didn’t know’.

A low point was discussing a potential documentary with a male commissioner who insisted that Nadia (still maintaining her anonymity at the time) and the other girls would have to show their faces whilst detailing their experiences of sexual violence.

Otherwise, he insisted, we’d be denying viewers “anything to look at.” We discussed videos of sexual assaults I had heard that ISIS fighters were sharing. I got home and decided this wasn’t a search I wanted to undertake. I didn’t get commissioned.

I eventually stepped back, but Nadia kept on going, writing her book, meeting Hillary Clinton when she seemed about to be the first female US president, touring the world advocating on behalf of victims everywhere including meeting Boko Haram survivors. All whilst learning English and German and, earlier this year, getting engaged.

Like other Yazidi survivors I met, Nadia considers herself lucky. She talked more about what happened to her family and her community, than what happened to herself. She was in captivity for far less time than other girls, she would say. She’s safe and well in Germany; she has many nice things. I wasn’t to worry about her; there were many others.  

Her Nobel peace prize deserves to be celebrated, but it cannot make up for the serious lack of international commitment to her cause. The tacit deal she made with us – with me, as with every journalist she spoke to – has been broken by our collective inaction.

Help to find those missing is still needed. Resettlement programmes must be supported along with adequate aid and meaningful education facilities in camps; medical treatment for the displaced, support for those who want to return to Sinjar; and some kind of dignified identification of remains that still lie decaying in open air mass graves.

By telling her story so bravely, Nadia has done her part – again and again and again. Now it’s time for the international community to do theirs.

Lara Whyte is a reporter and award-winning documentary and news producer focusing on issues of youth, extremism and women’s rights. Originally from Belfast in northern Ireland, Lara is based in London. She is 50.50’s special projects editor working with our feminist investigative journalism fellows and tracking the backlash against sexual and reproductive rights. Find her on Twitter: @larawhyte.

Courtesy: https://www.opendemocracy.net
 

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A portrait of Indian poet and musician Rabindranath Tagore. Cherishsantosh/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

But as Bob Dylan might croon, “the Times they are mistaken.”

A Bengali literary giant who probably wrote even more songs preceded Dylan’s win by over a century. Rabindranath Tagore, a wildly talented Indian poet, painter and musician, took the prize in 1913.

The first musician (and first non-European) to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Tagore possessed an artistry – and lasting influence – that mirrored Dylan’s.
 

Bengal’s own renaissance man

Tagore was born in 1861 into a wealthy family and was a lifelong resident of Bengal, the East Indian state whose capital is Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). Born before the invention of film, Tagore was a keen observer of India’s emergence into the modern age; much of his work was influenced by new media and other cultures.

Like Dylan, Tagore was largely self-taught. And both were associated with nonviolent social change. Tagore was a supporter of Indian independence and a friend of Mahatma Gandhi, while Dylan penned much of the soundtrack for the 1960s protest movement. Each was a multitalented artist: writer, musician, visual artist and film composer. (Dylan is also a filmmaker.)

The Nobel website states that Tagore, though he wrote in many genres, was principally a poet who published more than 50 volumes of verse, as well as plays, short stories and novels. Tagore’s music isn’t mentioned until the last sentence, which says that the artist “also left … songs for which he wrote the music himself,” as if this much-loved body of work was no more than an afterthought.

But with over 2,000 songs to his name, Tagore’s output of music alone is extremely impressive. Many continue to be used in films, while three of his songs were chosen as national anthems by India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, an unparalleled achievement.
The Bengali national anthem, ‘Amar Sonar Bangla.’

Today, Tagore’s significance as a songwriter is undisputed. A YouTube search for Tagore’s songs, using the search term “Rabindra Sangeet” (Bengali for “Tagore songs”), yields about 234,000 hits.

Although Tagore was – and remains – a musical icon in India, this aspect of his work hasn’t been recognized in the West. Perhaps for this reason, music seems not to have had much or any influence on the 1913 Nobel committee, as judged by the presentation speech by committee chair Harald Hjärne. In fact, the word “music” is never used in the prize announcement. It is notable, however, that Hjärne says the work of Tagore’s that “especially arrested the attention of the selecting critics is the 1912 poetry collection ‘Gitanjali: Song Offerings.’”
 

Dylan: All about the songs

It may be that the Nobel organization’s downplaying of Tagore’s significance as a musician is part and parcel of the same thinking that has long delayed Dylan’s receiving the prize: uneasiness over subsuming song into the category of literature.

It’s rumored that Dylan was first nominated in 1996. If true, it means that Nobel committees have been wrestling with the idea of honoring this extraordinary lyricist for two decades. Rolling Stone called Dylan’s win “easily the most controversial award since they gave it to the guy who wrote ‘Lord of the Flies,’ which was controversial only because it came next after the immensely popular 1982 prize for Gabriel García Márquez.”

Unlike Tagore’s Nobel announcement, in which his songs were an afterthought, the presentation announcing Dylan’s award made it clear that aside from a handful of other literary contributions this prize is all about his music. And therein lies the controversy, with some saying he shouldn’t have won – that being a pop culture icon who wrote songs disqualifies him.

But like many great literary figures, Dylan is a man of letters; his songs abound with the names of those who came before him, whether it’s Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot in “Desolation Row” or James Joyce in “I Feel a Change Comin’ On.”

Why not celebrate Bob by being like Bob and reading something unfamiliar, great and historically important? Tagore’s “Gitanjali,” his most famous collection of poems, is available in the poet’s own English translation, with an introduction by William Butler Yeats (who won his own Nobel in literature in 1923). And YouTube is a great repository for some of Tagore’s most celebrated songs (search for “Rabindra Sangeet”).

Many music lovers have long hoped that the parameters of literature might be writ a bit larger to include song. While Dylan’s win is certainly an affirmation, remembering that he’s not the first can only pave the way for more musicians to win in years to come.

Author is Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor of Music, University of Minnesota

This article was first published on The Conversation

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Politically I do not know where he stands today.'

Image:  Pierre Guillaud/AFP

I’m not really sure how I feel about Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for literature. Firstly, there is nothing sacred about Nobel, whose fortune was made by inventing, manufacturing and selling military explosives. We can go past that one as it’s an old story and even war profits may theoretically be used for peace. Were they? Here again we get into uncomfortable territory. Henry Kissinger won a Nobel Peace Prize when a less deserving candidate must have been hard to find. More recently, Barack Obama did. Charming as he may be, his peace record is abysmal.

Wait. We are not talking of the Nobel Peace Prize here. That, the Bob Dylan of the 1960s may well have deserved for songs like Blowing in the Wind, Masters of War, With God on Our Side, The Times They Are A'Changing or civil rights songs like Oxford Town and Only a Pawn in their Game”. I grew up with these songs. We sang them at protest rallies when I was a student in America fighting against the Viet Nam war. Best of all, you didn’t need to be a great guitarist to learn the few chords that most early Dylan songs required.

To be truthful, at the very beginning of my introduction to his work, almost anybody sounded better than Dylan when they sang his songs. There were so very many who did, from Joan Baez to the Byrds and Peter, Paul and Mary. At least when they sang, you could understand the words. Not so at first for me with Dylan. But soon, the Dylan delivery, the nasal twang and the long, free verse mouthed without breaking for breath, interspersed with short bursts of a harmonica that seemed to care nothing for its audience’s pre-conceived ideas of music, grew on me. And obviously I wasn’t the only one. Millions around the globe were hooked. The poetry and the music were a package, inseparable. When you got a better voice, or a more technically accomplished musician, you didn’t feel the words in the same way.
 

The man and his art

So much for Dylan the musician and poet. What of the man? The politically charged Dylan gave way to the lover who either perennially walked out of relationships or made a brave face as others walked out on him. Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right is a classic of that genre. His fierce independence politically and personally meant that no one could take him for granted, including fans like me. So we suffered as he went from being the Lefty pacifist, to becoming a born-again Christian, to asserting his Jewish roots as Robert Zimmerman. Frankly I never enjoyed these later avatars though recognising his right to explore himself in every way that he wanted to.

Musically, of course, he was able to reinvent himself from acoustic folk to electric rock and for a long while that created a delicious amalgam best exemplified by the album Blonde on Blonde. Politically I do not know where he stands today. Is he a critic of the American war machine that created Bin Laden to fight communists, that first armed Saddam Hussain and then invaded Iraq to capture natural resources, that allies with Israel and Saudi Arabia to create Islamic jihad and recolonise the world? There is no evidence of this in his music today. This is not the Dylan of the '60s and '70s.

Luckily he has not won a Nobel Peace Prize. That I would gladly have seen on musicians like Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger or even Joan Baez.

This is a prize for literature. For his unique blend of poetry and music and his precocious ability to capture the pulse of his times. That I can celebrate. 40 saal der, par durust. (40 years late, but nevertheless right). To say it in Dylan’s words:

May your hands always be busy
May your feet always be swift
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift
May your heart always be joyful
And may your song always be sung
May you stay forever young.

Courtesy: Scroll.in

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BAGHDAD, March 12: If the invasion that the Pentagon has dubbed "Operation Shock and Awe" commences, Charlie Liteky is unlikely to feel either.He expects the United States to bomb Iraq. He expects noise and destruction more powerful and frightening than he has ever known. He expects the earth to shake and houses to go dark and children to scream themselves hoarse.

But Liteky sounds more determined than frightened.

Like 20 other members of the Chicago-based Iraq Peace Team who remain in Baghdad even as hostilities appear certain, Liteky abhors cluster bombs, cruise missiles and the civil unrest that combat causes. As a decorated Vietnam veteran, he knows firsthand the chaos and carnage of war.

That’s precisely why he sounded elated Tuesday morning when he told his wife that the Iraqi government had extended his tourist visa 10 days and is likely to extend it again, long enough for him to help Iraqi children through the difficult time.

Most of the peace activists who descended by the hundreds on Baghdad this fall and winter have fled. Those who remain have no intentions of leaving. They are anchored to the bull’s-eye despite the fact – or maybe because of it – that the World Health Organization predicts 1,00,000 Iraqis could die.

"I’m here because I hear the children cry," Liteky said. "In my mind … I imagine the bombing and the noise and the windows shattering and something coming down from the ceiling and children looking up and parents grabbing them and fear being transferred from parents to children."

Save yourselves

Washington has warned the activists to clear out. The Pentagon has said its assault will leave no place in Baghdad to hide. So the rundown hotels that enjoyed full houses as recently as February are shuttering their windows.

At the Hotel Al-Fanar on the Tigris river, the Iraq Peace Team is moving to the lower floors because the eight-storey building is old and seems unsteady. Its bomb shelter is a musty basement that stores the hotel’s chemical cleaning supplies.

Members of the peace team have signed an ominous-sounding contract: "In the event of your death, you agree to your body not being returned to your own country but being disposed of in the most convenient way."

They have had awkward discussions about what to do with the corpses that might collect around them. Wrap the dead in hotel drapes, they decided. Pray for help.

Iraq Peace Team founder Kathy Kelly had a photo enlarged that shows her with some of her dearest friends — the family of an Iraqi widow and her nine children. The photo is being mailed to Kelly’s mother in Chicago.

"She can see by that photo that I am very, very happy," Kelly said, sounding serenely calm despite the gathering storm.

On Monday, Kelly helped an Iraqi friend pack to leave. Teacher and artist Amal Alwan rushed her three young children into a taxi and paid $300 for the 10-hour drive from Baghdad to Damascus, Syria. Alwan doesn’t have relatives in Syria and couldn’t tell the cabbie exactly where to go.

"She doesn’t have a clue where she will stay, but she can’t possibly stay in Baghdad, not with children," Kelly said. "Her house is next to a communications centre."

As Kelly spoke it was almost 1.30 a.m. on Tuesday in Baghdad and she was awake reading "A Fine Balance," a novel about civil war in India. She planned to rise six hours later for a daily prayer meeting, then go with the peace team to the United Nations offices in Baghdad. They would hold aloft several enlarged photos of Iraqi families.

Each photo would carry a single question: "Doomed?"

"I don’t have the slightest sense of not belonging exactly where I am right now," said Kelly, 50, a three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee. "The thought of leaving has not even crossed my mind."

The Pentagon says the presence of US pacifists will not deter the course of war. Although there are no plans to arrest them for violating sanctions on Iraq by travelling to Baghdad, officials throughout the US government, from the White House to the State Department to the Pentagon, sound confused about how to best to deal with them.

"There’s not a whole lot of precedence," said Pentagon spokesman Lt. Dan Hetlage. "It’s not like you had human shields protecting the Taliban."

Armed for war

Members of the Iraq Peace Team say they are as prepared for war as they will ever be. They have "crash kits" packed neatly and set by their hotel doors. Liteky’s is the size of carry-on luggage. It bulges with bandages, antibiotics, water-purification tablets, three litres of water, dried fruit, canned tuna, biscuits, power bars and a short-wave radio.

He hopes to ride out Operation Shock and Awe in Baghdad’s Orphanage of the Sisters of Mother Teresa. Or at least to rush there as soon as the bombing subsides. He’s compelled to at least try to quell the inevitable trembling of the children.

"I’d rather die doing something," he told his wife, Judy, "then die … in some old folks home."

Liteky, 72, is a former Roman Catholic priest and Vietnam war hero awarded the congressional Medal of Honor for crawling under volleys of gunfire in 1967 to rescue 23 injured US soldiers.

According to army reports, during the firefight near Phuoc-Lac the wounded became too heavy to carry so Liteky turned onto his back in the mud, pulled the men on top of him and crawled backward under gunfire, using only his heels and elbows.

He’s plenty scared of war, he said, but his fear is for the children.

When the attack comes, he said, "the most beautiful thing that can happen for me is if I am permitted to be at the orphanage. At least I could pick the children up, hold them, and try to let my calm and love transfer to them."

Liteky speaks every morning to his wife, 11 time zones away, in San Francisco. Since arriving in Baghdad three weeks ago, it has become increasingly difficult to hang up the phone. On Tuesday they spoke for 40 minutes, said goodbye twice, and kept talking.

"I don’t have a death wish," he said in an interview Monday. "I have everything to live for. I have a wonderful wife and a wonderful life back home."

Liteky and his wife have thought for a week that the invasion of Iraq would begin sometime between March 10 and 17. So when Judy Liteky, a math teacher at a community college, left for work on Monday, she put a bumper sticker on her car.

"Attack Iraq? No!," it read.

"The bumper sticker made me feel just a little bit better," she said

Kelly heard late Monday that the United Nations would evacuate most of its remaining office staff on Tuesday. Still, she sounded steadfast in her decision to stay in Baghdad, even if it meant dying.

"A lot of people are concerned for the foreigners who remain here; you wonder if anyone is concerned for these very ordinary Iraqi people who are going to die here," she said.

When photographer Thorne Anderson chose to travel to Baghdad with Kelly in January to document the people and the war, he informed his family of the trip in an e-mail.

Anderson, who has freelanced for Gannett News Service, Newsweek, The New York Times and other publications, said he expected a little preaching, lots of concern, and some pleas to reconsider.

Instead, his father, the Rev. Eade Anderson of Montreat, N.C., was succinct in his reply.

"I’ve always said life shouldn’t be wasted on the small things," he wrote in an e-mail. "Love, Dad."

( March 12, 2003, Gannett News Service, http://www.commondreams.org/

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 2003 Year 9  No. 85, Cover Story 3

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"The present moment is the only moment available to us, and it is the door to all moments." – Thich Nhat Hanh

I am in Baghdad with the Iraq Peace Team, and we
will stay here throughout any war. We will share the risks of the millions who live here, and do our best to be a voice for them to the world. Our risks are uncertain. Thousands here will surely die. But most Iraqis will survive, and so too, I hope, will I.

A banner the government put up a few blocks from where we stay reads simply, "Baghdad: Where the World Comes for Peace."

It’s meant as propaganda, I’m sure, flattering Saddam Hussein. But without knowing it, it states a simple truth: that the world must be present for peace. We must be present in Baghdad as in America – in Kashmir or Chechnya, the Great Lakes, Palestine and Colombia – where there is war, and rumours of war, we must be present to build peace.

We are present. My country may arrest me as a traitor, or kill me during saturation bombing, or shoot me during an invasion. The Iraqis may arrest me as a spy, or cause or use my death for propaganda. Civil unrest and mob violence may claim me. I may be maimed. I may be killed.

I am nervous. I am scared. I am hopeful. I am joyous, and I joyously delight in the wonder that is my life. I love being alive. I love the splendor of our world, the beauty of our bodies, and the miracle of our minds. I bless the world for making me, and I bless the world for taking me. I feed myself on the fellowship we inspirit, in standing one with another in this, this present moment, each moment unfolding to its own best time.

Different things move different members of our team, but all of us are here out of deep concern for the suffering of our brothers and sisters in Iraq. Twenty years of almost constant war, and 12 years of brutal sanctions, have killed hundreds of thousands of innocents in Iraq. We are here, today, because most of the world refused to be present, then. What more right do I as an American have to leave than all the people I’ve come to love in Iraq? An accident of birth that gives me a free pass throughout the world?

All of us are here out of a deep commitment to nonviolence. Peace is not an abstract value that we should just quietly express a hope for. It takes work. It takes courage. It takes joy.

Peace takes risks.

War is catastrophe. It is terrorism on a truly, massive scale. It is the physical, political and spiritual devastation of entire peoples. War is the imposition of such massive, deadly violence so as to force the political solutions of one nation upon another. War is the antithesis of democracy and freedom. War is the most bloody, undemocratic, and violently repressive of all human institutions.

War is catastrophe. Why choose catastrophe?

Even the threat of war is devastating. On March 11, when we visited a maternity hospital run by the Dominican sisters here in Baghdad, we found that eight new mothers that day had demanded to have their babies by Caesarian section — they didn’t want to give birth during the war. Six others spontaneously aborted the same day. Is this spirit of liberation?

Don’t ask me where I find the courage to be present in Iraq on the eve of war. Five million people call Baghdad home. Twenty-four million human beings live in Iraq. Instead, ask the politicians — on every side — where they find the nerve to put so many human beings at such terrible risk.

We’re here for these people, as we’re here for the American people. The violence George Bush starts in Iraq will not stop in Iraq. The senseless brutality of this war signals future crimes of still greater inhumanity. If we risk nothing to prevent this, it will happen. If we would have peace, we must work as hard, and risk as much, as the warmakers do for destruction.

Pacifism isn’t passive. It’s a radical challenge to all aspects of worldly power. Non-violence can prevent catastrophe. Nonviolence multiplies opportunities a thousand-fold, until seemingly insignificant events converge to tumble the tyranny of fears that violence plants within our hearts. Where violence denies freedom, destroys community, restricts choices — we must be present: cultivating our love, our active love, for our entire family of humanity.

We are daily visiting with families here in Iraq. We are daily visiting hospitals here in Iraq, and doing arts and crafts with the children. We are visiting elementary schools and high schools. We are fostering community. We are furthering connections. We are creating space for peace.

We are not "human shields." We are not here simply in opposition to war. We are a dynamic, living presence — our own small affirmation of the joy of being alive. Slowly stumbling, joyous and triumphant, full of all the doubts and failings all people hold in common – our presence here is a thundering, gentle call, to Americans as to Iraqis, of the affirmation of life.

We must not concede war to the killers. War is not liberation. It is not peace. War is devastation and death.

Thuraya, a brilliant, young girl whom I’ve come to love, recently wrote in her diary:

"We don’t know what is going to happen. We might die, and maybe we are living our last days in life. I hope that everyone who reads my diary remembers me and knows that there was an Iraqi girl who had many dreams in her life…"

Dream with us of a world where we do not let violence rule our lives. Work with us for a world where violence does not rule our lives. Peace is not an abstract concept. We are a concrete, tangible reality. We the peoples of our common world, through the relationships we build with each other, and the risks we take for one another — we are peace.

Our team here doesn’t know what is going to happen any more than does Thuraya. We too may die. But in her name, in this moment, at the intersection of all our lives, we send you this simple message: We are peace, and we are present. n

(Ramzi Kysia is an Arab American peace activist and writer. He is currently in Iraq with the Iraq Peace Team (www.iraqpeaceteam.org), a project to keep international peaceworkers to Iraq prior to, during, and after any future US attack, in order to be a voice for the Iraqi people. The Iraq Peace Team can be reached through info@vitw.org)

Archived from Communalism Combat, March 2003 Year 9  No. 85, Cover Story 4

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