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These are regular editorials
produced alongside the corresponding issues on Nonviolent
News. |
Also in this editorial:
“Blair make or break offer to Ulster”
(sic) went the heading in the Belfast Telegraph of 16th February.
If you looked hard enough in the newspapers of 1974-76 you
could probably find an almost identical headline with the
exception of “Wilson” substituted for “Blair”.
Northern Ireland has had so many ‘makes or breaks’
over more than 35 years that it is hard to believe anything
is going to make it, or anything is the ‘last offer’.
And proposals for a ‘shadow assembly’, pending
full restoration, have not gone down well with Sinn Féin
or the SDLP.
If you looked at the DUP’s devolution
proposals you would see proposals for an assembly but without
the power-sharing executive that the Good Friday Agreement
set up. There are a couple of possibilities the DUP outlines
– low level powers for an assembly and a possible shadow
executive or British ministers appearing before assembly committees.
The DUP says it is unwilling to share power with Sinn Féin
while the ‘shadow of the gunman’ is still around
and there is republican involvement in criminality. Ian Paisley
said the DUP’s proposals are a simple take it or leave
it affair (and expressed thus); this seems a bit reminiscent
of a child holding a ball refusing to let others play with
it because everyone else wants to play a different game. Certainly
the DUP is the political party with the largest support in
Northern Ireland but that does not entitle it to block progress
for everyone else. Obviously the DUP is trying to show it’s
the party with the veto and avoid anything that might taint
it with the Good Friday Agreement. How long the DUP will play
the veto game is anyone’s guess.
The other parties, certainly on the nationalist
side, are unwilling to settle for an assembly with little
or no powers, and the fact is that when the Good Friday system
was up and running it was popular among all parties for bringing
local control (despite misgivings and DUP manoeuvring, and
other issues came to the fore which shut it down, including
the tardiness of the IRA in disarming). As we have stated
before, the Good Friday Agreement system was certainly not
perfect and if reinstated would need to be moved beyond in
due course; the lack of opposition and the rigid checks and
balances involved are inadequate in the long run. However
we are not in the long run, we’re not even in the short
run, and the DUP stand is not going to help lift off. The
DUP has its principles but cooperation across the board (except
on terms unacceptable to nationalists) does not seem to be
one of them. Tony Blair is going to have to come up with plenty
more make or break offers.
The involvement of the Irish army in EU rapid response battlegroups,
announced by the government in early February, marks a new
departure ‘from’ or ‘for’ Irish neutrality,
depending on your point of view. This relates to a variety
of areas including other proposals within the EU, to the Irish
government’s agreement in principle to be involved in
2004, and to a lesser extent to the UN.
There are dangers in this development. Firstly,
there is the danger that the ‘triple lock’ of
UN, Dáil and government approval being needed before
an operation is undertaken by Irish forces will be undermined
if things develop in a certain way either within this proposal
or other EU developments.. Willie O’Dea, as Minister
for Defence, has committed himself strongly to the continuation
of that triple lock, and explains the new involvement as support
for the UN and a move to prevent atrocities such as Rwanda
and Srebrenica. But once into the system things may change
and who knows what operations the EU will try to engage in
some time in the future, and if our ecosystem does teeter
or collapse then resource wars may be the in thing some decades
from now. Any weakening of that triple lock could make the
Irish army simply a part of an EU army which acts in the interest
of the EU and not of conflict resolution or justice.
Secondly, military ‘peacekeeping’,
while it may possibly keep warring factions apart, is not
a solution to the issues behind the violence. “Irish
soldiers will help to enforce peace” went a headline
in the ‘Irish Times’ (10/2/06) in a very particular
understanding of ‘peace’; perhaps they can keep
sides apart but ‘enforcing peace’ is a somewhat
difficult concept to grasp, better translated as ‘combat’
(after initial involvement, the battlegroups could hand over
to longer term UN military ‘peacekeeping’ missions).
This move also has to be seen in the context
of current Irish government policies on the international
stage, such as giving the USA free and unregulated use of
Shannon airport through which 330,000 US troops passed last
year (not to mention any possible detainees en route to torture).
There is no neutrality there in giving the USA the only possible
facility it could want in Ireland. The Irish government has
also treated ordinary citizens in a cavalier fashion in joining
the NATO-led ‘Partnership for Peace’ despite Fianna
Fail’s pledge not to do so without a referendum. It
is in these contexts that such new developments should be
considered.
But another important question needs to be asked.
Why is a comparable amount of money not being put by the Irish
government into developing early nonviolent interventions
in conflict, training large numbers of people as monitors
and mediators (by this we mean local people in areas of possible
conflict and not necessarily Irish people – though that
would be no harm either), and looking at conflict from a non-military
point of view? And in an unjust, unequal world which may have
mounting problems of ecological refugees and migration forced
by poverty, why are the causes of conflict not being dealt
with in a holistic way? Putting your eggs in the military
basket is not what is most needed in the world at the moment
but it is, unfortunately, the only thing some people see as
an intervention method.
Larry Speight brings us his monthly column:
A few days ago I went for a walk with my nearly
5-year old daughter Kathleen around Lough Achork in the hills
of County Fermanagh. It was a mild sunny afternoon, and as
well as enjoying some exercise, I thought it would be good
for us to share the experience of early spring together, looking
at the first leaves on bush and tree, with an eye for awakening
flowers, and the chance of seeing a bird or mammal. I took
my camera and Kathleen, learning how to write the letters
of the alphabet, took a pen and notebook, which she duly used,
saying that she was taking notes about the trees and grass.
The walk around the Lough, at the bottom of a bowl formed
by high hills, takes about twenty minutes at a leisurely pace.
Most of those who come to visit are fishermen. Knowing from
past experience that most of them don’t respect the
place they come to enjoy I took a shopping bag with us to
pick up the litter I expected to find. By the time we completed
the circumference of the Lough our bag was brimming with empty
beer cans, soft drink bottles, chocolate wrappers, cigarette
packets, crisp packets and plastic bags. In spite of this
caring for nature chore we enjoyed the walk - our engagement
with nonhuman nature, taking the time to stand still and listen,
and of course play.
At dusk I went for a run along a forest path
I had not ran on for awhile and to my dismay found extensive
fly tipping that included bales of hay, a mattresses, a hover,
stacks of newspapers and toys, including two or three dolls.
I reflected on the message the father of the girl who owned
the discarded toys gave her when she came to know that they,
along with the rest of the household ‘waste’,
had been dumped in the forest. It could not have been one
other than that a persons’ interests are tightly drawn,
and do not include respect for the environment - the commons
we all share. The contrasting experiences of the day illustrate
how, by our everyday behaviour we educate the next generation,
and in this affect the biosphere we are a part of long after
we are dead.
On my run I reflected that if people are so
uncaring as to spread their litter around the countryside,
when with little effort they could dispose of it properly,
what chance is there that the radical personal changes needed
to tackle serious environmental problems such as global warming,
water scarcity, and the rapid loss of biodiversity would ever
be taken. It was a disheartening thought on which to end the
day.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Resistance to the war machine
continues in the USA – often at great personal cost
- but it is usually inadequately reported, if at all. Here
Clare Hanrahan reports on School of the Americas trials –
by Clare Hanrahan
Columbus, Georgia
Thirty four peaceful protesters arrested during
the November 20, 2005, vigil at the gates of Fort Benning,
Georgia, faced trial before Federal Magistrate G. Mallon Faircloth
on January 30th and 31st in Columbus, Georgia. All defendants
were found guilty and face prison or probation. This year,
prosecutors charged one activist with “Aiding and Abetting.”
According to the U.S. Criminal Code, “Whoever aids,
abets, counsels, commands, induces or procures the commission
of an offense, is punishable as a principal.”
“It seems possible that others in our
movement could receive similar charges,” SOA Watch Events
and Outreach Coordinator Eric LeCompte commented after the
convictions. “Now the government knows they can use
this charge against us and the judge will give the maximum
prison sentence. We sensed for some time that the government
has attempted to piece together a Conspiracy case against
SOA Watch, but the Aiding and Abetting charge doesn't seem
to carry the burden of proof that a Conspiracy charge would
carry.”
According to the law, “Mere encouragement or assistance
is sufficient participation in the criminal act” for
a defendant to be prosecuted for aiding and abetting.
Each November, human rights activists from throughout
the United States assemble at the gates of Fort Benning to
call for closure of the U.S. Army School of the Americas,
known officially as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security
Cooperation. Demands include closing the Institute, an investigation
into the human rights abuses traced to graduates, and a change
in U.S. foreign policy in Central and South America.
In past years, many thousands have crossed onto
the Fort Benning Military Reservation to demonstrate civil
resistance to the notorious counter-insurgency school harbored
inside. Nineteen thousand gathered for the November 18-20,
2005, vigil—the largest in the 16-year campaign of the
School of the Americas Watch organization.
According to a report by the SOA Watch Legal
Collective, forty-one people were arrested in connection with
the vigil. Thirty seven faced Federal charges. Of those thirty
seven, thirty four were charged with crossing onto the base,
two were charged with damaging the fence, and one person was
charged with assisting others in line crossing. Three were
arrested at the Sunday evening solidarity vigil at the Muscogee
county jail.
One person, Ed Lewinson, 73, a retired professor,
crossed onto the base for a third time, according to the Legal
Collective. “Again this year, Mr. Lewinson was not charged,
probably because the government fears the bad publicity associated
with prosecuting a person who is blind.”
Defendants, their families and supporters, as
well as numerous formerly imprisoned SOA resisters, arrived
in Columbus several days prior to the January trials to provide
mutual support and to consult with a team of pro bono attorneys
and legal advisors, including Loyola University Law Professor
Bill Quigley, who arrived from Haiti the night before the
trials after working with the Institute of Justice and Democracy
to win the release of Haitian political prisoner Father Gerard
Jean-Juste, arrested for “incendiary sermons,”
and “public clamor,” by the Haitian coup government.
On the first day of the SOA trials, defendants
and supporters walked silently from the hotel to the U.S.
Federal Courthouse in a several blocks long show of solidarity.
Supporters, in turn, filled the 80 or so seats available on
the long oak benches of the narrow courtroom for two days
of trials held in the same building where Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr. had appeared during the civil rights years to appeal
for the right to march through Georgia.
We learned the sad news of the death of Mrs.
Coretta Scott King from the massive, flat-screen television
in the Howard Johnson hotel before the second day of trials
as we sat among tables of soldiers from nearby Fort Benning
to share the coffee and grits, cereal and juice from the hotel
breakfast bar.
The U.S. Courthouse in Columbus, Georgia, a
1930's era, three-story building just blocks from the Chattahoochee
River, again became both a forum for truth tellers and an
instrument for repression of political dissent as one defendant
after the other was found guilty and offered the opportunity
to address the court prior to sentencing.
“If the voices of this courtroom were
heard throughout this country,” Franciscan Friar Jerome
Zawada, 68, of Cedar Lake, Indiana, told the judge, “the
SOA/WHINSEC would be shut down tomorrow.” Zawada, who
completed a six months sentence for a 2002 conviction, was
sentenced to another six months prison time, with credit for
the 63 days he had already served in the Muscogee County Jail.
This year’s group of defendants, between
19 and 81 years of age, include a film maker and a janitor,
two Franciscan Friars, several members of Witness for Peace
and Christian Peacemaker Team delegations, a Quaker, a nurse,
and a nun, a Georgetown University student who was suspended
by university officials for his act of civil dissent, several
Catholic Workers who share their lives in service among the
poor, a single mother of a teenage daughter, a newspaper reporter
who stepped away from a twenty-five year career to participate
in the civil resistance protest, a member of Veterans for
Peace, a war tax resister, and a mother of 14 who refused
bail following her November arrest and was brought before
the judge directly from the Muscogee County Jail after 72
difficult days of incarceration.
All but one of the defendants had engaged in
civil resistance by crossing over or under a perimeter fence
into the immediate custody of military authorities. Each had
planned and prepared for the nonviolent crossing, and were
charged with violation of 18 US Code 1382, a misdemeanor trespass
offense.
They joined 231 others who have been prosecuted
and convicted for similar acts of peaceful dissent at the
military installation. Since 1990, these human rights activists
have spent over 81 years of prison time in 199 prison sentences
served by 181 different individuals. Forty-seven different
individuals have served 50 years of probation and three have
been sentenced to home confinement, according to statistics
provided by the SOA Watch organization.
The defendants were prosecuted by a team led
by a military JAG officer, dressed in civilian clothes. She
was acting as a civilian attorney, according to the Judge,
who addressed her as Captain. Columbus, Georgia, police officers
also testified during the trials and were responsible for
arresting several individuals on the city-side of the fence
and turning them over to military authorities, further blurring
the distinctions between civilian and military authority.
Kenneth Crowley, 64, of Washington, DC, the
Delegations Coordinator for Witness for Peace, faced prosecution
on the charge of “Aiding and Abetting.” This is
the first time this charge has been leveled against a participant
in the SOA Watch-sponsored gathering. Crowley, who served
a six month prison sentence for crossing the line in 2002,
testified that he responded to a request from 66 year old
defendant Gail Phares, to lift the fence that had fallen on
her back as she attempted to crawl under it onto Fort Benning
property. Prosecutors presented a surveillance video tape
of the action taken by Columbus police that allegedly showed
three others following Phares under the fence as Crowley held
it up.
“I couldn’t have just let it drop
on their backs,” Crowley told the Judge.
Unlike the other defendants, who received a
verbal warning prior to crossing, Crowley had not been warned
that holding the fence could result in his arrest, and he
had not come to Fort Benning with an intention to participate
in civil disobedience.
“Ignorance of law is not a legal defense,”
the prosecutor argued, and “not expecting to be arrested
is no legal defense. … if the government proves he knowingly
assisted others in violation of the law, the defendant is
equally culpable.”
Arguing for the defense, Bill Quigley said,
“If he is guilty of anything, he is guilty of being
a gentleman and trying to keep a fence from hurting someone.”
“This is the first time in my 45 years
judicial career where chivalry has been used as a defense,”
Judge Faircloth quipped prior to issuing a guilty verdict.
“There is always a place for politeness and chivalry
in this world; nonetheless, I don’t buy the chivalry
defense. I consider this a grievous offense.” He sentenced
Crowley to six months imprisonment with a $1,000 fine.
Gail Phares of Raleigh, North Carolina, speaking
in a press conference before the trial said, "In my 40
years of experience in Latin America, I've witnessed a number
of patterns repeated over and over which trace death, torture
and suffering back to troops trained in counter-insurgency
warfare by the U.S. military, many of whom were trained at
the School of the Americas."
Taking the stand at her trial, Phares, a founding
member of Witness for Peace, testified, “I’m so
tired of seeing this pattern. …We are training an Army
allied with paramilitary death squads to focus on the civilian
population. In Colombia, three million people have been displaced.
This is the worst humanitarian crisis in this hemisphere.
Thousands are being massacred and tortured and assassinated.
…Is it a crime to call attention to a crime, to call
attention to genocide?
Turning to face Judge Faircloth Phares said,
“On December 2, 1980, one of my closest friends, Sister
Maura Clark, was raped and murdered by graduates of the SOA.”
In tears, she continued, “Maura Clark was my friend.
… When will we U.S. citizens and people of faith rise
up and demand that our government stop this pattern?”
During the course of the trial, Judge Faircloth
reminded those assembled that “the right to demonstrate
before the front gate has been upheld by this court.”
He attempted to excuse his judgments and harsh sentencing
by declaring, “It’s not in my hands. I have to
deal with the practical application of 18 USC 1382.”
Robert Call, 72, a former priest and an “off-off
Broadway actor,” from Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey,
told the Judge, “It is right, quite civilly, to disobey
a ‘No Trespassing’ sign and commit a Federal misdemeanor
in order to send a message of disapproval. When I crawled
under the Fort Benning fence, my demeanor was somewhat amiss.
I admit it. But it was right to do it.”
Prior to receiving a sentence of three months,
Call told the Judge, “I went to Guatemala as a Witness
for Peace and I met a group of Mayan women who had watched
uniformed soldiers shoot their husbands dead. I went to Mexico
and met people driven out of Guatemala and still afraid to
go back. When Rios Montt, an alumnus of the School of the
Americas, was President of Guatemala, he saw to the destruction
of over six hundred Indian villages, killing hundreds of thousands
and driving two hundred thousand to refuge in Mexico.”
Writer David A. Sylvester, 54, of Oakland, California,
characterizes the SOA as “one of the most horrific examples
of how this society lives out a lie, violating its members’
personal and social integrity.”
Sylvester took a voluntary lay off from his
work as a newspaper reporter to participate in the November
action at the gates. “It freed me from restraints of
alleged neutrality,” he said. “We’re in
moral crises in this country. There comes a time when one
must join the fight.”
Before being sentenced to three months prison
and a $500 fine, Sylvester told the judge, “When I first
heard about Abu Ghraib and saw the photos, at that moment
the line crossed me. I had already been violated by the time
I got to Fort Benning.”
On January 23, 2006, a week before the SOA trials,
Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer Jr, was spared a prison
sentence by a six-member military panel at Fort Carson, Colorado,
for torturing to death Iraqi Major General Abed Hamed Mowhoush
by covering his head with a sleeping bag, binding him with
electric cord, and sitting on his chest until he died.
Brevard, North Carolina, resident Linda Mashburn,
a nurse and human rights activist, told the judge in her sentencing
statement, “Prison for three or six months is not such
a terrible ordeal to face if my action will publicize the
fact that the U.S. has been running the largest training school
for terrorism in the world for the last 50 plus years.”
Mashburn was sentenced to three months imprisonment.
“By crossing the line to call for the
closure of the SOA/WHINSEC,” according to the SOA Watch
Legal Collective, the defendants “were complying with
the highest laws, international laws and laws of conscience.
In their actions they were demanding that our country abide
by the Convention Against Torture, which was ratified by the
U.S. in 1994. It states that ‘no exceptional circumstances
whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal
political instability or any other public emergency, may be
invoked as a justification of torture,’ and that orders
from superiors ‘may not be invoked as a justification
of torture.’"
Clare Hanrahan served six months at Alderson
Federal Prison Camp as an SOA prisoner. She is a free-lance
writer and author of Jailed for Justice: A Woman’s Guide
to Federal Prison Camp. She can be reached through her website:
www.celticwordcraft.com
Jim McGovern (D-MA) reintroduced legislation
in the 109th Congress to suspend operations at the School
of the Americas/ WHINSEC. HR 1217, "The Latin America
Military Training Review Act of 2005," has 124 bi-partisan
co-sponsors. For more information on the SOA/WHINSEC and to
support the prisoners, contact: www.soaw.org
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