by Beth Pyles

It was Pentecost.* Our team gathered for prayer, then left to conduct a nonviolence and reconciliation training with people from the Kurdish and surrounding governorates.  The participants came from Tikrit, Mosul, and Kirkuk.  They had lived in Baghdad and Kurdish villages.  A few spoke English, most Arabic, some Kurdish, and one of us, Cantonese.  

We wondered how we would communicate. 

by Michele Naar-Obed

CPTers began working in the Kurdish North of Iraq in 2006.  Since then, both Turkey and Iran have launched military attacks on northern border villages.  Car bombings have occurred in Suleimaniya, where the team is based, and the capital city Erbil.  Kirkuk, not part of the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), is also a frequent target of bombings that seem to increase whenever the referendum to make it part of the KRG comes close to a vote.  The memories of genocidal attacks against the Kurds by Saddam's Ba'ath Party are still fresh in the Kurdish collective memory.

by Michele Naar-Obed

Throughout the mountains in northern Iraq, villagers flee from ongoing bombing and shelling by Turkish forces.  Turkey's battles with the Kurdish Worker Party (PKK) continue to wreak havoc on the villagers caught in the crossfire.  They stream south to Internally Displaced People's (IDP) camps; when there is a lull in the bombing, they stream back up the mountain to their homes.

by Chihchun Yuan

I rest my hand to where my heart is and then raise it to the sky, saying, "Choni?  Bashi?  (How are you?  Good?)"  This is the greeting that the team in Northern Iraqi Kurdistan receives everyday from the Kurdish people.  Think of it: we, the most fortunate of people, are receiving sincere blessings from those suffering afflictions.

In 1962, the Islamic Charitable Society (ICS) was established in Hebron to take care of orphans.  Today the charity serves 7000 children.  Some 240 boys and girls aged 5-18 live at two orphanages, while thousands of other children, many of whom have lost at least one parent, receive schooling, food and clothing from the charity.  To support their work with the children, the ICS runs several small businesses including a bakery which provides bread to the orphanages, a sewing workshop where students produce beautiful coats and dresses, a warehouse which stores goods from foreign donors, and a 30-unit apartment building.

#1: In 1948, in order for Israel to be created as a Jewish state, hundreds of Arabic villages were ethnically cleansed.  The hundreds of thousands who fled would never be allowed back to their homes, despite repeated UN resolutions. They and their families still live in refugee camps all over the region. On 15 May, Palestinians in Aida camp, near Bethlehem, joined their compatriots in commemorating this event, in Arabic called the Nakba, or Catastrophe, by sending up clouds of black balloons.

by Maureen Jack

On March 26, 2008, one of CPT's shepherd friends was out with his flock below the Hill 833 Israeli settlement outpost.  Bullets from the outpost whizzed near him, hitting two sheep and one goat.  Given that the communities in the area rely on subsistence farming and grazing, as their ancestors did before them, the loss of any animal threatens a family's economic survival.

by Eileen Hanson

The South Hebron Hills are a place of great beauty.  Gazelles roam the hillsides; birds are abundant in the sky.  When you look out over the hills, you can see ancient Palestinian villages where people are still living a subsistence lifestyle.  They have flocks of sheep and goats.  They market lambs, and the women make delicious cheese and butter.  In springtime, the valleys are brilliant green with crops of wheat and barley.

by Emily McClanahan

Ghosts haunt the Arizona desert.  Participants in CPT's Borderlands Delegation went in search of them.  We spotted their footprints on the migrant trails, tennis shoe-shaped evidence of their presence in the area.  We collected their water bottles, discarded when empty to lighten the load of a four-day journey over the hot and thorny terrain to Tucson.  We drove past the sentinels in Border Patrol uniforms and SUVs, diligent in their average of 1,000 arrests per day, ever striving to stop more of the estimated 2,000 that slip past them.

by Carolyn Hudson

Tuesday afternoon of Holy Week (March 18), I sat in the front row of a Kingston, ON courtroom.  The court had just sentenced six Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug (KI) community leaders to six months in prison for resisting mining in their area.

On May 26, 2008, an estimated one thousand people converged in Queen's Park, seat of the Ontario Provincial Parliament, to support of the rights of the indigenous people of Canada.    

Witness Against War: Voices for Creative Nonviolence has organized a peace walk starting July 12 from Chicago, IL, site of the 1968 Democratic Convention, to St. Paul, MN, arriving September 1 in time for this year's Republican Convention.  Walkers seek to raise public awareness of and opposition to the anticipated deployment of the 32nd Brigade Combat Team of the Wisconsin National Guard to Iraq.  Contact www.vcnv.org for details.

"118 Days: Christian Peacemaker Teams Held Hostage in Iraq," edited by Tricia Gates Brown; published by Christian Peacemaker Teams, Chicago/Toronto, 2008; 227 pages.

On November 26, 2005, Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) members Tom Fox and Jim Loney along with delegation members Norman Kember and Harmeet Sooden were kidnapped in Iraq.  Tom Fox was killed on March 9, 2006.  Jim, Norman and Harmeet were freed two weeks later on March 23 after 118 days of captivity.

The kidnapping of these four peacemakers was like a rock thrown into a pond.  This collection describes the ripples on the water, the impact and results of that rock, in stories characterized by hope, courage, friendship, and forgiveness.  "118 Days" bears witness to vital peacemaking being done around the world in these times.

by Rey Lopez, CPT Reservist

In early 2001, the Union Theological Seminary (UTS), owned by the United Methodist Church (UMC) and the United Church of Christ of the Philippines (UCC-P), declared itself a refuge (kanlugan) to those who are marginalized and persecuted.

The seminary, which has a 97-hectare (240-acre) campus in Cavite, south of Manila, first welcomed some Mangyans (tribal minorities) from the Island of Mindoro who left their communities due to extreme militarization.

On April 10, 2008 paramilitary groups sent death threats to organizations with which CPT has worked closely for years - the Middle Magdalena Peace and Development Programme (Programa de Desarrollo y Paz del Magdalena Medio), the Agro-mining Federation of the South of Bolívar (La Federación Agrominera del Sur de Bolívar), Catholic priests working in the municipalities of Tiquisio, Arenal and Regidor, in the department of Bolívar, and members of the human rights organization Corporación SEMBRAR.

by Pierre Shantz

"For six years sow your fields, and for six years prune your vineyards and gather their crops.  But in the seventh year the land is to have a Sabbath of rest." - Leviticus 25: 2-3

On May 31, CPT Colombia completed seven years of accompanying communities along the Opón River.  These fisher and farmer families had been displaced by violence and sought refuge in the city of Barrancabermeja.  They first asked for CPT's violence-reduction presence in order to return home and rebuild their lives with a greater sense of security.

by Julian Gutiérrez Castaño
translated by Michele Braley

"... ¿Adónde van los desaparecidos?  Busca en el agua y en los matorrales.  ¿Y por qué es que se desaparecen?  Porque no todos somos iguales..." - Ruben Blades
"...Where have the disappeared gone?  Look in the water and in the brush.  And why do they disappear?  Because we are not all equal..."

On March 6 2008, an unusually balmy winter day, a colorful crowd gathered at Dupont Plaza in Washington, DC.  Colombians and sympathetic "gringo" human rights activists carried signs describing the outrageous situation of the victims of the armed conflict that has plagued Colombia since the late 1940s.

 

by Stewart Vriesinga

Threats to the security of campesinos (subsistence farmers) living in Colombia's Cimitarra Valley continue.  While the campesinos insist that the government has an obligation to protect them, most believe that government interventions actually promote their forced displacement as part of an effort to expropriate their farms and territory to make way for a number of mega-projects - new highways along the Magdalena River, huge multinational mining projects, a hydro-electric dam and expansion of the bio-fuel industry (African Palm plantations).  Two rival paramilitary-run drug cartels also threaten the local population in a battle for control of local coca production.

 

A Listing of CPTers and delegation members and where they served...

Though I must admit at being suspicious of "do-gooders" from outside, I'm prepared to make an exception for CPT.  Not only are the volunteers I've met women and men of highest integrity, but, talking to them, I was left with the impression that they recognize the complexities of the situation and would not issue blanket condemnation of Israelis or express uncritical views of Palestinians.
Dow Marmur
Rabbi Emeritus, Holy Blossom Temple
Toronto, ON

Signs of the Times is produced four times a year.  Batches of 10 or more are available to institutions, congregations, and local groups for distribution.  Any part of Signs of the Times may be used without permission.  Please send CPT a copy of the reprint.  Your contributions finance CPT ministries including the distribution of 21,000 copies of Signs of the Times.