Waging Peace, at Home and Abroad

By Onnesha Roychoudhuri, AlterNet. Posted December 9, 2005.

Tomorrow, it is very likely that four people, taken hostage two weeks ago, will be executed in Iraq, the latest victims of a war that has claimed unknowable thousands of lives. But the ironies and injustices tower ever higher from there. These four people -- Norman Kember of London, Tom Fox of Clear Brook, Va., and Canadians James Loney and Harmeet Singh Sooden -- are not soldiers or military contractors. They are volunteers with the Christian Peacemaker Teams, nonviolent activists who serve as witnesses and advocates in war-torn regions around the country.

You might not have heard much about the CPT, but they have been serving for years as go-betweens to help families in Iraq search of relatives who have been imprisoned in coalition military sweeps. CPT has been on the ground, outside of the green zone, covering abuses against detainees for quite some time. Indeed, they had documentation of detainee abuse well before the Abu Ghraib scandal broke.

Just as the CPT team in Iraq works to document the abuses and detentions of Iraqi civilians by occupying forces in that country, their abductors demand the release of all detainees in Iraq before they will release the CPT hostages.

The American Friends Service Committee, founded by the pacifist Quakers in 1917, has been following the news closely, issuing press releases regarding the hostages, one of whom, the American Tom Fox, is a member of the Quaker community. The AFSC is currently in the midst of a "Wage Peace" campaign directed at ending the war on Iraq.

Central to this campaign is the "Eyes Wide Open" exhibit, currently touring communities throughout the country. The concept is simple: one pair of combat boots for each U.S. soldier who has died, set out roughly three feet apart in military format. Alongside of these are placed some 6,000 shoes of various sizes, representing the estimated 100,000 Iraqi civilian killed in the war.

The boots and shoes are all tagged with names and ages of the fallen. According to Marq Anderson, the national tour manager for the exhibit, over 700,000 Americans have attended the exhibits, with some 200 requests from communities who are still seeking to host the display.

The incredible turnout and demand for the continuation of the exhibit reveals how organizations like the American Friends Service Committee, in its "Wage Peace" campaign, have filled a critical vacuum in the current dialogue on the war in Iraq simply by humanizing the losses.

Suffering from 'Atrocity Fatigue'

As a journalist, it's difficult not to wonder why there is so little outrage over the ever-increasing absurdities in the war on terror. There is no end to the scandalous news emanating from all fronts in this Global War on Terror: CIA flights deliver people to other countries in order to use interrogation procedures illegal in the U.S.; millions of tons of bombs have been dropped during a war in which we long since declared ourselves victorious; the casualty list -- already a staggering 2,135 U.S. soldiers -- grows longer every day as reports of suicide bombers and IEDs pepper the nightly news.

Perhaps that's just it. There is only a certain quota of moral outrage that we can muster. Especially during the holiday season when more personal battles are being waged, such as the one pitting our ever-increasing debt against the constant messages to consume all the more.

People have become inured to the scale of carnage on the news, and the scandal in the White House. Indeed, this administration's tactic, intended or not, seems to work impressively well: cover up one flub-up with another, more mind-boggling one.

Just when people thought they could wrap their minds around the CIA allegedly torturing war on terror suspects in Europe, Americans are faced with digesting the news that our military is paying journalists in Iraq to publish pro-American stories. Spreading democracy is, apparently, an inherently undemocratic process.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri is an editorial intern at AlterNet.

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