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Alternatives to War Janet Jai AlterNet http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=11544 September 17, 2001 (Note: 2 part series has been consolidated
here) While America is nowhere near as prepared to wage peace as it is to wage war, there are alternatives. America's peace groups are working hard at defining them and putting them into action. This is the first of a series of interviews with peace group leaders in the aftermath of Tuesday's events. Mary Ellen McNish We have launched the No More Victims
campaign to help support victims and survivors of the tragedies. No More
Victims is also designed to educate the public about finding peaceful
solutions in the face of these terrible acts. We understand the grief, the fear, the
anger, and the rage. We feel them ourselves. But a violent response will
not bring justice and safety, and it might bring another terrible attack. The perpetrators of
Tuesday's attacks are criminals. They must be brought to justice under the
rule of law. And their supporters must be brought to justice under the
rule of law. This could possibly be done
through the World Court or the UN could call a tribunal. If these legal
mechanisms don't work, we can create something. With the support we have,
not only from our allies but from all the world, we could find these
people and bring them to justice through the legal system and throw them
in jail for the rest of their lives. People are still stunned by these events,
and finding it hard to plan and be heard. We are trying to work with our
partner organizations, Quakers all over the country, and others to get our
voices heard in Congress. All that seems to be being heard so far in
Congress are the voices suggesting war and retaliation and retribution
(blood for blood). Anger is the first reaction and the easy reaction. There is no question that the anger is legitimate. I am angry down to the soles of my feet. We all are. But we have to take a step back and say this is an opportunity for the U.S. to stand tall and lead the way out of this cycle of violence that is constantly increasing. Carol Hansen Grey Cultural Creatives (affluent, well-educated
individuals, motivated by environmentalism and social justice) do not want
war. That doesn't mean we don't want the people who did this brought to
justice. We do. But we don't want to kill other innocent people. I had the idea to bring together representatives from different groups of Cultural Creatives to brainstorm for alternative solutions. I am in the process of arranging this. Bringing representatives from these groups together to say what is the best step to take would be a message to our senators and representatives that there are a great number of us who don't want war. Then we can take it back to our groups to make it happen. Molly Rush We had a interfaith prayer vigil at the
Federal Building in downtown Pittsburgh. About 100 people came. It was
quite moving, with a lot of ministers and priests. Its purpose was to pray
for the victims and to make clear that we felt strongly that the
perpetrators should be brought to justice, but also to say let's not
escalate the violence that will create more innocent victims. Leaders always think their wars are going to be manageable. It is not clear that a campaign against terrorism has a remote chance of winning. There is so little attempt to understand why people could get to the point of religious fanaticism and hatred that they would kill themselves. The Board, staff, and membership of the
Merton Center have been invited to a meeting this weekend to look at where
we are and how we are going to move in this situation. We have endorsed a
statement basically opposing going into war, but I think we have to come
up with our own ideas. My answers now are contingent. There has to
be a lot of thinking on this. At the moment I do not find it easy to think
clearly about how to respond in a human way to what we are up against. A
lot of human support for war is emotional and based on real fear. But if
we had a few days, we would realize that a war would bring more of what we
experienced this last week. My own sense is that
we need to call together a lot of the groups that work on the peace issue
and are being drowned out in a media that is sounding the drumbeat of war.
Decisions are being made and are announced when they happen. How do you
respond to something that is underway? I hear our Senator Rick
Santorum say that it is not a time for justice. I think it is precisely a
time for justice, and justice means that we search responsibly for the
perpetrators and those supporting them. We are well aware of how sometimes -- often
-- evidence is produced and later found to be faulty if not actually
manufactured. But you try to think of how to find the real links and make
the kind of cases that could be brought to the World Court and result in
an arrest. It may be that U.S. courts would take this
on. It was an act in the U.S. People need to be brought to justice with
evidence, bringing faces to the crimes, not just blaming a whole nation. People want to blame Afghanistan or Iraq,
and it may be that there is collusion. At this time the U.S. has the
strongest worldwide support for an international outcry that would have an
impact on those nations. I doubt that bombing them and killing more
innocent people will have as much impact as diplomatic and economic
actions. We have to find some
alternatives to war, using systems that we have like the World Court.
These systems are weak and fragile because they haven't been well
supported, and the U.S. is largely responsible. Now having to rely on them
when we have opposed them sounds crazy. But we have to oppose the
craziness of war. And it is important
to learn more about the reasons for the hatred of the U.S. and a worldwide
economic system that keeps so many people down. We need to do
teach-ins here and have forums on the issues. It is hard to think of how to do this without reaching out to the other peace groups. All of the peace groups are so under-funded and understaffed. Many people have been working on local and immediate issues, but we need to find a way to voice these concerns across a wide spectrum of people. Ambassador Swanee Hunt We are hosting conversations around the
current situation with Harvard faculty and women here from Sudan, Bosnia,
and Afghanistan. The women talk about what it is
like to live in a society warped with terror and the lessons they have
learned. Regarding alternatives to war, I am not a
pacifist. Certainly there are people in our group who have the strong
conviction that violence begets even greater violence. Others say that
military intervention can be the less violent of the alternatives. There
are women from Kosovo who were pleading for military intervention long
before it occurred. But it is very important to distinguish between
military intervention to stop genocide and military intervention as a form
of retribution or retaliation. What else is possible in the current
situation? In talking to a former member of the Clinton cabinet, I said
that we must come to grips with the fact that we cannot ultimately defend
against terrorism. We can make airports safer, but then terrorism shifts
to the less protected areas. If we again try to protect these, we can
become a locked society. Ultimately we are left with
what happens at a person-to-person level. Let me suggest this. What if we
decided to put $40 billion into the 10 countries in the world most thought
to harbor terrorists? What if we put that money into economic empowerment,
micro enterprise, elevating the voice of women in the society, and massive
citizen-exchange programs? Can you imagine what $40 billion could do? That
approach has a much higher possibility of providing safety for us all. Think of community policing, where
policemen and women get out of their cars and walk their beats. They get
to know their neighbors, and the neighbors are more likely to say, I saw
this suspicious character. Then if the policeman says I want to keep an
eye on him, the neighbor is likely to invite him to watch from his son's
bedroom. We forget all of this in
our foreign policy. In Bosnia, U.S. troops were told to stay on the base
for security reasons and were not allowed to go out and help someone
putting a roof on a house. The Brits were out there doing all kinds of
things to help the community, and their morale was great. These are all
basic ways of interacting with other people at a human level that I think
women are particularly adept at. Regarding the Women Waging Peace Conference this November, this attack will certainly change the dynamic and tone of our colloquium. Instead of the West offering advice, help, and counsel, we will be joining our sisters from around the world with much more understanding. Janice Auth We issued a statement last week condemning
and mourning the terrorist acts while also calling for a peaceful
resolution of the conflict. We believe that violence begets more violence
and that we must work for justice through international collaboration and
systems such as the International Criminal Court. Next, we wanted to take this to another
level. We decided to send a letter to the President and the media, urging
the President and his advisors to bring the great peacemakers of the world
into his discussions of how to resolve this problem. President Bush is now
meeting only with his military leaders. Yet this
problem, which is a problem for the world, demands the wisdom of the minds
of peacemakers. We're including a list of 16 peacemakers, including
Nobel Peace Prize recipients, in the letter. We'll also be present at the Emergency
Mobilization Meeting called by The Thomas Merton Center for Peace and
Social Justice this weekend for anyone who wants to get together and talk
about the problem and its solution. We do not want to criticize and
undermine the government but are trying to help and offer input. These
attacks require a long-term solution as well as the short-term solution of
finding the perpetrators and bringing them to justice. The world needs to
protect itself against this type of insanity, a person so deranged that he
kills thousands of innocent people. How to capture the perpetrators is a tough
one. We as an organization haven't tackled that one. We do hear from our
supporters that something as off the wall as bombing a country like
Afghanistan will have little effect. We are not in favor of an invasion or an
attack on a country that harbors terrorists. We are in favor of using
international systems like the International Criminal Court, which tried
the war criminals from the war in Yugoslavia. How to find the perpetrators is still a question mark. Daniel Sheehan To bring perpetrators of
terrorist acts to justice, one engages in law enforcement. I want to recommend a made-for-TV motion picture that came out in the late '80s, called Under Siege. It starred Hal Holbrook as the President. It is uncannily prescient of the current situation. It sets forth all the instinctive reactions that are happening here, the way the media are handling it, the way the CIA wants to use the situation to settle old scores. Bob Woodward was co-author of the script. It showed the fundamental conflict that arose between a Director of the FBI who advocates using very professional head law enforcement to track down the perpetrators, and the CIA and major political parties that were posturing, and the pressure that was brought to bear on the president to take some reactive type of military action. This movie is like a two-hour seminar on almost everything you need to know about this current thing. With sound professional law enforcement and sound professional application of proper diplomatic tools, we can ascertain who committed last Tuesday's terrorist attacks and bring them to justice just as we did with Lockerbie and Milosovich. With the Lockerbie bombing of the Pan Am jet, there was professional law enforcement immediately put into place. The FBI, the FAA, all the in-place institutions came into play, coordinated through the interagency law enforcement team investigating the forensics of the bombing. They found where the bomb was placed -- in the luggage compartment. They investigated who had access to the luggage, consulting with the security department of Pan Am. They isolated who they believed did it. They investigated them and brought
indictments against them in the U.S. They then contacted the proper
authorities in the countries where they thought these people were and
asked for their cooperation. They didn't get the immediate cooperation
of Libya. Here they did one inappropriate thing, they launched military
action against Gaddafi, which killed Gaddafi's daughter. This didn't help
the situation. But then they got back to normal law. They
wanted the Libyan government to extradite the perpetrators to them for a
trial, but the U.S. didn't have jurisdiction since the place of the crime
was Scotland. They then agreed to have the trial in a neutral country, The
Netherlands, where it was mutually felt that the defendants could get a
fair trial. One of the defendants was convicted and one was acquitted
because there was not enough evidence. This demonstrates that this can be done in regard to the current situation too. The kind of remedies they are talking about now -- killing hundreds and thousands of women and children -- won't do anything except generate more potential terrorists. Janet Jai is a writer and founder of the firm Vision and Values. She is currently writing a book called World Peace: A Beginners' Guide. Sidebar: Peace Links urges President Bush to include peacemakers along with military advisors in discussions about last Tuesday's terrorist attacks. Here is their recommended list: Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United
Nations (My Note: How about adding some Muslims to this list???)
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