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Contending the logic of violence -Mar 24, 2006

By Simon Barrow

Any romantic notions on the part of their supporters that the three Christian peace campaigners recently released from captivity in Iraq would return home to universal acclaim have been rapidly disabused.

Alongside relief and joy at the rescue of Norman Kember, Jim Loney and Harmeet Singh Sooden have come sharp questions about what they (and their tragically murdered colleague, Tom Fox) were doing in Iraq in the first place.

In an over-heated media environment fixated on immediate events and rapid conclusions, both journalists and the public remain slow to look behind the scenes and quick to judge.

Although the four were kidnapped some twelve weeks ago, and their provenance covered in detail on sites such as Ekklesia, the mainstream media has until yesterday paid little serious attention to Christian Peacemaker Teams – present in Iraq since before the invasion.

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Nevertheless, commentators and bloggers alike have been quick to throw harsh epithets at “fools who dare to tread”. The CPTers have been denounced in some quarters as naïve, ideologically anti-American, ungrateful to their military rescuers, and irresponsible in endangering others by their allegedly ill-calculated presence.

These are legitimate concerns. The world is a messy place, and the so-called law of unintended consequences makes a mockery of the noblest of intentions.

But the way such questions are being asked in some quarters seriously overlooks the utility of Christian Peacemaker Teams as a church-backed agency which has undertaken crucial work worldwide in exposing injustice and in reducing or combating violence.

For example, very few of the reports over the 24 hours following the freeing of the three have mentioned the pivotal role of CPT in unveiling the now widely-condemned Abu Ghraib abuses. Yet it was unlauded work on the ground by Christian Peacemaker Teams which made later media exposes possible.

Similarly, there has been little or no reference to the fact that the men were seized outside a Baghdad mosque after a meeting with Sunni clerics about prisoner abuse, about their role in bridge-building between antagonistic communities, or about their deep roots in an NGO community which has persisted with vital humanitarian work in the face of grave threat.

None of this properly fits the media ‘script’, the overarching storyline that a competitive reporting environment needs to shape its task within minutes or hours of any ‘breaking news’.

In the case of CPT, the orthodox script runs: “worthy but foolhardy amateurs show that pious non-violence doesn’t work by getting themselves into trouble and having to be bailed out by our brave boys-in-khaki risking their lives. Relief naturally mixed with finger-wagging by wise observers.”

This is a powerful narrative, and it takes some contending. Underpinning it is a deep fatalism about the invincibility of violence as an instrument of policy which Christian Peacemaker Teams exists precisely to challenge.

Force, so this logic goes, “works”. The point is ably illustrated by the rescue of a bunch of hapless pacifists by the SAS and other representatives of the ‘multilateral coalition’ who are ‘present’ in Iraq.

The fact that, in this case, the operation involved no violence, that much security work is civilian and that CPT contractually and publicly disavows military protection, are nuances which are conveniently ignored.

Moreover, while soldiering in Iraq may be efficacious in particular instances, overall it has been part of a cycle of revenge and militarism which has cost perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives. Vicious dictatorship has given way to callous chaos. We can celebrate the former, but not without acknowledging its price in the latter.

The point, of course, is that we live in a messy, ambiguous and opaque world where liveable options are rapidly reduced to cruel calculations. Christian (or any other kind of) peace-making cannot afford to be naive, blind or morally self-contained in such an environment.

What it exists to do, however, is to witness to the possibility of another way forward – one which would not be present at all without the willingness of some people (often a minority) to put their lives on the line.

Nonviolence is not an easy or soft option. On the contrary, it requires redirecting, retraining and refocusing some our most primitive and natural energies – rather than simplifying problems by imposing our will or eliminating (quite literally) the human obstacle.

Peace is not primarily a policy, it is a culture, a community and a set of countervailing practices which require both courage and calculation. It is the wisdom of the dove contending with, but not easily displacing, the wisdom of the serpent.

In other words, not-killing does not come naturally. It needs to be learned.

Peacemaking, as distinct from peace-wishing or peace-talking, will often be dismissed as ‘do-gooding’. That was a phrase I heard on the radio to describe Norman Kember, a retired professor who decided to forsake placard-waving and follow the unarmed Jesus into the wilderness to see if he could do something practical.

Yet, to use a phrase beloved of military advocates, what is the alternative to doing good? Doing bad, perhaps, or doing nothing?

That we can mock serious attempts to inject non-violence into situations of intractable conflict, even at some risk, shows how hopelessly anaesthetised we are by the hatreds that form us.

Christian Peacemaker Teams operate with care and consideration. They train, prepare and support people with a dedication that far exceeds the easy condemnations of their critics.

Such dedication is little-known and often much-misunderstood in civilian circles – that is, people who have known neither the true horror of war nor the true price of shalom/salaam.

There is indeed an irony to peacemakers being rescued by soldiers. And it would be both churlish and wrong to deny the good offices of those who bear arms, even as we seek to outlaw their instruments of death.

But in a world where toxic religion is fuelling both heartless jihad and gung-ho militarism it would surely be a far greater irony to deny the witness of those whose chief role is to demonstrate that human beings do not have to live in the enmity of might-is-right.

For what lies at the heart of Christian peacemaking is neither suffocating piety, nor the invocation of the divine as a magic potion, nor a sense of moral superiority over those caught up in life’s death-dealing.

It is, rather, the conviction that a bond of a love which is willing to embrace suffering in hope is finally stronger than all the weapons of destruction ever assembled.

This unlikely possibility is embodied in a ‘script’, the Gospel of Jesus, which is not about quick victory or the triumph of empire. Rather, it is about a small, vulnerable community forged from the wounds of a Galilean peasant – a man crucified between the certainties of politics-as-usual and religion-as-usual.

It is in this event that, extraordinary though it may seem, the boundless love of God is to be seen: a love which delivers us from evil not by twisting events to its own ends, but by reshaping the very people who have to negotiate those events.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the theologian executed by the Nazis whose centenary of birth we celebrate in 2006, stated the vocation of the Christian with alarming simplicity. He said that it was to pray and to act justly so that we might share God’s sufferings in the world rather than perpetuate a culture of murder.

Such an option requires much more than a debate about political tactics or a metaphysical proposal about the kind of God that might reasonably be supposed to confound our expectations that radically. It requires, instead, a re-orientation of our whole way of seeing and living in the face of the apparently unassailable reign of death.

Perhaps that is why it is easier to either dismiss or ignore the Christian peacemakers – and those of other faith and no faith – who put their lives on the line when all hope seems exhausted. For if we didn’t find a way of rationalising their choice out of existence, we might see no truthful alternative but to join them.

Simon Barrow (www.simonbarrow.net) is co-director of Ekklesia. His background is in journalism, adult education, politics and theology, and his weblog is: http://faithinsociety.blogspot.com

To see the full list of columns by Simon Barrow click here

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