Captivity (7 page)

“Should we say something?” I ask. It seems crazy to me. Excuse me, Mr. Kidnapper, but my blindfold is coming off … Someone enters. I decide it’s better to say something. “Excuse me?”

“Yes?” the voice says, gentle and solicitous. It’s Number One.

“Our blindfolds are falling off,” I say.

“If you don’t want us to see you, then we don’t want to see you,” Tom says.

“Yes, I see that,” Number One says. “I have something for that.” He gives an order. A drawer opens and closes. Then, standing directly behind us, he says, “I have a hat for each of you.” With exquisite care he removes my blindfold, places a hat on my head and pulls it down over my eyes. “You must not to see me. It very dangerous. For you and for me. Are you hungry? Would you like some food? Some biscuit?” We don’t answer. “Doctor, would you like some biscuit?”

“No, thank you,” he says.

“Tom? Jim? Harmeet? Something to drink? Seven? Miranda? Pepsi?”

I shake my head. The only thing I want is my freedom.

I hear water pouring into a cup, someone drinking. “Thank you,” Norman says. More water-pouring sounds, and then a cup being placed in my hands.

“Is this from the tap? If it is, it will make us sick,” I say.

“It is good water,” Number One says.

“Thank you,” I say. I don’t believe him and I don’t want it, but there doesn’t seem to be any choice. I gulp it down. I am thirstier than I thought. He offers me a second glass. “No, thank you,” I say.

“I get the phone call from another group,” Number One tells us. “You know this group, al-Tawhid wal-Jihad? This very dangerous. They want you, especially you Thomas, and you Doctor. This very
dangerous. Iraq very dangerous. There are many groups that take you. I not give you to them. I cannot. Inshallah, you will stay with me, and I make sure you release. You safe with me,
inshallah
. We are not terrorists. We are not al Qaeda. We are different. We are Iraqi. We fight for Iraqi freedom.” He speaks gently, like a parent reassuring a frightened child.

“Are you Sunni or Shia?” Norman asks.

Number One is suddenly angry. “We are not Sunni, we are not Shia. We are Iraqi! No Shia-Sunni. This something America make. We are Iraqi! Do you understand, Doctor?”

“Yes, you are all Iraqi,” Norman says.

The captors chat amongst themselves, yawn, fall into silence. I have to talk to them, open a channel of communication, punch through the muting effect of the blindfold. I rack my brain for some way to engage these men and make them see our humanity. I send mental prompts to the others, hoping they will speak. It is a relief when I can finally think of something to say. “Excuse me,” I say when I am sure Number One is in the room.

“Yes?”

“May I ask a question?”

I feel his hand on my shoulder. “Yes, of course.”

“Did you read our white paper, the one in Arabic and English?”

“Yes, I read it.”

“What did you think?”

Number One takes a breath. “You are the peaceful man. I love the peaceful man. Your group … the name of your group …?”

“Christian Peacemaker Teams,” Tom says.

“I not hear of this. You are the Christian?”

“Yes, but we aren’t here to make anybody Christian,” Tom says. “We believe in peace, non-violence,
salam
. We are against the war and we are against the occupation. We came to Iraq before the war to try and stop it from happening, and we’ve been here ever since to try and get
the United States to leave. We are independent. We are not part of any government or church.”

“Thomas, it very dangerous in Baghdad. Very dangerous.”

“Yes, so it seems,” Tom says. “But we are a human rights organization that works in war zones. We have a team in Palestine as well. Harmeet, Jim and I have all been to Palestine.”

“You go to Palestine?” Number One says to Harmeet.

“Yes. Last year, with the International Solidarity Movement,” Harmeet says.

“What you do in Baghdad?” Number One asks Tom.

“We work for justice for security detainees,” Tom explains. “Iraqis who are imprisoned by the U.S. We go with families to the American authorities. We document torture and mistreatment. We are here to find out the truth about what’s going on in Iraq and we tell people back home so that it will change. The most recent place we visited was Fallujah. We were taken by Sheik Mohammed to the site of the mosque where the video was taken of U.S. soldiers killing Iraqis on the floor.”

“What can this do? This can do nothing,” Number One says.

“We are in Iraq trying to do the same thing you are doing, which is to get the Americans to leave, except we’re trying to do it non-violently.”

“Not everyone in America wants this war,” I say, jumping in. “Many many people are against it. The media just never talks about us. They make it seem as if nobody is against it.”

There is a period of silence. I hear someone walking about the room. Suddenly Number One’s voice is at my ear. “See this?” By looking down through the crack at the bottom of my hat I can see he’s holding a photograph in front of me. It’s a wallet-sized studio portrait of four children. The two oldest stand behind the two youngest in front. Their faces are proud and solemn. “This is a picture of my family. My sister’s children. Can you see them?”

“Yes,” I say.

“This is a tragic event. They are all killed. All of them dead. Seven members of my family. In one night, at a checkpoint. My sister and all
of her family. The Americans shoot them, kill every member of my family. They are innocent! Why! I look at this picture every night. I keep it by my bed.” He points to each child, starting with the oldest. “This is Mohanned, and this Mohammed, and Zayneb and Noor.”

“Mohanned, Mohammed, Zayneb and Noor,” I repeat. “I will remember them.”

“Thank you.” The oldest is seven, he tells me, the youngest two.

“I am sorry. They are beautiful children.”

He hands the picture to Norman. “Doctor, look. Do you see? They are all gone.”

“Yes, I am sorry. I have two daughters of my own,” Norman says.

“This happen one year ago. I died that night. I am a dead man now. I see their face every night. I can’t sleep … I
can’t
sleep. What can I do? The only thing I can do is stop the American occupation. I am a dead man.”

Number One’s story transports me back to an emergency room in Balad’s hospital. Mahmud Achnud Nejin, a 43-year-old farmer, was lying unconscious on a stretcher, the left side of his hip and abdomen covered in a mass of bandages. He had been shot the day before by U.S. soldiers at an impromtu checkpoint. “He is in shock and has severe bleeding. The bullet exploded in the groin,” hospital director Dr. Kassim Hartam told us. “This is not the only case.” He estimated that his hospital had treated twenty “innocent civilians” shot by U.S. soldiers at checkpoints in the past six months.

“We know about this,” I tell Number One. “I have met several families who had people killed at checkpoints. This is why we come to Iraq. We learn about these stories, document them, bring them back to our countries so people can learn about what’s happening in Iraq, and when enough people find out, things will change.”

“What good does this do? This does nothing. You say many Americans are against this war. Why do the parents send their children to this war? Why do they send their children to Iraq? Why? One night we make some attack against a Humvee. This north of Baghdad. We make a good attack and kill three soldiers. I see him after, this boy, his
face very beautiful. Maybe he is twenty, twenty-one. He is
very
beautiful. I see him, lying on the ground, this boy. He is dead. I see him and I think of his mother. Why this? Why?” His voice is anguished.

Words! I need words. Our lives could depend on what I say. “You know, there is a woman in the United States named Cindy Sheehan whose son—his name was Casey—was killed in Iraq. And she wanted to ask George Bush why her son had to die in Iraq, and he refused to meet her. Many times she asked and he never answered her. So finally, when George Bush was having a vacation at his ranch, she went and set up a tent on the road to his ranch. And the media came, and she got on TV, and then more and more people came, until there were hundreds there with her, all asking for George Bush to come and meet her.”

“Yes, I know this. This very famous,” Number One says.

“It is usually the poor who end up in the army. They join because they don’t have any other choice,” I say.

“Yes, I know this,” he says, impatient. “There is no way for them to get the education. But what can this do? This does nothing. We must to fight.”

“We are in Iraq trying to do the same thing you are doing,” Tom says. “I want my country to leave. What my country has done is wrong. It makes me sick to think what we’ve done. But we’re trying to change things non-violently.”

“They will never leave. Your way will never work. The only thing we have to do is fight. I have to fight for Iraqi freedom,” Number One says.

“If enough people find out about what is happening, they will vote against George Bush. The United States will have to withdraw. In other conflicts non-violence has worked. Take the Badshah Khan in Pakistan. He was like a Muslim Gandhi who forced the British to leave Pakistan non-violently—”

Number One interrupts. “Do you expect us to stand there and let them shoot us? We are not crazy.” He turns abruptly and leaves the room.

–

I was vaguely aware in university that there existed a group of people who refused on principle to use violence and that they were called pacifists. The very idea seemed preposterous. Of course war was bad, that went without saying, but if another country invaded yours, or if somebody attacked you, you had the indisputable right to defend yourself—with whatever force was required, so long as it was commensurate with the threat you were facing. This was basic common sense and a self-evident truth. The only alternative was to allow your enemy to walk all over you like a doormat.

I was sharing an apartment with Dan Hunt and William Payne. William suggested we visit a place called Dorothy Day House in Detroit. He said it was a house of hospitality. What’s that? I asked. He didn’t know exactly, but it was a place where homeless people could go. The auxiliary bishop of Detroit, Thomas Gumbleton, was going to be speaking there about non-violence. He had been arrested for protesting against nuclear weapons. He must be one of those fringe lunatics, I thought. I didn’t want to go, but William wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Dorothy Day House was an old, dingy, falling-apart place with slanting floors and paint-peeling walls. The furniture looked as if it had been rescued from the curb in front of someone’s house. The kitchen was cluttered with jars of strange-looking beans and grains. A man wearing women’s clothes who lived at the house sat down beside me. The impulse to switch chairs was overwhelming.

William, who has this annoying gift for inviting people to think about doing something they would never have imagined themselves doing (and inevitably end up doing!), told me they were looking for live-in volunteers. It was my last year of university and I was in agony about what to do next. I shook my head and rolled my eyes. There was no way I was going to live in a place like this.

Dinner was announced and everybody lined up with a plate. They called it a potluck supper. I’d never been to one before. I thought it was rather a good idea. Everybody brought a different dish and you shared whatever there was to share. After supper, people were invited to gather in the living room to hear Bishop Gumbleton speak.

My arms were crossed and my mental defences were ready. He was warm and gentle and spoke with deep humility. He talked about how love of enemy was integral to the Gospel, and the Cross was the way of non-violence. He explained how the first tradition of the Church was pacifist: a Christian could not be a soldier under pain of excommunication and was prohibited from using violence in self-defence. He talked about Martin of Tours and Oscar Romero, Dr. Martin Luther King and Dorothy Day. He talked about the power of non-violence to transform society and heal the wounds of violence. I listened and found it impossible to dismiss what he was saying. I uncrossed my arms. A window had opened in my mind.

That year, 1986-87, Dan, William and I were Basilian associates, which meant we were interested in becoming priests and had accepted formation with the Basilian Fathers. We rented a two-bedroom apartment in Windsor’s poorest neighbourhood. We slept in the larger room and crammed our desks into the smaller room. We prayed the office each morning (the ancient prayer required of all those who take vows and enter religious life) and read the day’s Scripture reading.

I remember it vividly. The Gospel was vitally alive. It seemed that Jesus was pointing his finger right at me, speaking directly to me. “Go, sell everything you own, give it to the poor, and come follow me.”

I began to give what I was feeling a name. I called it the unknown
option
—the call to leave everything behind, all my possessions, all that was known and comfortable, for a journey along an unknown road where, through a life of radical poverty in solidarity with the poor, I would discover a new way of being, a life of joy overflowing, the Kingdom of God where all live as sisters and brothers in the glorious freedom of the children of God.

At the end of that school year I graduated from the University of Windsor with a BA in history and left the Basilians after deciding their comfortable institutions were not compatible with the unknown option. Dan, William and I went our separate ways for a while: Dan to the University of Toronto to study philosophy, William to Laval in
Quebec City to study geography and I to the University of Toronto to do a master’s in social work.

On one of his trips through Toronto on his way to Quebec City, William suggested we visit a Catholic Worker community called Angelus House that, much to my surprise, was located right in Toronto. Over bowls of lentil soup and cups of herbal tea, Lauren Griffen and Charlie Angus (now a Member of Parliament for Timmins–James Bay) explained the philosophy of the Catholic Worker movement to us. “The aim of the Catholic Worker,” they said, “is to build a new society in the shell of the old where it is easier for people to be good.” The reconstruction of the social order was to be accomplished through the works of mercy performed at a personal sacrifice—feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless. Every parish would sponsor a house of hospitality and every home would have a Christ Room where Jesus could be welcomed in the face of a needy brother or sister. Voluntary poverty was central: the extra pair of shoes, the extra coat in your closet, belonged to the one who was without. We were to be go-givers, not go-getters. Work was a gift to be freely given for the common good. By firing the bosses we could reclaim our work from wage slavery and build a new economy based on mutual aid and co-operation rather than personal profit. By going back to the land we could heal the earth from the ravages of industrial capitalism and restore our lost sense of communal identity. And we were to love our enemies just as the Gospel said. A disciple of Christ must not enlist as a soldier, work in armaments manufacturing or pay for war through his or her taxes. Christians were not to kill for any reason.