Stop the Next War Now (10 page)

On the day of the massive global peace rallies, a small group—Archbishop Desmond Tutu from South Africa; Harry Belafonte and his wife, Julie; and I— had an extraordinary meeting with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. The secretary-general, Archbishop Tutu, and Harry Belafonte had all known each other for years, but they were sitting on opposite sides of the table, literally— Kofi Annan and his advisers on one side and our delegation on the other. When the meeting began, Archbishop Tutu said a prayer, and then he made the most extraordinary statement: “We are here today on behalf of the people that are marching in 665 cities around the world,” he said. “We’re here to tell you that those people marching in those cities all around the world claim the United Nations as our own, and we claim it in the name of the global mobilization for peace.” I’ll never forget the magnificent dignity with which he delivered those stirring words.

Kofi Annan’s response could be seen in his face. Probably the last thing he wanted to hear that day from his close friends and allies was that we were holding him accountable, because the pressures on him to give in to the United States were intense. You could see that every fiber of him wanted to say, “Yes, I stand with you and the people outside. I’m going to come out with you and speak to the crowd.” But he didn’t say that. He couldn’t say that—the pressure was just too great.

Then we each spoke in turn. I talked about the global nature of the mobilization; Julie Belafonte addressed the particular danger of the war for women; Harry spoke about the significance of this global movement. When it was over, we bundled up and went back outside to what was the coldest day of the year in New York, with a bitter wind blowing down First Avenue as we made our way through the huge crowd that had swelled to over five hundred thousand.

After we each addressed the crowd, we received a call backstage from someone who had seen an Associated Press story that had come over the wire. It was just two lines: “The U.S. and Britain, stunned by the outpouring of global criticism, today announced their intention to change their proposed resolution at the UN. The new resolution would not explicitly call on the UN to endorse the war.” That was all it said.

If true, it was a huge victory. We huddled backstage to figure out whether we should announce it to the crowd, and several of us said, “We’ve got to say it. Even if it turns out not to be true, the fact that AP is running the story at this moment means there’s enough of a buzz in Washington that these demonstrations around the world are having an effect.” So I went out onstage again in front of half a million people and said, “If anyone believes that these kinds of demonstrations don’t matter, listen up.” I read the AP story and the crowd roared.

“You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.”

—Jeanette Rankin

A PERMANENT

PEOPLE’S MOVEMENT

LESLIE CAGAN

Leslie Cagan is the national coordinator of United for Peace and Justice, the nation’s largest antiwar coalition. She has a lifelong history of activism on domestic issues such as lesbian/gay rights and foreign-policy issues such as the Cuba embargo. She was one of the coordinators of the massive February 15, 2003, rallies to protest the impending war on Iraq.

In the fall of 2002, when Congress was voting for the bill to authorize the invasion of Iraq, I started to sense that a resurgent antiwar movement was brewing. Those in Washington who follow Congress more closely than I do were hoping that 25 or 30 representatives would vote against the authorization for war being sought by the Bush administration. The bill passed by a wide margin, but to our amazement, 133 members of the House voted against it! We knew they must have been hearing from their constituents.

Dissent was bubbling up from below. Throughout the country, people felt they had to do something to stop the war. With a crucial vote coming up in Congress, they decided to contact their representatives—by telephone, e-mail, fax, or visits to their offices. At that time, there was really no national organization coordinating all of this work. Discussions amongst a dozen or so longtime peace activities led to the conclusion that it was time to form a national coalition that could strengthen the growing antiwar movement, and so United for Peace and Justice was created in October 2002.

In June 2003, United for Peace and Justice had its founding conference in Chicago, with representatives from hundreds of organizations. This was one of the most amazing moments in my long experience in the peace and social-justice movement—a rare example of individual groups understanding that they are stronger when acting as part of a larger collective and functioning as a movement.

With 550 attendees representing 325 organizations, we faced a difficult task as we tried to agree on a strategic framework for our work and a program for the coming eighteen months. In the end, virtually everyone embraced the goals that we hammered out, and many people expressed their appreciation for this experience in grassroots democracy. It demonstrated that local, community-based organizations want to be part of a federation that allows them to keep control over their own plans and agendas but that also links them to other local and national groups that think about the world in similar ways. By the end of 2004, our coalition numbered more than 900 groups.

We encourage lots of local activism, and we’ve also organized mass national mobilizations. Our most phenomenal rally took place on February 15, 2003, right before the war began. In New York City, hundreds of thousands of people came out in the freezing cold, in spite of a concerted effort by the mayor and police department to block our demonstration. And on the same day millions of other people, in more than nine hundred places around the world (by our count), staged their own protests. Some were massive, some were tiny— but all were extraordinary. At a nursing home in lower Manhattan, for example, the residents who felt strongly against the war made signs and held a little demonstration of their own in the lobby of the nursing home.

There’s no way to know how many people hit the streets or the lobbies of their nursing homes on that day. But millions of people around the world knew that what the Bush administration was doing was absolutely wrong. And by protesting together, we all knew we were part of something much bigger than ourselves; we were part of a historic global outcry against war.

The organizing of simultaneous demonstrations of millions of people gave us a glimpse of what it would be like to have a permanent global people’s movement. The work of this burgeoning movement goes on every single day. People are holding educational forums, organizing vigils, lobbying their elected officials, writing letters to the editor, gathering shipments of humanitarian aid to Iraq—these day-to-day actions are the heart and soul of the movement. But one of the shortcomings of the movement is our lack of long-term planning. During the Bush administration, in particular, we have been jumping from crisis to crisis—trying to defeat the Bush agenda in the 2004 elections, trying to stop the war in Iraq, trying to deal with the ongoing crisis in Palestine and Israel, and so many other important issues.

When a building is burning down, you rush to hose it down. You don’t immediately start analyzing what led to the fire and what could be done to prevent future fires. But while we respond to emergencies and the urgent needs of the moment, we must also engage in strategic planning. We have to do a better job challenging the corporate and political forces that drive us to war. We have to create a global people’s movement that is firmly grounded at the local level and is coordinated at both the national and international levels. That’s the only way we’re going to stop present wars. And it’s certainly the only way we’re going to prevent future ones.

A LIFE IN THE

MOVEMENT:

AN INTERVIEW WITH

FRIDA BERRIGAN

MEDEA BENJAMIN

Frida Berrigan is a senior research associate with the World Policy Institute’s Arms Trade Resource Center.The eldest daughter of peace activists Liz McAlister and Phillip Berrigan, she was raised in a Catholic peacemaking community. Here she is in conversation with CODEPINK cofounder Medea Benjamin.

Q:
What was it like growing up with a family and a community dedicated to trying to end war and rid the world of nuclear weapons
?

A:
My parents founded the Jonah House Community in 1973, the year before I was born. Jonah House is an experiment in nonviolence by a radical Catholic community. Hundreds of people came through the house, many of whom spent time in prison for acts of civil disobedience, first against the war in Vietnam and then against nuclear weapons and militarism.

The Jonah House Community was located in a very poor neighborhood in Baltimore. We painted houses to make a living and lived way below the taxable income. I learned very early on about the monthly cycle that many Americans go through who depend on public assistance—with a little bit of money at the beginning of the month and none at the end. We organized weekly food drives and shared the food with about two hundred people in the neighborhood. For many of our neighbors, the fruits and vegetables that we scavenged often made up the core of their food.

As a child I learned how wasteful and unjust our society is, with so much money for the military and so little to help the poor. Now that I’m looking at the military budget as an analyst for the World Policy Institute, I see the full dimensions of this waste and maldistribution of resources. Lockheed Martin receives more each year from the Defense Department than is spent on the entire public-assistance program—Temporary Assistance for Needy Families— a program that tens of millions of Americans depend on.

Q:
Your parents and your uncle Daniel Berrigan became famous as a result of their acts of civil disobedience against the Vietnam War. Can you describe these
?

A:
My dad, my uncle, and some friends started this new form of civil disobedience that consisted of destroying draft records. The Catonsville Nine is the best known of those actions. In 1968, they walked into the draft-board office in Catonsville, Maryland, carried about six hundred draftees’ files out to the parking lot, and burned them with homemade napalm. As Catholics, they had a sense of reverence for the act as ritual, but it was also real and tangible. Afterward, guys used to come up to my dad and say, “Thank you for destroying my draft files. You saved my life, because I didn’t have to go to Vietnam.”

Q:
After the Vietnam War ended, the Jonah House Community turned its focus to abolishing nuclear weapons. This seems so much harder than struggling against a particular war, because the weapons industry is less visible to the public and has no “end.” Tell us about the “plowshares actions.”

A:
In 1980, my dad and seven others began what are now known as “plowshares actions.” It comes from the idea that the biblical prophet Isaiah calls us to turn spears into pruning hooks, swords into plowshares. They went into a General Electric plant in Pennsylvania and did a symbolic disarmament of Mark 12A nose cones, which carry the nuclear material. They were convicted of felonies and spent about a year and a half in prison for that action. During his life, my dad did four more plowshares actions. My mom was involved in one at an air force base in upstate New York in 1983. My dad says he and my mother spent eleven years apart because of their periods of prison time.

Q:
Some people say that these kinds of actions require too much sacrifice, that they take our best activists out of commission for years, that they are too hard on families—especially families with children. Some also question whether these actions really make changes that are significant enough to warrant the sacrifice. How would your parents or your uncle respond to that type of criticism
?

A:
They would probably say that you can never sacrifice enough for peace. More than thirty years ago my uncle Dan wrote: “We have assumed the name of peacemaker, but we have been, by and large, unwilling to pay any significant price. And because we want peace with half a heart and half a life and will, the war, of course, continues. Because the waging of war, by its nature, is total, but the waging of peace, by our own cowardice, is partial.”

Q:
How would you evaluate the movement against war in Iraq? We managed to get lots of people out for some large demonstrations, but do we lack the kind of “put your body on the line” commitment that your parents had and still have
?

A:
I think that twelve million people around the world coming out on February 15, 2003, was extraordinary and really powerful. Yet once the war started, the protesters went home. They felt demoralized and defeated, as if their efforts hadn’t paid off. We didn’t manage to hold the space that was created on that day when the world said no to war. Through the months of the war and occupation, we have had an opportunity and, really, a responsibility to continue to be in the streets and to be a visible opposition to the war, day after day.

The problem, of course, is that we all have this tension between our personal and political lives where we say, “OK, I’ve done that, but now I want to go home and get back to normal.” We need to ask, “Can we go back to normal when our government is killing people in our name?” We need to think about how to create a lifestyle that is opposed to war in every way, so that there is no going home at the end of the march to our “normal lives.”

Q:
It’s so hard to do that
. codepink
called for an ongoing vigil in front of the White House in opposition to the pending war in Iraq, and we kept it going for four months, in the dead of winter. We created this critical space right in front of the most important location in this country, and we thought people would give up their lives and join us en masse. They didn’t—especially absent were women your age, women in their thirties and forties. We had younger women and middle-aged women. What accounts for that
?