Stop the Next War Now (30 page)

Environmentalist Diane Wilson and young Iraqi boy during CODEPINK delegation visit to Iraq before the 2003 U.S. invasion.

Photo by Medea Benjamin

We must certainly work together to root out terrorism, and Pakistan has been a frontline state in the war against terrorism. In fact, most of the leading terrorists, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, have been arrested in Pakistan.

But while global attention is focused on terrorism, the crisis of poverty is effectively disregarded. While most Muslim intellectuals strongly condemn the attack on the World Trade Center, they believe that unaddressed political problems and neglected social injustice provided a petri dish allowing the germs of terrorism and hatred to multiply.

Without a war on poverty, terrorism will never be defeated. Unfortunately, today big business seems to be in the driver’s seat, while every hour a thousand children starve to death in the world. One recent report found that while twenty years ago CEOs made an average of forty times what factory workers made, in 2003 they made four hundred times as much, and their incomes are now climbing to a multiple of five hundred.

This staggering rise in the fortunes of those on top, while those below suffer, is a festering sore that has the potential to erupt. The 2004 Indian elections showed that a stock-market economy alone could not make India shine. The Indian electorate went against all predictions, as peasants, laborers, and the middle classes voted for change. Similarly, in Pakistan the talk of stock-market rises and foreign-exchange increases hides a more troubling picture. This is one of increasing poverty, hunger, misery, and frustration. The number of young people killing themselves because of hunger was twelve hundred in a six-month period. That is the officially recorded figure—the real figure is believed to be much higher.

In Pakistan, the average income has been shrinking. The cost of living is rising sharply. It is becoming increasingly difficult for the ordinary citizen to pay fat utility bills and buy the basic necessities of life. The Pakistan Economic Survey admits that poverty has increased since democracy was derailed in 1996. The gap between the rich and the poor is growing at an alarming rate.

The war against terrorism is primarily perceived as a war based on the use of force. However, economics has its own force, as does the desperation of families who cannot feed themselves.

The neglect of rising poverty against the background of religious extremism can only complicate an already difficult world situation. Militancy and greed cannot become the defining images of a new century that began with much hope. We must refocus our energy on promoting the values of democracy, accountability, broad-based government, and institutions that can respond to people’s very real and very urgent needs.

THE CRACKED

MIRROR

WANGARI MAATHAI

Wangari Maathai is Kenya’s assistant minister for environment, natural resources, and wildlife.Winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, she is the founder of Kenya’s Green Belt Movement and the author of
The Green Belt Movement
.The following is excerpted from the November/December 2004 issue of
Resurgence
magazine (www.resur gence.org), and from a speech by Professor Maathai on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.

Mount Kenya is a World Heritage site. The equator passes through its top, and it boasts a unique habitat and heritage. Because it is a glacier-topped mountain, it is the source of many of Kenya’s rivers. Now, partly because of climate change and partly because of logging and the encroachment of crops, the glaciers are melting. Many of the rivers flowing from Mount Kenya have either dried up or become very low. The mountain’s biological diversity is threatened as the forests fall.

“What shall we do to conserve this forest?” I asked myself.

Mount Kenya used to be a holy mountain for my people, the Kikuyus. They believed that their God dwelled on the mountain and that everything good—the rains, clean drinking water—flowed from it. As long as they saw the clouds (the mountain is a very shy mountain, usually hiding behind clouds), they knew they would get rain.

And then the missionaries came. In their wisdom, or lack of it, they said, “God does not dwell on Mount Kenya. God dwells in heaven.”

We have been looking for heaven, but we have not found it. Men and women have gone to the moon and back and have not seen heaven. Heaven is not above us: it is right here, right now.

So the Kikuyu people were not wrong when they said that God dwelled on the mountain, because if God is omnipresent, as theology tells us, then God is on Mount Kenya too. If the people still believed this, they would not have allowed illegal logging or clear-cutting of the forests.

The Green Belt Movement (GBM), which I led until joining the new Kenyan government in January 2003, set out to mobilize community consciousness toward self-determination, equity, improved livelihood, security, and environmental conservation—using trees as the entry point. When we began, we believed that all we needed to do was to teach people how to plant trees and make connections between their own problems and their degraded environments. But in the course of our struggles to realize GBM’s vision, we discovered that some of the Kenyan communities had lost aspects of their culture that had facilitated the conservation of the beautiful environment the first European explorers and missionaries recorded in their diaries and textbooks.

During the long, dark decades of imperialism and colonialism from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, the British, Belgian, Italian, French, and German governments told African societies that they were backward. They told us that our religious systems were sinful, our agricultural practices inefficient, our tribal systems of governing irrelevant, and our cultural norms barbaric, irreligious, and savage.

Until the arrival of the Europeans, communities had looked to nature for inspiration, food, beauty, and spirituality. Their habitats were rich with local biological diversity, both plant and animal. Today these are the very habitats most at risk from globalization, commercialization, privatization, and the piracy of biological materials found in them. This global threat is causing communities to lose their rights to the resources they have preserved throughout the ages.

Of course, some of what happened before the Europeans arrived was bad and remains so. Africans were involved in the slave trade; women are still genitally mutilated; Africans are still killing Africans because they belong to different religions or ethnic groups. Nonetheless, I for one am not content to thank God for the arrival of “civilization” from Europe, because I know from what my grandparents told me that much of what went on in Africa before colonialism was good.

African leaders were to some degree accountable for their actions. People were able to feed themselves. They carried their history—their cultural practices, their stories, and their sense of the world around them—in their oral traditions, and that tradition was rich and meaningful. Above all, they lived with other creatures and the natural environment in harmony, and they protected that world.

Cut off from their cultural heritage by colonialism, African communities began to lose their identity, their dignity, and their sense of destiny. Disinherited, they had nothing to pass on. Even those who were not sent into slavery became, in effect, slaves—and the consequences were long lasting. In gbm seminars, as participants put down the mirror that has been showing them their own cracked reflections—the mirror first held up by the missionaries or the colonial authorities—there is enormous relief and great anger and sadness.

Cultural revival might be the only thing that stands between the conservation and destruction of the environment, the only way to perpetuate the knowledge and wisdom inherited from the past. But cultural liberation will come only when the minds of the people are set free and they can protect themselves from colonialism of the mind. Only then will they really appreciate their country and the need to protect its natural beauty and wealth.

The thirty million trees planted by GBM volunteers—mostly rural women—throughout Kenya over the past thirty years are a testament to individuals’ ability to change the course of history. Working together, we have proven that sustainable development is possible; that reforestation of degraded land is possible; and that exemplary governance is possible when ordinary citizens are informed, sensitized, mobilized, and involved in direct action for their environment.

Many wars are fought over resources, which are becoming increasingly scarce across the earth. If we did a better job of managing our resources sustainably, conflicts over them would be reduced. So, protecting the global environment is directly related to securing peace.

When we plant trees, we plant the seeds of peace and the seeds of hope. We also secure the future for the generations to come.

For more information, visit www.greenbeltmovement.org and www.wan garimaathai.com.

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of

strength that will endure as long as life lasts.”

—Rachel Carson

Chapter 10

CELEBRATE

JOYFUL

REVOLUTION

GRITO DE VIEQUES

A

YA DE

L

EóN

Aya de León is an award-winning writer, performer,

and teacher. Her one-woman shows include

Aya de León Is

Running for President

and

Thieves in the Temple:

The Reclaiming of Hip Hop.

She is a coauthor of the book

How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office.

Note:

Vieques, Puerto Rico, was used by the U.S. Navy for

target practice with live ammunition for more than sixty years.

But in May 2003, after years of struggle, the people of Puerto

Rico forced the navy to leave.

My name is Vieques.

I am a Puerto Rican girl.

My stepfather is the United States.

He comes into my room at night to do his business.

My name is Vieques.

I used to dream that Spain, my real father, would come

back and rescue me.

But he’s gone for good.

I have only the faint and echoing voices

of Africana and Taina ancestors telling me that

I can survive this.

My name is Vieques.

When my body started to change,

my stepfather dressed me in a clingy, itchy dress.

“Smile,” he told me. “Smile at the nice foreign military

man,” and pushed me toward him.

The military man was not nice.

His skin was pasty. His breath smelled.

I couldn’t understand his language.

He came into my room and did his business.

My name is Vieques.

Sometimes my stepfather sells me to whole groups.

He calls them allied forces.

I fought back the best I could with chains and live bodies

and fishing boats.

It happened anyway.

My name is Vieques.

I am still fighting back.

I am bigger and stronger now.

I have put a church, an encampment,

a struggle up at my bedroom door.

My stepfather can’t get in.

He has not been able to do his business for months now,

longer than I ever dreamed.

My name is Vieques.

Without the shock of constant bombardment, the numbness is subsiding.

I look at my body and see the devastation.

Lagoons, like self-esteem, have dried up to nothingness.

My womb is wilting with radiation

from illegally used uranium ammunition.

Where my skin was once lush and soft, I am scarred.

Old tanks, like cigarette burns, dot my flesh.

Unexploded bombs, like memories, may detonate in

the future when chosen lovers touch me in the wrong spot

or without warning.

My name is Vieques.

The numbness is subsiding.

Tender shoots of grass push up toward the sky.

A lizard sneaks back to sun itself on a chunk of shrapnel.

A butterfly alights on a rusted-out jet.

Fish slowly make their way back toward my shores,