I don't know if they are "winning souls for Jesus," as the Southern Baptist missionaries in Iraq that I've mentioned before are trying to do. But I'm sure that the form of "Christian witness" practiced by this group is doing more good for the United States, and for the reputation of the Christian religion among Iraqis.
Abuse photos spur Christian peace teams' return to Iraq: Activists say they're willing to die for cause San Francisco Chronicle 05/16/04.
The activists described in the article are part of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, "are part of a campaign led by the Mennonite, Church of the Brethren and Quaker movements, all of which have long histories on advocating nonviolence."
There aren't really that many genuine pacifists around in the United States. Most people hear about them when some armchair warrior makes a rirual statement about respecting "sincere" pacifists. It's normally followed in the same sentence with a sneer that implies they're really all cowards who are helping The Enemy.
These activists who are going into Iraq with the Christian Peacemaker Teams sound like anyting but cowards to me. Foolish, maybe. Cowards, no.
They have had more than one brush with danger since they first came to Iraq as human shields before the U.S. invasion. They ran afoul of Saddam Hussein's security police, the Mukhabarat, and were expelled in March 2003 for taking unauthorized photographs of bomb damage. But a few weeks later, they were back.
In February, two Iraqis whom the group befriended suddenly produced a bomb and a gun during a meeting at the team's anonymous-looking headquarters on a shabby side street near the Tigris River.
"They said, 'If you will all please put down your tea cups, we were sent on a mission to kill you,' " Kindy recalls.
The Iraqis "tied us up and said they were from al Qaeda, and then they proceeded to rob some of our telephones, computers and money," said Vriesinga, 46, of Ontario, Canada. "Then they left us alone, saying a bomb would go off in 35 minutes. Luckily it didn't, and when we realized that they were really just robbers rather than terrorists and that we had just lost a few telephones, we decided to stay."
A significant part of their work in Iraq has been to help Iraqis communicate with the American occupation troops, few of home have even rudimentary Arabic-language skills. These activists have quite a bit of experience dealing with the occupation forces over detention questions. This article refers to reports the Christian Peacemaker Teams have made about cases of abuse of detainees.
This article has some of the kind of disturbing comments that those who were paying close attention to the news have been seeing since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. The kinds that the mainstream press, Congress and responsible Pentagon officials should have been investigating long before now:
The teams' report in December stressed that amid the complaints, many Iraqi detainees also spoke of other soldiers who were kind and considerate. But occupation officials showed little interest in the increasing complaints about human rights violations and illegal detentions until now, [team member Stewart] Vriesinga said.
He said many of the charge sheets of those in custody that he has viewed have blank spaces where their alleged crimes are to be detailed, or simply a soldier's scrawled phrase: "Brother shot at us,'' or 'Uncle is a suspect.''
"We suspect a lot of them were simply caught in a raid (while soldiers were) looking for somebody else, or just standing nearby, maybe, when an attack started," said Vriesinga.
"We often see people released after six months without any further interview, which means they could equally have been released on the second day. Release dates are often governed by jail overcrowding rather than judicial procedure," he said.
Handling of prisoners is always a intense issue in wars. Just think of how the MIA (missing in action) issue of soldiers lost but unaccounted-for in the Vietnam War has hung on. The only Confederate officials executed after the American Civil War were ones convicted of mistreatment of Union prisoners-of-war in the notorious Andersonville prison camp. The prison torture and other abuses have cost the United States an awful lot.
One other interesting aspect of that article is that it's a reminder of the way in which the uses of soldiers-for-hire ("security consultants"), some of whom operate in civilian clothes, is blurring the distinction between occupation troops and civilians, both civilians working with the occupation government and those with NGOs (non-governmental organizations).
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