make it – he's raising a ‘peace force’ to do just that
By Kate Rope -- Bangkok Post -- 2002
George W. Bush is dividing the world and waging war. Osama Bin Laden is
skillfully eluding capture and giving hope to the thousands he has trained
to kill. Betwixt the two, hot spots in Israel and the occupied territories
are descending into ever more gruesome violence, other countries are being
forced to choose which side of the “war” they support, and nobody is talking
about peace.
Except, perhaps, David Hartsough, who is quietly building an army in the
midst of the fury. A veteran of the civil rights struggle in the US and
a peace activist who's been on the front lines of some of the most destructive
clashes of the last half century, Hartsough is travelling the globe to
rally a force that will march into the danger zones of the world armed
with only a commitment to peace. Born from the work left unfinished by
Mahatma Gandhi some 70 years ago, it's a hard-sell in times like these,
but Hartsough is an experienced and persuasive salesman.
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| David Hartsough in 2002 |
prominent peace academic, Hartsough comes across first as a friendly, traveller
type. His greying hair, well-worn trousers and forest-green rucksack look
like the accoutrements you'd expect a peace-loving wanderer to sport. But
when he sits down to tell his story and how and why his approach will work,
it is with the resolve and no-nonsense confidence of a battle-seasoned
general. Hartsough knows nonviolence can work because he has spent his
life in the field.
When Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated in 1948, he was building a shanti
sena, a “peace troop.” From that idea, Hartsough and of ‘Nonviolence is
the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the
mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man.’–Mahatama
Gandhi
others have created the Global Nonviolent Peace Force – a corps of civilians
trained in active nonviolent techniques that will be sent to areas of conflict
around the world to protect human rights and create the space for peaceful
resolution of differences.
At the invitation of NGOs or other parties, the corps will enter combat
areas to provide unarmed escorts for peaceworkers and training in active
nonviolence, as well as summon the attention of the world. Hartsough hopes
to have the force “non-combat-ready” by 2003, with an initial contingent
of 200 active members, 400 reservists and 500 supporters around the globe
who will send email, make phone calls, alert the press and turn the international
spotlight on particular conflicts. He already has 10 informal invitations
from places including Sri Lanka, Burma, Korea, Mindanao in the Philippines,
Columbia, Ecuador, Zimbabwe and Nigeria.
At a conference due to be held in New Delhi in November, an international
steering committee, which includes Acharn Chaiwat, will choose the location
for a pilot project. If it is successful, Hartsough hopes it will set a
precedent for solving conflicts peacefully.
Hartsough's early teachers were Gandhi, whom he read as a child, Martin
Luther King, whom he met as a teenager, and his father, who risked his
life in the early years of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis.
A Congregationalist minister who later became a Quaker, Hartsough's father
went to the Middle East when David was eight years old to bring tents and
medicine to refugees displaced by the first Israel-Palestine war. “My father
gave sermons in church on the Good Samaritan story, and it really impressed
me that he was not just preaching it but was willing to risk his life on
the belief that ‘everyone is my neighbor’,” he recalls.
Hartsough's father also took his teenage son to see the work Martin Luther
King was doing in Montgomery, Alabama, to secure equal rights for black
citizens of the United States. King was the leader not only of the struggle
for civil rights in the US, but also of the first nonviolent movement in
that country.
“I was very deeply moved that these people, who were facing such oppression,
were determined to get justice, but they were determined to do that nonviolently,
even against people who were bombing their churches and their homes. That
put me on the road to a much deeper understanding of nonviolence,” says
Hartsough.
After a year spent at an elite, almost entirely white college on the East
Coast of the United States, where he was helping the admissions office
recruit black students, Hartsough heard that Howard University, a black
college in Washington, DC, needed white students. Deciding to practise
what he was preaching, he transferred to Howard in 1959, and there he received
a lesson more valuable than anything else he could have learned: the power
of peaceful resistance.
In 1960, all across the southern states of the US, people began protesting
the segregation of lunch counters. So, every Saturday, Hartsough and his
black friends would leave DC, which had already been desegregated, and
cross into Maryland. They would sit at a lunch counter there until they
were arrested. After spending the weekend in jail singing freedom songs,
they'd be released in time for classes on Monday, only to be back in action
the following Saturday.
Hartsough stayed clear of nearby Virginia, which was home not only to
the American Nazi Party but also to a law that handed down a year's prison
sentence and a thousand-dollar fine to anyone who protested at a lunch
counter.
“We didn't have a thousand dollars and we didn't want to spend a year
in prison,” says Hartsough laughing. But when months passed and no one
challenged the racist law there, he and his friends mustered their courage,
did some extra training in nonviolence, and crossed the state line.
“Twelve of us went in and sat down at this lunch counter at the People's
Drugstore in Arlington, Virginia, and within minutes there were six cars
and sirens coming from all directions. They didn't arrest us, but neither
were they going to serve us any food. We stayed there for two days, and
it was the most difficult two days of my life.”
Hartsough and his friends endured vicious name-calling, lit cigarettes
being dropped down their shirts, punches so hard they were knocked off
their stools to the floor, where they were kicked, and members of the American
Nazi Party sporting swastikas and brandishing photos of apes, asking them
malevolently, “Is we or is we ain't equal?”
At the end of the second day, as Hartsough sat in meditation trying to
think about loving his enemies, a man approached him from behind. “He said
to me, ‘you nigger-lover’, and he had this horrible look of hatred on his
face; ‘if you don't get out of this store in two seconds, I'm going to
stab this through your heart’.” In the man's hand was a switchblade. “I
had two seconds to decide if I really believed in nonviolence, and I looked
this man right in the eye, and I said, ‘Friend, do what you believe is
right, and I'll still try and love you’, and it was quite amazing, because
his jaw began to fall and his hand began to drop and he left the store.”
The most difficult part was to come. The protest had been on newspaper
front pages and an angry crowd of 500 had gathered outside the drugstore,
armed with rocks and firecrackers and threatening to kill the 12.
For their part, Hartsough and his friends decided to write to Arlington's
religious and political leaders asking them to use their moral and political
leadership to open the eating establishments to everyone. “We said that
if nothing changed in a week, we'd come back. Some friendly newspaper reporters
had their cars outside and got us out of there alive, and we went back
to Washington and for six days we were shaking and wondering, ‘Do we have
the courage to go back and do it again’.”
But they didn't have to make that choice. On the sixth day, the call came
that the lunch counters in Arlington were now open to all.
“That taught me a very powerful lesson,” says Hartsough, “That by acting
on our conscience we got those people to act on their conscience, and those
people got the society to act on its conscience. That you don't need millions
of people ... even a few can make change.”
Since that time, Hartsough has been working beside the few and sometimes
the many, to make change all over the world. He has been jailed well over
100 times, but his most high-profile arrest was at the hands of Slobodan
Milosevic.
Before violence erupted in Kosovo in the late 1990s, hundreds of thousands
of Albanians marched to secure basic freedoms – the right to attend school,
secure jobs, speak their own language, get access to medical care – that
had been taken from them by the Serb regime. They enlisted the help of
Hartsough and others to awaken the international community to what was
happening and bring moral, political and economic pressure to bear on the
Serbs, like that which had succeeded against apartheid.
So Hartsough travelled the US and Europe to rally support, but met with
none. He finally returned to Kosovo with a small crew of four Americans
to conduct nonviolence training sessions. Though there was no international
media attention, coverage on Albanian TV got Milosevic's attention and
Hartsough and the five were locked up. “It became front-page news around
the world,” says Hartsough, “which was stupid, because 100,000 people marching
for justice had not been news, but five Americans in jail was.”
Unwilling to take the international heat, Milosevic soon released the
activists and turned them out of the country.
Not long after, the world woke up to the situation in Kosovo and Nato
began dropping bombs, a response Hartsough believes could have been avoided
and is at the heart of why he is now devoting all of his time to building
the peace force.
“I travelled all around the US saying, ‘Kosovo is an explosion waiting
to happen, we need people to come’. Nobody responded, and then it exploded
and after it exploded, NATO said our only choices were to do nothing or
to start bombing. But many of us there felt that with 200 trained and courageous
peace troops we might have made an important contribution to a peaceful
resolution.”
Hartsough wants his peace force to march right down the middle path between
doing nothing and bombing, so that places like Sri Lanka, now possibly
on the precipice of peace, can be delivered there rather than disintegrate
into further acts of death and destruction.
To charges that this is naive and unrealistic in the world's present landscape
of violence, Hartsough marshals evidence that forces like the one he is
building have been successful around the globe.
Peace Brigades International, a smaller corps than the one Hartsough plans,
was instrumental in giving courage to the civil society in Guatemala which
challenged a repressive government that was killing hundreds of thousands
of citizens, says Hartsough.
At the invitation of a group called “The Families of the Detained and
Disapeared”, the Brigades came in to escort protesters, providing a buffer
between military death squads that carried out the government's orders
and the civilians who were challenging the government's power.
During a four-year period, only two peace-workers were stabbed in Guatemala
and no one was killed. In the increasingly safe environment, more members
of the civil society emerged to oppose government oppression. Hartsough,
who was there at the time, attributes Guatemala's transition to democracy
in large part to the work of the Brigades.
To prepare a training module for his force, the Nonviolent Peaceforce
has studied the work of Peace Brigades International and others and has
compiled a 300-page document on what has worked, what hasn't, and what
has never been tried.
“We're not going to take on the whole world in the first year,” says Hartsough.
“Ideally we'd like something that in two years' time we could see some
real success. We're convinced that if we do this well, the world will discover
that here is a method that costs one millionth of what a military response
to a conflict costs, is much more effective, and you don't have the terrible
death and destruction and hatred that can continue for generations.”
Despite being a less expensive alternative to armed conflict, peace doesn't
come cheap and Hartsough and his colleagues need to raise a pretty penny
by peace-movement standards – $8 million (352 million baht) a year – a
sum that may be even harder to gather in the wake of September 11. Hartsough
is quick to point out, however, that this amount is equal to what the world
spends on the military every four minutes. If they can secure the funding,
they hope to have the force fully operational – with 2,000 active members,
4,000 reservists and 5,000 supporters – by 2010.
Though September 11 has engendered more violence, Hartsough sees this
moment in history as an opportunity to advance his cause. He points to
an article in the International Herald Tribune exposing the deaths inflicted
on one Afghan village by the American bombing campaign.
“As more and more facts like this come out, I think people are going to
be revolted by this militaristic response to something terrible. The United
States has spent trillions of dollars on military security, bombers, planes,
nuclear weapons, the CIA, FBI ... and that got us zero security. It didn't
protect one person on September 11. Isn't it time to look at an alternative
way to get security?
“After [Martin Luther] King was killed, I was devastated, because he gave
so much hope for a new kind of America with him as a leader. But I finally
came out of that depression feeling that the only thing we've got is for
many of us to become like King,” argues Hartsough. “Today we have a whole
lot of local leaders like him that most of the world doesn't even know
about. They're in Sri Lanka, Nepal, India, Latin America, Africa and Thailand.”
And, like King, they are all saying unpopular things to a few people in
the hopes of changing the minds of the many. This is a legacy which Hartsough
is happy to carry on.
“I have felt ever since that time [in Arlington, Virginia] that we don't
have to be just subjects of history. We can help make it.”
– For more information on the Global Non-violent Peace Force, visit www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org
or email info@nonviolentpeaceforce.org
