Dr. Laura E. Powers, agriculture and food security advisor with the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)

Dr. Laura E. Powers, agriculture and food security advisor with the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), will speak 4 p.m. Friday, Sept. 28, in Suter Science Center room #104.

She will focus on the challenges related to preventing nutritional and economic crises before chronic food insecurity becomes acute in African settings, drawing from her experience with USAID.

Dr. Powers believes the primary challenge in the agricultural sector is "to provide emergency relief that can lead to sustainable improvements in productivity without heightening conflict or encouraging dependency on foreign aid."

The program is open to everyone free of charge. Refreshments will be served 15 minutes prior to the start of the program.

The seminars are made possible by the sponsorship of the Daniel B. Suter endowment in biology, named for the late Dr. Suter, professor emeritus of biology who taught at 91¶ÌÊÓƵ 1948-1875 and was premedical advisor.

Learn more about 91¶ÌÊÓƵ’s efforts on sustainability, creation care, and building green.

For more information on the science seminar, contact Dr. Roman J. Miller, at 540-432-4412.

The presentation, sponsored by the (CJP) at 91¶ÌÊÓƵ, will look at ways current government policies affect the lives of everyday citizens now and may in the future.

Lisa Schirch

Panel participants will include:

• Lisa Schirch, associate professor of peacebuilding;

• Jayne Docherty, associate professor of conflict studies;

• Peter Dula, assistant professor of Bible and religion and former Mennonite Central Committee representative in Iraq;


Jayne Docherty

• Dan Wessner, associate professor of international and political studies;

• Dr. John (Jack) Butt, professor of history at James Madison University.

CJP students Marshall Yoder and Leymah Gbowee will facilitate the discussion.

Admission to the program is free. For more information, contact Matthew Hartman at 503-754-3319; e-mail: lifepilgrimage@yahoo.com.

The 3D Security Initiative based at 91¶ÌÊÓƵ is attracting wide interest among national leaders who often don

The art is simple, stark, yet powerful. The images depict, and evoke, a flood of emotions growing out of the effects of war on children.

A collection of 123 drawings made by refugee children from El Salvador has been donated to the (CTP) at 91¶ÌÊÓƵ.

The drawings were done by children, mostly 6 to 12 years of age, in refugee camps on the Honduras-El Salvador border. The refugees fled El Salvador during protracted civil war between government forces and guerilla movements in their native country. The children created the art based on their personal experiences of devastation and trauma.

Ken Lawrence of Spring Mills, Pa., was part of a peace group fact-finding mission to Nicaragua and Honduras in 1984. He was one of four persons from his group able to visit the camps where the art work was discovered.

Lawrence determined to bring back the drawings to show Americans the violence and suffering taking place in Central America, some the direct result of U.S. involvement there.

Photo by Jim Bishop

“It was hard to believe the horrible things that were happening in one of the most beautiful locations I’ve ever seen,” Lawrence said. “These are universal images showing the barbarism of war through childrens’ eyes even while being uniquely Central American,” he added.

After returning to the U.S., Lawrence went on tour with the children’s art. He sold an article detailing his experience to “Life” magazine, but it never was published.

The couple, friends of James and Marian Payne of Richmond, Va., long-time benefactors of the CTP program, decided to give the collection to 91¶ÌÊÓƵ’s graduate-level peacebuilding program because “we felt it had a better chance of more people seeing this striking art work if it went to an organization that is addressing the very ills caused by war and injustice.”

The children who made the drawings would be in their 30’s now, if they’re still living, Lawrence noted, adding: “It would be something if one day these materials could be given back to their creators.”

“These pieces are a striking, painful reminder of how trauma can be reflected in art,” said 91¶ÌÊÓƵ President Loren E. Swartzendruber. “91¶ÌÊÓƵ is grateful to receieve this collection in recognition of the work that CTP does on behalf of hurting people around the world. We will do our best to be good stewards of this gift,” he added.

Ruth H. Zimmerman, CTP co-director, said the artwork will initially be put in acid-free sleeves and placed in notebooks for public viewing. Some “will certainly be displayed as part of the 10th anniversary celebration of the CTP program being planned for June, 2005.”

The at 91¶ÌÊÓƵ will host Peggy Gish, an Athens, Ohio, native who recently returned from her fourth trip to Iraq, working with .

She will speak about her experiences 8 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 8, in the Coffeehouse located on ground floor of the University Commons.

Gish, 63, has been in Iraq for a total of 13 months in the past two years. The CPT team in Iraq has worked to reduce violence, promote fair treatment of Iraqi detainees and to witness the conditions of life under the U.S. occupation.

Gish

Zulia Mena will speak about the impact of the war in Colombia and U.S. foreign policy on the Afro-Colombian people 12:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 5, in the Common Grounds Coffeehouse at 91¶ÌÊÓƵ. The coffeehouse is located on ground floor of 91¶ÌÊÓƵ’s University Commons.

Ms. Mena was elected to Congress in 1994, serving for four years as Colombia’s first ever Afro-Colombian congresswoman. Today, she continues her work in the Choc� as a community organizer and social worker.

At 8 p.m. Tuesday, Mena will speak at James Madison University. She will be accompanied by Harrisonburg resident Silvia Romero, who will talk about her experiences as a Latino in the Shenandoah Valley. The presentation will be held at the Health and Human Services (HHS) Building 1301.

Ms. Romero was born in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico. Her family came to the United States in 1991, and she started elementary school not speaking a word of English. Romero currently works for the Shenandoah Valley Migrant Education Program and is involved in the community through her church, Blessed Sacrament, and the Latino theater troupe, Teatro Chirmol.

Mena is traveling across the southeastern U.S. with Witness for Peace, acting as a voice for the Afro-Colombian population internationally. Her appearances locally are sponsored in part by 91¶ÌÊÓƵ’s Conflict Transformation Program (CTP).

Admission to both presentations is free.

For more information, contact Danny Malec, (540) 729-6936; e-mail: dannymalec@hotmail.com.

Jayne Docherty, associate professor of conflict studies at 91¶ÌÊÓƵ

Jayne Docherty, an associate professor of conflict studies at 91¶ÌÊÓƵ, spent three years studying what went wrong in 1993 in Waco, Texas, during a 51-day standoff that produced one of the bloodiest episodes in U.S. law enforcement history.

She interviewed FBI agents with expertise in standoffs, including one of the Waco siege’s lead negotiators. She read studies and reports. And she pored over more than 12,000 pages of the government’s transcripts of the failed negotiations.

All this led her to the conclusion that government agents and Branch Davidian leaders came to the confrontation with such divergent worldviews that they ended up talking past each other.

The Branch Davidians saw the FBI agents as representatives of an ungodly system. The FBI saw the Davidians as deluded, and couldn’t understand why they would see government bargaining attempts – such as offers to trade media access in exchange for the release of women and children – as offensive and immoral.

As the people on the inside used more biblical language and resisted bargaining, Docherty has written, the people on the outside “concluded the Branch Davidians were more deluded than they had originally thought. As the FBI responded with harsher measures, the Branch Davidians concluded that the United States was more evil than they had originally thought.”

It was, Docherty says, a “clash of worlds” that ended in tragedy – in a conflagration that killed more than 70 men, women and children inside the Branch Davidian complex.

Now, Docherty has turned the lessons she learned from Waco to another conflict – the United States’ campaign to gain military supremacy and win hearts and minds in Iraq. Docherty sees disturbing parallels.

“As I watch what’s going on in Iraq,” she said, “it just looks like the same stuff over again.”

A Bad Situation Made Worse

Both confrontations pitted groups of people with starkly different worldviews against each other, producing an atmosphere ripe for fatal misjudgments. Just as FBI agents couldn’t fathom the religious beliefs of the Branch Davidians, Docherty said, U.S. foreign policy planners proceeded with little understanding of how devout Muslims would react to an American invasion and the chaos that followed.

In recent weeks, she argues, U.S. policy makers made a bad situation worse by attacking the Iraqi holy city of Najaf, the home base of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who has led an insurrection against the occupation. Last week U.S.-led forces announced a fragile truce with al-Sadr’s Mahdi militia.

“There’s a failure to recognize that when we fulfill the predictions of this religious leader by invading sacred space,” Docherty said, “more and more people who are on the margins are going to become more radical, because our actions actually validate the worldview of the leaders.”

Similarly, FBI agents in Waco “didn’t understand those Branch Davidians who felt that safety was staying in the sacred space – in the building,” Docherty said. “Safety for them was measured on a sacred scale. The belief is: Even if you die, you’re better off being with God than being outside, living in sin.”

Political leaders don’t have to approve of another group’s religious motivations, she said, but they do have to understand them in order to make informed decisions – “so that you understand what their reactions will be to your actions.”

Docherty is a faculty member at 91¶ÌÊÓƵ’s Conflict Transformation Program, which brings together scholars, activists and aid workers from around the world to discuss how to prevent violence and help heal the wounds after it happens. She’s drawn on a number of perspectives as she’s watched events unfold in Iraq – as an ex-Army brat who grew up steeped in military culture, as a one-time member of an outside-the-mainstream Catholic community, as a scholar who studies confrontations between government authorities and unconventional religious groups.

Docherty’s book on the Waco standoff – “Learning Lessons from Waco: When the Parties Bring Their Gods to the Negotiation Table” – was published by Syracuse University Press. She is currently working on a book about “how we get authentic security in an age of terrorism,” which will incorporate her analysis of the war in Iraq.

Clash Between Good and Evil

In comparing Waco and Iraq, she cautions that there are many differences between the Branch Davidians’ Christian millennialism and the Islamic religious beliefs of those who are fighting to end the U.S. presence in Iraq. But a common thread, she said, is the conviction that life is a clash between good and evil and “you must chose between the two.”

In a world that’s changing rapidly thanks to globalization, she said, many Christians, Muslims and Jews are grasping for identity and meaning. Some embrace a belief that “the world is a mess, it’s evil and the way you handle that is to be faithful to a higher law; if you follow that law, the world will be transformed and become right – or at least you’ll get saved.”

In the case of Iraq, she said, the “good vs. evil” narrative is embraced not only by those who are fighting the occupation, but also by U.S. leaders who see their adversaries simply as evildoers, rather than as people who are striking out because they’re frightened by events they can’t control.

In a speech in March, President Bush called the war on terrorism “an inescapable calling of our generation. The terrorists are offended not merely by our policies – they are offended by our existence as free nations. No concession will appease their hatred. No accommodation will satisfy their endless demands.”

Docherty said some religious leaders in Iraq are trying to exercise a moderating influence, but there’s been little discussion in America about how we chose to paint all our opponents as unmitigatedly evil.

“I think the prison abuse scandal has opened the door for that kind of discussion in a way that it wasn’t opened before,” she said. But that discussion won’t last, she added, if the media and Congressional leaders define the problem as the deeds of a clique of renegade, low-ranking troops.

On the ground, she said, American policy makers have heightened tensions because they have failed to understand that providing security requires not only force but also real efforts at nationbuilding. This would include greater efforts to restore Iraq’s physical infrastructure and a commitment to building a political infrastructure that takes into account Iraqis’ history and culture.

The ‘Get-Tough’ Approach

“You basically have two approaches to policing – the SWAT team approach or the community policing approach – and we went with the SWAT,” Docherty said.

Some commentators view a get-tough approach as exactly what’s needed. William Arkin, a military analyst who writes for the Los Angeles Times, argues that America actually underestimated the need for force in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s ouster. “As far back as memory extends for most Iraqis, the spoils (and the power) have gone to the tough,” Arkin wrote in April. “Brutality – and the fear it inspires – have been the central organizing principle of Iraqi society. That can’t just be turned off overnight. … In the short term, force may be necessary, because it is what Iraqis understand.”

Docherty, in contrast, argues that the only way to begin
to make the transition from violence to order is to rachet down the use of force, and to internationalize the work of nationbuilding by bringing in the United Nations.

“I’m not some naive person who says, ‘If we were nice everything would be OK,'” she said. “The threats are very real. And the people who are suffering are the Iraqi people on the ground who are caught in the crossfire. And our troops, too, who are also caught in the crossfire. Lots of times they don’t understand where it’s coming from.”

She said this week’s announcement that nine Iraqi militias would lay down arms as part of a rewards and retraining program is a hopeful sign. But whether the deal holds depends on whether U.S. and Iraqi leadership can maintain a consistent posture, “which has been lacking on the ground there.”

Beyond that, she said, there’s still a complicated mix of groups from inside and outside Iraq – including al-Qaida – that will continue to press the fight.

To end the violence and bring stability, she said, “we have to start sorting out who’s motivated by what factors. Violence is interactive. That means any time you want to talk about reducing violence you have to look at everybody involved – including yourself.”

reprinted with permission of The Roanoke Times

Reformation church leader Martin Luther reportedly said, “Even if I knew my life would end tomorrow, I would still plant a tree.”

A Southern magnolia was planted in front of 91¶ÌÊÓƵ’s Hillside Suites residence May 27 as a living symbol of hope for peace in Iraq, a country devastated by war and destruction in the wake of the U.S. invasion.

Six Iraqi citizens who spent several weeks attending programs at 91¶ÌÊÓƵ aimed at training persons to do peacebuilding, mediation work and trauma healing in areas of protracted conflict gave the tree to the university as an expression of thanks for their experiences.

The group, three men and three women, attended a weeklong STAR (Seminars on Trauma Awareness and Recovery), a program co-sponsored by 91¶ÌÊÓƵ’s Conflict Transformation Program and Church World Service. STAR provides intensive training programs for religious leaders and caregivers to assist persons in areas affected by traumatic events.

They then participated in the first two sessions of the annual Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI), an annual CTP-sponsored event that offers intensive seven-day courses on conflict transformation, strategic nonviolence, trauma awareness and reconciliation, restorative justice and related themes.

“The workshops we attended were extremely valuable to our work in Iraq,” said one participant, speaking on behalf of his colleagues. “The mediation training will help us in resolving local and community conflicts, hopefully reaching out to a broader base and with more formal applications to human rights situations.

“Coming here (to 91¶ÌÊÓƵ) gave us a new sense of hope,” he said. “The public media isn’t showing the progress being made in trying to bring stability and improved economic life. Violence will only lead to more violence. We want to take back and apply the values to help build up peace in our country.”

The delegation was sponsored by Church World Service and Mennonite Central Committee.

The SPI program continues through June 15.

As her husband dressed for work the morning of Aug. 7, 1998, Doreen Ruto suggested he change shirts. She found one that matched his suit better.

Several days later, that shirt helped her locate his body on the floor of the city morgue in Nairobi, Kenya.

“Beyond the Rubble” was the title that Ruto – a diminutive, lively woman in a lavender dress and head-scarf – gave to the account of grief and healing that she shared at a recent Summer Peacebuilding Institute luncheon. Ruto is a beginning student at 91¶ÌÊÓƵ’s Conflict Transformation Program, which has brought 170 people from all continents together for the annual institute, May 3-June 15.

Many have powerful stories to tell, SPI co-director Pat Hostetter Martin noted.

Ruto, a former secondary school teacher, and her husband, Wilson Mutai — both from rural Nandi families – had moved to Nairobi for careers with the Teachers Service Commission, where she still works in teacher training and management. She was on leave that August morning, at home with the couples two then-young sons and recovering from a miscarriage two weeks earlier.

She heard “a shattering noise” and suspected a transformer had blown. Moments later, her nine-year-old saw the first TV report of the bombing five miles away that targeted the U.S. Embassy and destroyed all but the shell of the commission high-rise where Mutai had worked on the fourth floor. “I panicked,” Ruto says. Her husband was among 224 killed.

Her year-old baby kept asking for his dad: “One of my greatest discomforts was how do I explain to him where this person is?” After she returned to work, Ruto and surviving colleagues had to go through bloodstained files littered with glass shards. She found her husband’s imprint on a blasted door.

“I asked myself what is it that I had not done. Was it a curse? What did God expect of me?” says Ruto, a Pentecostalist. She read the entire Bible in six months. Additionally, “I wrote a long letter to Wilson because I needed to talk to someone about my pain.” Having finished the 15-page letter, she observed a mourning tradition: “I packed his clothes, put them in a suitcase and apologized to him for evicting him from his house.”

As permitted by Nandi custom. Mutai’s family of origin insisted on pocketing his entire inheritance, causing a painful estrangement common among Kenyan widows.

She found healing in assisting fellow-mourners, becoming vice-chair of a survivors’ group. She learned of 91¶ÌÊÓƵ’s conflict resolution programs during a conference with bombing survivors in Oklahoma City. In 2002, she participated in 91¶ÌÊÓƵ’s STAR program for trauma healing. She hopes to obtain her masters in conflict transformation degree in 2006 and use the skills gained to help other survivors of terrorism.

“Terrorism takes all forms,” she says. “For me, poverty and starvation are other forms of terrorism.”

When U.S. customs officials asked Ruto the purpose of her visit, she replied, “to study peacebuilding.” An official inquired, “Peacebuilding between whom?” Ruto recalls, “I wanted to say ‘between you and me.'”

She says many Kenyans fear U.S. “anti-terrorist” policies will hurt their country. “We now have ‘are you with us or against us?’ This continues to drift us apart.”

Aaron Wright, attending SPI from Liberia, said Ruto works so hard helping other terrorism survivors that she often lacks time to rest. “I’m going back with her story,” said a man from Nepal, where widows are also struggling.

Watching news of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, Ruto unconsciously searched the crowds for friends’ faces. That year in New York, she gave a victim-impact statement at proceedings where four men received life sentences for the Nairobi bombing. Her testimony was not legally relevant, however, because the men were only tried for the 12 American deaths – not those of more than 200 Africans. Ruto notes the average compensation for Nairobi bombing widows was $10,000, compared to a $1.6-million average for World Trade Center families.

Most Kenyans did not want the Nairobi terrorists executed, however. Recalling that Oklahoma City murderer Timothy McVeigh went to his death expressing no remorse, Ruto says a life sentence allows more time for regret.

Chris Edwards is a free-lance writer from Harrisonburg.