Peacemaker calls for 'true Christian witness' in Iraq.

"People in Iraq are beginning to understand the Christian message as the bombs that fall from the sky or the abuse of detainees in Abu Ghraib," said Cliff Kindy, a Church of the Brethren member recently returned from working with Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) in Iraq. Kindy returned to the US at the end of March. He has been with CPT in Iraq for five months of each of the past three winters, first arriving in Baghdad in October 2002.

In an example of the kind of daily violence that Iraqis are living through, Kindy and the CPT team "often hear about cars run over by tanks for whatever reason," he said. In a visit to Fallujah, they saw a car flattened by a tank--a father and son were killed in the car. "How much good do we have to do to overcome that?" Kindy asked.

He warned that the true witness of Jesus Christ is being overwhelmed by the violence of the US military. Iraqis recognize the US as a "Christian nation," and are beginning to identify the military activities of the US as a reflection of the nature of Christianity, Kindy said. "The most important thing we can do is to make clear what Christianity is, and what it isn't," he said.

Kindy also told of points of hope that he and other CPT volunteers in Iraq have witnessed in the past six months. The CPT team has helped train a Muslim Peacemaker Team, worked with Iraqi Human Rights Watch, and served as election observers--although Kindy said that if the election had been held in the US it would not have been regarded as free and fair.

The Muslim Peacemaker Team (MPT) grew out of the Iraqi Human Rights Watch, which has begun documenting mass graves from the 1991 uprising against Saddam Hussein, Kindy said. The group asked CPT for nonviolence training after members began to initiate nonviolent actions such as attempting an intervention between the US military and the Sad'r militia in the besieged city of Najaf, and creating a combined Sunni and Shi'ite response to the needs of refugees from Fallujah, Kindy said.

A CPT visit to Fallujah--a town the size of Fort Wayne destroyed after a months-long assault by the US military against insurgents--revealed the continuing hopelessness of Iraq, however. "It looked like what Hiroshima would look like," Kindy said. A non-governmental report has said that 40 percent of homes in Fallujah have been totally destroyed, another 40 percent are unlivable, and another 20 percent are damaged, Kindy added. Residents told CPT that they have received no aid and no compensation for their homes from the US military. Although the CPT team saw shops re-opened and people out on the streets, the team also witnessed the fact that residents had no running water, electricity, or telephone service.

The CPT team visited the hospital in Fallujah, which has been rebuilt following destruction by US bombing. It was one of the first targets in the assault, Kindy said. He shared a current Iraqi theory that hospitals, clinics, and doctors are targeted or shut down by the US military because they are the source of reporting of Iraqi civilian casualties. A CPT press release on April 26 said physicians also are targets of the Iraqi insurgency.

While the team was in the hospital, a father brought in his infant daughter, reportedly made sick by depleted uranium left over from US explosives. People in Fallujah talked to the CPT team about illegal weaponry that they suspect was used there, including napalm and other chemical weapons. Kindy also said that CPT received reports in Fallujah of mass burials by the US military, and reports that the official casualty count does not match the numbers of disappeared. "What does all this mean?" Kindy asked. "We don't have a very good handle on that."

Kindy asked Brethren to "keep an eye on" the actions of the US and Iraqi militaries, which may use the tactics that destroyed Fallujah in other places. "We begin to hear about things happening in Baquba, Beiji, Mosul," Kindy said, also mentioning Ramadi and Samarra.

He asked Brethren to be aware of dangers facing the CPT team in Iraq, which varies from three to eight members at any one time. CPT volunteers are among the last nongovernmental foreigners to remain at work in Iraq. Most have left for fear of insurgent kidnappings, suicide bombings, and other threats. Recently one of the CPT team, a British citizen, was warned by his government that he was a high-profile kidnapping target. This has caused the rest of the team some hard heart-searching to decide what is the right thing to do, Kindy said.

"There is no place in Iraq that can guarantee security," he said. "And we're being fed a line that it's just getting better."

For more information about Christian Peacemaker Teams, see www.cpt.org.

Source: 5/11/2005 Newsline
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