CWS Update November 2009
In this issue:
>>Israel-Palestine Rabbis seek forgiveness; Christian Peacemakers report on demolition of water cisterns, denying Palestinian farmers their livelihoods read more
>> South Sudan - Violence escalating destablising region ahead of next year's referrendum read more
>>Mozambique - Transforming guns into hoes - churches cleaning up bombs so farming can begin read more
>> Climate Change - Religious traditions join together in a call to action. read more
>> Bougainville - Good news; Reconciliation on-going read more
>> Special Thanks: 25 years of service to CWS read more
>> Christmas Appeal launch read more
Dates to note:
November 20 - Africa Industrialisation Day
November 25 - International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women
November 29 - International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People
Israel-Palestine: Rabbis’ Group Seeks Forgiveness for Behaviour to Palestinians
The head of the Israel-based Rabbis for Human Rights group has urged Jews to reflect on the way in which they deal with those outside their faith and to ask for the forgiveness of God about mistreating people in the name of Judaism. “The way we treat non-Jews reflects on our God and our religion,” Rabbi Arik Ascherman, the executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights, says. “And to mistreat people in the name of Judaism defames and desecrates God’s name.”
Palestine: Water Cisterns Destroyed
Christian Peacemaking Teams are people from around the world who stay in towns on the Palestinian West Bank to observe events and record the injustices being done to Palestinian people. Recently they made the following report:
“We received an early morning call asking us to come immediately to the Beqa’a Valley. Bulldozers had arrived to carry out demolition orders on farmers’ water cisterns (open, walled ponds for collecting water) which irrigate this fertile valley of grapes. When we arrived at the scene, two ‘stingers’ (5 ton jack hammers) had already begun their path of destruction. Away from the demolition action, two handcuffed men and a woman sat on the ground in powerlessness. Earlier, the soldiers had blindfolded these men, but later removed the blindfolds. Within an hour, the family owning this cistern had lost the source of water for their many dunams of grapes. Many Palestinians from the Valley watched, mostly in silence”
The report goes on to document the destruction of another cistern belonging to three families on their own land and neither the owners nor the observers could do anything about it. There was no explanation of why this destruction occurred, but it seems that nearby Israeli settlements which draw on underground Palestinian water sources did not want Palestinians to use the water, which is in reality their own. Later in talking to one of the families the father commented, “We have nothing. We have lost everything. We are poor, we have no weapons, we have little water and food. The only thing we have to leave our children is our land. Sometimes I ask myself, Why did God put us here? You tell me, Why did God put us here?”
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South Sudan: Violence Escalating
Violence in southern Sudan is rife, with many women, children and the elderly among the victims, the head of CWS partner, the Sudan Council of Churches (SCC) the Rev. Ramadan Chan Liol, has warned.
Chan urged those responsible for the violence to cease their actions immediately in the south of the country, where four years ago an accord known as the Comprehensive Peace Agreement ended 21 years of civil war.
He was speaking three days after about 100 people were killed in Duk County. The killings were blamed on fighters from the Lou Nuer ethnic group who have clashed with members of the Murle group. Church leaders in the south believed members of the central government from the north were arming militias in the region.
“They are trained, transported and attached to tribal groups,” said Chan, noting that the country’s council of churches was planning to work with ethnic groups, government officials and church leaders to identify the killers.
He explained that some political leaders from Sudan’s north want to destabilise the southern region so that it will be unable to take part in scheduled April 2010 general elections, as well as in a 2012 referendum. The referendum will determine whether the mainly Christian and animist south would break away from the mainly Arab and Islamic north.
Chan said many in the north thought that the election and referendum would not be in their interests. It might lead to the secession of the people in southern Sudan, southern Blue Nile and southern Kordofan. The southern region of Sudan has enjoyed relative peace following the 2005 accord. Some analysts say the recent attacks were intended to derail the peace pact.
The SCC is involved in programmes aimed at overcoming the deficit in development caused by the years of war. These include income-generating projects for women and young people which CWS is supporting.
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Mozambique: Transforming Guns into Hoes
Seventeen years after war ended in Mozambique, churches are still collecting and destroying weapons and cleaning up areas of unexploded ordnance so the land can be farmed.
This is typical of a situation, all too common in Africa particularly, when armed conflicts end and the world’s attention tends to fade away rather quickly. Reconstruction, however, may take a very long time. Churches in Mozambique know this all too well.
In response the Christian Council of Mozambique (CCM) has set up a programme called Transforming Guns into Hoes.
A typical case is that of a farmer who discovered a bomb, thrown from an airplane many years ago, lying half-buried in a piece of land he intended to farm. The device, together with a number of guns and ammunition collected in the area, was destroyed by means of a controlled explosion. The programme has been working since 1995, three years after the signature of a peace agreement that ended a 17-year-long civil war. The programme’s name is inspired in the vision of the prophet Micah, “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks”.
Shortly after its independence from Portugal in 1975, Mozambique entered into a cruel civil war, partly due to its involvement in the struggle against white rule taking place in neighbouring South Africa and Rhodesia (today’s Zimbabwe). Both parties committed atrocities that did not spare the civilian population until a peace agreement was reached in 1992. By then, war and famine had killed up to a million people.
Today economic growth is fast, although poverty is widespread, with more than half of the population of 22 million living on less than one US dollar a day. Between 2000 and 2002 successive floods and a severe drought hit the country.
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Climate Change: Call to Action
Representatives of diverse religious traditions from around the world recently drew up a ‘Call to Action’ on climate change, includes the statements:
“We recognise particularly that indigenous peoples have a profound stewardship of Creation and affirm their worldview, which sees the connectedness of all living things and our collective interdependence. This is a view that we need to adopt in fighting the effects of climate change. With dangerous levels of greenhouse gas emissions, destabilising earth’s climate, acidifying the oceans, threatening the living systems on which all life depends, both humanity and all living creatures now face unacceptable risk.
“We acknowledge our collective responsibility for the climate danger and suffering faced by the most affected and marginalised among us, those in extreme poverty, the disabled, older persons, those in coastal communities, on small islands, who are bearing the worst impacts of the climate crisis while contributing least to it. Without appropriate and urgent action, plant and animal species, as well as people and cultures, will increasingly continue to suffer and to die.
“We further acknowledge that although governments can mould policy and commitments, which can be global in effect, governments alone cannot make the change of heart and mind that will turn the human-earth community into a global culture of ecological responsibility. This task belongs to all of us.
“Recognising that climate change is not merely an economic or technical problem, but at its core is a moral, spiritual and cultural one, we therefore pledge to join together to teach and guide the people who follow the call of our religions. We must all learn to live together within the shared limits of our planet.
“We urge you therefore to take bold action that demonstrates the attitudinal shift that will mark the Copenhagen negotiations in December 2009 as the time when humanity came together to avert a climate crisis and we unite our diverse voices in the following Call to Action. There’s more than an agreement at stake.”
The group further called on leaders and citizens of the G8 (now G20) nations to remain true to the Millennium Development Goals pledged in 2000 and take courageous and concrete actions to address the immediate needs of the most vulnerable. Simultaneously it asked for structural changes to close the growing gap between rich and poor and prioritising long-term environmental sustainability and a halt climate change, while addressing its impacts on the poor. It urged the G20 to invest in peace and remove the factors that feed cycles of violent conflict including costly militarism.
The WACC (World Association for Christian Communication) of which CWS is a member and which participated in the group, is asserting that mass and community media can play a key role in informing the public, highlighting the vital issues and policy decisions at stake, and nurturing the climate of public concern and debate that customarily pressures those with the power to make change.
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Bougainville: Good News
Coffee will be Bougainville’s alternate cash crop after cocoa and copra, which are the regions’ main revenue generating crops. It has been confirmed Bougainville can grow and produce better robusta and arabica coffee, and may prove to be one of the leading regions to supply the product. A team from the Coffee Industries Corporation has held two training courses in Buka and Arawa to train farmers to manage and plant coffee. More than 70 farmers in both places attended the course and expressed interest. According to the Bougainville Department of Primary Industry, interest in the venture first came from the people in 2007, who made a successful submission to the Bougainville Executive Council and a coffee expert was recruited. Bougainville is heavily dependent on cocoa, but the cocoa pod borer is already endangering the crop, so it cannot depend on that alone, but must have another cash crop. The introduction of coffee will make the economy more stable.
Bougainville: Reconciliation On-going
CWS partner in Bougainville, BAERDA, worked through years of civil war to provide literacy classes for young people who had missed out on normal schooling. Its work continues now that there is peace as there are still many issues to be resolved to enable real development to occur.
Major reconciliation under the auspices of the newly established Peace Ministry has begun in Panguna, Central Bougainville, where the dispute over mining sparked the conflict. Autonomous Bougainville Government president James Tanis says representatives of one family concerned, the people of Panguna, and Panguna landowners, need to reconcile before any other reconciliation could take place. He said now that he had K4 million allocated for this purpose and support for weapons disposal from the national government, he could start.
“We have to start from the big one instead of going around in the circle,” Mr Tanis said. “Now it is the time to strengthen the peace work and it is time to rid the region of guns. Bougainville must reconcile after all this. It is the key to prosperity.” Mr Tanis praised the setting up of the Peace Ministry as it would be the designated ministry aimed at responding to post conflict issues. “The administration of Bougainville was not designed to respond to post conflict situations and that’s why we have not moved forward in the last years,” Mr Tanis said. “We are now able to go forward and carry out the programmes set.” With clear demarcation of responsibilities and a line of duty, the office will be able to effectively co-ordinate all non-government organisations and other entities involved in peace building. In past years, there have been several organisations dealing with issues of peace, but no co-ordination.
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Special Thanks
CWS acknowledges with thanks Althea Campbell’s 25 years of service to the organisation with particular responsibility for the Christmas Appeal, Update and the video network. Out of a deep sense of the justice she has continued to focus the organisation’s attention on the excellent work CWS partners do to make real change happen. We wish her well in her retirement.
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Christmas Appeal Launch
This year’s Christmas Appeal comes with a special plea from partners working to overcome poverty and injustice in their own communities. The theme Give Us a Chance highlights the rights all people have to clean water, adequate food, a healthy life and to live in peace. It features stories from partners in Uganda, Palestine, Fiji and the Philippines. Resource materials can be downloaded from our Christmas Appeal section or obtained along with a DVD from cws@cws.org.nz . The appeal will be launched on Sunday, November 29 in a parish near you.
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