Back from peace space

The following is a letter from Sara Koopman, recently returned from our August peace delegation to Colombia.

Dear friends and family,

Thanks for all your support vibes last week! Well, I was sweating so much in the tropical hazy heat that there wasn’t much danger of me wandering off the path to pee. So, happily I didn’t get blown up on the hike up to the peace community, though my stomach, skin and throat did all puff up incredibly - I got miserably sick in several unpleasant ways (thus the delay in this report-back), but I managed to keep it together long enough to be fabulously inspired by the brave folks there who are resisting being displaced from their land (1 in 10 Colombians have been forced to flee their homes and communities - and in the traditionally Afro-Colombian regions it`s more like 1 in 3).

It`s not hard to see why so many different actors want to get their hands on this land - it’s stunningly gorgeous incredibly fertile tropical land in mountains that allow for access to a major Caribbean gulf port (that lots of arms and drugs flow in and out of) and access down to several valleys. It’s harder to see how the community members have been brave enough to stay, and even serve on the community council, when over a hundred of them have been killed for it. Why are they willing to risk so much to build a peace space in the midst of a hot war zone?

For them, it has a lot to do with holding on to their dignity as the war tries rip it from them - with not being run off their land and forced to beg on the streets in the city, where their skill set is worthless - with not being told what to do by yet another group of men with guns.

There are several ways that they work to make it a peace space - including not allowing any stores in their settlements (unusual when it’s a several hour hike to the next settlement) so that armed strangers don’t come through creating trouble. Yes, there are folks that sell this or that to their neighbors, but you have to live there to know who can sell you what. They also don’t allow alcohol in the peace community - very unusual for the Colombian countryside! But I can see that if you’re being attacked for being a pacifist in a war zone, you want to keep your wits about you - and the last thing they need is drunken arguments amongst themselves when tensions are high.

Another way the community is trying to build peace space is by not selling to the banana companies, all of which are connected to the paramilitaries in Colombia (you may have heard of the stink around Chiquita banana paying death squads and unloading arms for them in their private port, but they are certainly not the only one). I’m happy to report that the community has a new agreement to sell their organic mini-bananas to a German solidarity company for a much better price. They’re working out the logistics, but they hope to start shipping them soon. That’s more than just fair trade, can we call that peace trade? Photos of my trip to the community, including pics of their bananas trees and organic cocoa, are up at http://picasaweb.google.com/sarakoopman/FORDelegation

The peace community also has various other strategies for making peace space, but the most visible, (and the one I am writing the dissertation about) is international accompaniment. FOR, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, has two to three internationals living full time in the one of the smaller and more remote peace community settlements. Community members told us that when the accompaniment started, and was off and on, armed actors would come only when the internationals weren’t there. Now that the internationals are there full time, those attacks have backed off (and moved to outlying settlements and areas of the community where there is not accompaniment). But when the community members run in to armed actors on the path they still ask them "if the internationals are still there with you".

It’s maddening that our lives, as internationals, are worth so much more than the lives of these incredibly brave campesinos. How can accompaniment tap in to the systems of geopolitical and racial domination and privilege that make our lives, our eyes, our mouths, worth so much more - without reinforcing those same systems of domination? Lots of ideas bouncing around in my head at this point, which will hopefully somehow cook down into a worthwhile dissertation!

Thanks again for all of your support,
with love and solidarity,
 Sara