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THE LAST GREEN LETTER FROM COLOMBIA No.56.
My dear Friends who have followed us this far: Yes, this is my last Green Letter, for I am leaving Colombia today, perhaps forever. Not our community, just me. I have decided I can no longer bear to hear of and watch the massacres in Palestine without taking more direct action, and I am leaving today to join the International Peace Brigades who are attempting to act as human shields against the incredible brutality of the Israeli Army there. Our longterm coworker Mary Kelly is already out there as a nurse, and has been for many weeks. Her anguished reports make harrowing reading.
I will now begin a whole new series of Letters, simply called "Letters
From Atlantis" which will report from wherever we are, and will also contain
accounts of our continuing work in Colombia. I beg anyone who at this stage
wishes to cancel receipt of these bulletins, to let Becky know at: Con's
Boatyard, Baltimore, Co. Cork, Ireland or by email at:
atlantisfoundation@eircom.net Thankyou.
'This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of
them out there .. if we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we
embrace it entirely, and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but
just wage a total war, our children will sing great songs about us years from
now.'
Any takers? Or would you prefer:
'Quietly and softly a shift is occurring, there's something in the air
..a glimmer of vision and possibility are starting to break through the
blackness which is choking our spirit and our very life. In the distance,
a hum: the soft sound of other people waking up: waking up to what is
possible for the Earth at this unbelievably sensitive juncture, waking up to the
call that is coming from our ancestors and from future generations, a call to
awaken ...'
In March, Anne finally brought our murdered boys home - just some of their bones. Javier's parents are so poor, they could afford neither a funeral nor the RENTAL for the cemetery .. and so they asked us to take him with us .. the only part the DNA experts could identify for sure that is, his skull .. to lie with ..part of ..Tris forever. Anne reports on this strange happening which occurred before she was able to travel home to the farm: "I was staying with my friend, Rodrigo, whose house is strewn with herbs which he dries for a medicine man of the Kogi tribe in Northern Colombia. The two small boxes that are what is left of our two beautiful young men, we kept amongst the herbs and agreed to tell no-one about them. When the medicine man, whom I had never met before, arrived, he heard I was an astrologer and suggested an exchange of skills: that I do his chart and he would do a reading based on his tribal knowledge for me. "He threw out a pile of beads, shells and general bric-a-brac and immediately looked at me accusingly and said in a sharp, aggressive manner: "WHY ARE YOU LIVING WITH TWO DEAD PEOPLE?" I jolted with shock and asked him how he knew. "I can see them standing behind you," was his answer. I then explained about our boys and that the authorities had recently given back the bones and that they weren't buried yet. "That's no good!" he said, "they will never be at peace until they are returned to the Earth." But he was wrong about the peace. Here is the translation of a report written by a black Colombian boy, Rafael, longterm member of our commune, and close companion of Tris - in fact it was nearly Rafa and not Javier who went on that last fatal journey with him. One Thursday afternoon, we buried the bones of Tristan and Javier here in the garden and I couldn't stop thinking about them. When I finally fell asleep that night, I dreamt that someone was outside the window. I thought I was awake. I saw Tristan outside the window and he was putting his hands on the plastic blind which covers it and looking in. But I knew he was dead and woke up shocked. When the fear had passed a little, I fell back to sleep again, but this time I dreamt that Tristan was inside the room, with someone else - Javier. I couldn't see them but I sensed them, and then I felt how they were beginning to pull my feet and lift my blankets, yet I knew they were dead and that they couldn't drag me away as they wanted to. I felt their hands and was so frightened, I woke up again in shock ..."
Rafa only told me about his dream after the following happened to me:
I returned to the farm from yet another stint in Popayan arriving late at
night after a four hour gruelling trot along deserted country roads, and
through fields, falling gratefully into bed when I got home. I dreamt
vividly of Tris over and over again all night, but it wasn't until I woke
up in the morning that I remembered Anne had brought the bones to the farm ..
I staggered out to the kitchen in the first dawn light and said alarmed and
half asleep, "Ned! Where have you put Tris?!" He looked at me shocked,
then realized what this mad woman was on about and said, 'Outside the gate'.
I then told Ned my dreams: First, the whole commune was there, warm, cosy,
happy together, lying around on mattresses in a communal room. Tris was
with us, lying on his back, white as in all our dreams, but joking and
happy and making a magical lampshade. In life he was our theatre magician,
dexterous, clever, full of mischief. And so it was: the lampshade kept
changing shape, it was like a kite, all lights and colours. I was
transfixed, amused, watching it, deeply contented. Then suddenly, he let
it go and Pouff! HE disappeared, leaving only the magic lantern.
I was gripped with a grief so mortal that I was choked with a crying
that would not come out, I couldn't breathe, I was gasping for my life and
grabbing on to the nearest person for help ... I woke up, shocked and
suffused with fear. Eventually I returned to sleep, and suddenly, Tris
reappeared again, in an old car, swerving cheekily to a halt in front of
me with a group of boisterous friends. Recalling my recent agony, I said
alarmed, "No! Not you again!" admonishing him not to come back, to keep
away, I didn't want to go through that deception again. But when I pushed
him away like that, his face stared at me white and shocked, crumpled and
he began to cry, whereupon I relented immediately, and said, 'No, no, it's
OK, of course you can stay with us,' and when I woke up, I vowed never to try
and stop him coming to us again.
Next day in the afternoon, out gardening with the girls, I said to Laura,
"Where exactly did they bury Tris?" and to my astonishment I discovered that
he was lying only 10 yards from my sleeping head at night.
I was then forced to have serious doubts about the non-survival of unhappy
spirits after they have been ripped away from life before time .. unlike
Rafa, I had not been thinking of Tris. He came to me.
Tristan was named after Tristan Jones, a lone round-the-world sailor man
from Wales who wrote a series of magnificent books of his travels. He
himself had been thus named because his mother gave birth to him on a boat
off the island of Tristan de Cunha. When we first planned to go to South
America in our own sailing boat, I got in touch with Tristan Jones and
asked him to be our sailing captain. At that time, he was planning a voyage
to look for the old Atlantis .... We met and discussed joining our two
journeys together, but tragically he lost first one leg, then the other,
from old war wounds, and eventually died. When we sent him news of Tris's
birth and of him being named after him, Tristan Jones wrote the new baby a
beautiful letter. Here is an excerpt: 'You are born into a world which is
in grave danger of self-wounding. I do not believe that if the worst comes to
the worst, humanity will completely destroy itself - there will be survivors
....you will see soothsayers and priests among your people. Look upon
them with a wary eye and be prepared to cut them down as soon as they appeal to
such false emotions as 'patriotism' or 'honour' -for they are the seeds of
the next holocaust... With your appearance you brought hope to the world,
as babies always do ...the human race will always be the same, with its
tragedy and comedy, its kindess and cruelties, its sadnesses and elations,
its expectations, its disappointments, and its Love. To take the last
amoung the stars is the mission of you and your generation .. and a little
part of that Love will be mine, for all of you..'
As I leave Colombia, this is the state of play of our Campaign and our community: back home in the forested valley where our farm lies, after us continuing to complain to every authority possible about the desecration of the forests, the FARC revolutionary army unexpectedly stepped in and threatened all wood-lorry drivers with a crippling fine if they took out one more log ... I made moves with a local leader and with Anne to investigate the financing of a project to teach local people carpentry and the making of small fine objects and furniture to give them an income using a minimum of wood. Anne will continue following this up. Our farmlands and food basis flourish as ever, being visited by ever increasing numbers of individuals, families and groups interested in seeing what is possible without chemicals. In Popayan, our girls daily grow more famous for their ecological, social justice, war and peace songs, appearing on TV just before I left. A Reuters TV team who interviewed me yesterday about my journey to Palestine is travelling down to film the girls singing tomorrow. During Easter week celebrations, the girls performed at many cultural events to wildly enthusiastic audiences. Their messages and style of delivery melt the stoutest heart. Anne continues to work for us amongst the Bogota middle classes, making all sorts of astonishing contacts along the way and working with the small but growing people's party called the Political and Social Front which is the only one that addresses the social justice issues which create the need for an armed insurgency in the first place. In the past, such parties have been massacred wholesale. There are some signs that this one is so far being left to campaign in some kind of peace. Down in Caqueta where we used to live, where we began the Green Campaign, where we were given 5 days to leave on our first exile, and which eventually became part of the massive demilitarized zone where the now failed talks between guerrilla and government took place - we still have campesino friends who write to us. The day we heard the Army had once again taken over this region, I received these words from our firmest friend there: 'When we heard the peace talks had broken down, many families fled from the region in fear of paramilitaries entering and massacring us as they have in other parts of the country. Our beloved Colombia goes from bad to worse, people die simply because they work the land, there is no such thing as human rights here, every day you hear the crying of widows and orphans and there is no consolation for these people. I don't know when this terrible war will end.'
I wrote to him as best I could .. but now I must go off to a far worse war,
where the dreadful has already happened and where the Men - and Women -
in suits are given 90% of all media time to invent their false history and
weave excuses for the next massacres ...
Perhaps if any of you are in touch with Mr. G. Bush, you might like
to mention to him that, apart from thousands of innocents dead, the net
result of his machiavellian 'war on terror in Bogota is the following, spotted
by Anne: 1. a taxi and 2. a hamburger stall, both called in large letters:
'Ben Laden'. Looks like some simple folk have accepted Bush's theory: "If
you're not with us ..."
Following the report in the last Green Letter of an impromptu birth
before dinner, our totally unwarranted medical fame led Ned into deep
waters, when one evening an anxious and diminutive Indian mother came marching
up the garden path with her boy in tow. He had just cut his finger off. He
had it in a bag. While the rest of us hid away to faint and quell our
nausea, Ned valiantly sewed up the other badly slashed fingers - but
balked at the presumably highly skilled task of finger-replacement. (There
is no question of poverty stricken families being able to afford either the
travel or the treatment that you and I might consider our obvious right).
I am mentioning this incident in case any of you have useful knowledge,
advice or gifts of simple medical equipment to offer Ned as the mother and boy
left so delighted with the treatment and care they received that .....oh dear.
And now for an anecdote on the urban Colombian education our young country
lasses are receiving: Katie, 16, going to classes on her bicycle, is stopped,
attacked, threatened with a knife and knocked off her bike by some boys in an
attempt to steal it. Ever cool, Miss Kate wraps her legs around the bike as
she falls deftly pretending to be tangled up in the works. The boys panic at
the time their theft is taking - shopkeepers and passersby are starting to
notice something is up - and flee, sans bike. I insisted she go to the police.
Like everyone brought up in Colombia, she says, "Ah, they won't do anything".
I push, insist. She goes. And returns with the following: The police cannot
do anything UNLESS SHE GIVES THEM THE NAMES of the thieves ... well, well.
And to complete the light relief, I will give the closing shots of this
letter to my friend Elaine in England. We have never met but have
maintained a deep correspondence ... during which she must have got to
know me, as she had this to say upon hearing of my departure for Israel:
"Any road up, Jenny, you are a strong and fearsome woman, destined to make
any army take cover and run ...'um, have they been ..'er ...warned? And ...
don't you think it would be sort of .. fair ..to give them a fighting
chance, or at the very least the chance to scarper bloody quick??!!" So
much for my efforts to appear a nice middleclass English lady to new
penfriends ....ta, Elaine,
~ End Green Letter 56 ~
Four months since the last 'Green Letter'; four months of intense
culture shock; two spent in Ireland where I had lived for 12 years, but on
a small, windswept, electricity-free island for the most part uninterrupted
by the ravages of Modern Civilization.
I returned to a country criss-crossed with motorways and cars, to a
throwaway 'culture', to the shock of strange urban savages with rings
through their noses - and everywhere else besides (they don't do that in
the jungle!), to school-uniformed children smoking in bus shelters, to the
smell of cigarette smoke everywhere (peasants and Indians for the most part
don't smoke - they eat), to people talking to themselves in public places
(so I thought, till I saw the strange machines held to their ears), to
houses choc-a-bloc full of things you can't eat, clothe yourself with or
lie under - a mass of THINGS everywhere: and wierdest of all, no poor
people to give away Unwanted Things to, unless you count the able-bodied
bedrugged young men huddled in the doorways of Cork and Dublin begging ...
for what?
Two months with my daughter Becky, mother of my murdered grandson
Tristan, helping her to give up Things, to move from House to Caravan, then
Caravan to Boat, so that she too can eventually leave Europe, taking her
floating home with her, which will double up as a mobile office and
campaigning centre, sailing wherever our boat can be useful in a sinking
world. Travelling times, meeting Mary Kelly off the plane, deported from
Palestine where she accompanied men besieged by the Israeli army and
perhaps helped to prevent yet another massacre; travels round Ireland, to
speak on Colombia, to listen to Mary talk on Palestine, to take part in a
demonstration in Galway against a hideous display of military
murder-potential in the sky, to support the Palestinian Ambassador in a
debate with a representative of Israeli policies ("There was no massacre in
Jenin" - I walked out of the meeting in protest). Hitch-hiking times, all
over Ireland, listening in astonishment to the level of political awareness
of my drivers regarding the Palestinian situation ... Ireland knows what it
is like to be an Occupied Nation.
In Ireland, I met Palestinians, beautiful people in tears of agony for
their country. Their simplicity, passion and extraordinary level of
culture confirmed me in my determination to do all in my power to support
their cause.
Then over to the Hebrides, Scotland, and England, meeting some of the
faces behind the long years of letter writing during our Green Campaign,
working in people's gardens, spending two days in a prison cell after a
demonstration against the pending war on Iraq, where we 'died' on the road
outside the nuclear submarine base at Faslane, where two years ago my
daughter Louise swam in those cold waters to symbolically 'hammer' on the
iron monsters lying there. And then down south, slowly down, sitting for
hours astonished, almost amused, in stationary lines of traffic on
pointless motorways to reach Hell - a city called London where trees and
gardens try to grow and people try to live, and I can't hear anything
except airtraffic and road traffic, can't breathe, can't smell anything
but fumes. And everyone walks around as if this is Life.
Everywhere I have travelled and stayed, I have met with extreme
kindness, generosity, hospitality. And everywhere I have agonized, with a
deep gnawing pain inside me for the Silence, the mountains, a green
rustling simple logical existence where nothing is wasted, all is recycled,
all is food-growing and physical work, and real rest, and communication at
its most vital level, no trammels, no niceties, no confusion, and no
too-much-of-everything-ness. Wooden cabins, a life lived outdoors all day,
no machines, a world without the constant hum of electrical appliances,
which no-one seems to hear any more, without flashing artificial lights,
which noone seems to see any more, a totally physical life, which so few
people have any more.
"Aren't you scared to go to Palestine?" is the natural question I am
constantly asked. How can I explain that I am far more terrified of
staying another day in 'comfortable' Europe?
A quote from an old issue of Organic Gardening Magazine, USA:
"Electricity is the handmaiden of modern technology whose inexorable
advance is really terrifying. Once you have the use of electricity, you
cannot get along without it. The memory of happy, less frenetic days B.E.
is lost ... The proliferation of electrically-operated gadgets shows no
sign of abating. Until it does, there is not much sense in getting upset
about the deterioration of our environment. .. The depletion of our
natural resources and the fouling of our environment spring from this most
important single source."
Back home in Colombia, Anne Barr has something to say about
'civilization' - and Homelessness:
"Today I was reading in 'The Ecologist' about the beautiful Kalahari
Bushmen being wiped out, and tears began pouring out of me. I couldn't
bear to think of these people torn from their desert home, though it looks
to me like the most inhospitable place on Earth. And I read of an
indigenous tribe in Canada who when 'resettled' began to commit collective
suicide through drugs and alcohol. ... How many peoples on the planet
still have a sense of home, family and tribe like these folk have? I think
of the Palestinians, craving their homeland. The parents of a Palestinian
friend of mine here in Colombia still have the keys of their house which is
now inside Occupied Jerusalem. It's 40 years since they had to leave.
"I look around my little group of friends and family, our commune
called Atlantis, and feel complete gratitude that I have them. I would
feel lost in the world without them. Life would have no meaning. We've
lost our land twice in the civil war here in Colombia, but we are
experienced 'gypsies' so that didn't hurt too much. We have the confidence
that comes from being white, European and over-educated, so being torn out
of the soil we had so carefully built up with compost and hard slog on our
lovely farms in Tolima and Caqueta didn't destroy our sense of self like it
does to so many campesinos. Yet it still did us irreparable damage, when
two of our young men went back to our old area seeking family ties and were
brutally murdered by a psychotic group of FARC militiamen. With the
hindsight of 2 years since they were killed, I can see now how the stress
and instability of being made rootless made me and them disregard the
dangers that led to their deaths. How many more people suffer disasters
and tragedies because of the confusion that being forced from your home by
violence brings?
"Why are we becoming a planet of homeless people? Is there some kind
of cosmic plan to uproot us all and shake us all up? Or is it just that
the rich side of the world hs lost its sense of at-home-ness and wants to
force the same feeling of alienation on the 'undeveloped' nations because
we can't bear to see that they still have the sense of sharing, family and
caring that we have sold for a shiny new car, a TV in every room and the
privilege of buying our food in small expensive packets from a supermarket.
"Of all the hundreds of articles I've read about the Israeli
occupation of Palestine, one stays stuck in my mind. It was an interview
with Ariel Sharon where he admitted his envy of how the Palestinians share
each last crumb with each other without giving a second thought. The Jews,
the world's eternal wanderers, are trying to feel at home by stealing not
just the land of the Palestinians, they want their sense of home too.
Their desperate, insatiable greed for Palestinian land is only a symbol of
their deeper thirst for home and community. But you can't steal love or
force people to hand it over at gunpoint.
"Why are people who defend their land and homes and families now
called terrorists? Let all of us who would do the same if we had to call
ourselves terrorists too. Let us accept that the mass media have changed
the meaning of the word 'terrorist' - Terrorist = a person who is willing
to fight and even die to protect his or her family, home and country.
Under that definition, is there anyone who isn't a terrorist?"
Journalist: "Mr. Gandhi - what do you think of Western civilization?
Gandhi: "It would be a good idea."
Reports from our local area where our community live are already
coming in: Anne reports:
"Maria Antonia, leader of the Guambiano Indians in our area, came and
talked and spun wool for a few hours while I sewed. She said that the
Guambi leaders are preparing their people for a four year war and say they
must become self-sufficient as food will be scarce. The Guerrilla have
told them they must be prepared to run for the forests as there will be a
lot of bombing. She said that if we are threatened in any way, we can get
help from her people, and can they come here if they are bombed down in
their villages? Bridges are being blown up daily. She agreed it would be
a good side effect if people become more self-sufficient and says that the
Cabildo (Indian Council of Leaders) in Guambia say people must get used to
using only compost as chemicals won't be available..."
And Ned reports from our farm that the Guerrilla called a meeting to
officialize their absolute ban on tree cutting for commerce: there would be
a one million peso fine for anyone caught, and their chainsaws would be
taken away. He also banned hunting and fishing. A Green-Red Army ..
And in the town of Popayan where our 'Green girls' sing, produce
theatre, write plays and songs and teach, Anne went to a Peace meeting at
the University. She reports: "As soon as I arrived, several middle-class
ladies nabbed me and insisted I ring to get the girls to come along as the
Government Vice Ministeress of Culture was there and they wanted to show
off what 'Popayan' can do! The girls came and closed the meeting with
their music - just 3 songs "Seeds of Peace", "A Child Born in the War" and
"Colombia the Beautiful". They received a huger-than-ever response. The
Vice Minister-ess of Culture who was sitting beside me kept digging me in
the ribs as they sang and saying she must take them to Bogota, they are
'jewels', that she's in love with them, how amazing, how sensitive, and how
come they understand Colombia better than most Colombians? I left the
girls with her, as she wanted them to sing somewhere else, and went home to
clean up the house for Katie's 17th birthday party ...
"The Peace meeting itself was really worth going to and yet another
'Colombian surprise'. It was run by the Ministry of Culture so I thought I
might be wasting my time there .. but I listened and I liked everyone who
spoke .. all talked about the need to build a solid people's movement of
non-violent resistance. I listened carefully - did they just mean against
the Guerrilla? No, mainly against America's Plan Colombia, crop fumigation
and the paramilitaries. All the speakers talked against 'the ruling
classes' and my little Minister friend kept nodding her head in agreement!
There were also lots of digs against the University for being snooty with
the ordinary people, and the Dean had to keep defending himself. He was
really friendly to us afterwards. You picked the right town, Jenny!"
On July 9th 2002 came the second anniversary of the murder of Tristan
and Javier. The day was greeted with the news in the national press and
over here in England that the Colombian Army had finally found the mass
grave where our boys lay with many other people, including a child and a
Japanese man (presumably a kidnap victim).
And recently Laura, 16, Tris's one time girlfriend, produced this
dream:
"I was in the big middle room on the farm doing ballet on my own.
Somebody knocked on the door and came in. It was Tristan. He looked very
happy and had nice rosy cheeks. He looked at me smiling and said: "I have
accepted that I am dead and at last I am happy. There are different things
after life and some are better and some worse. The moment I accepted that
I am dead, I was able to smile again. And I have realized that death isn't
the end of life."
"He said this like a speech, and then he said he was in a rush because
there are a lot of things to do after life, and he had to go and tell you,
Jenny, and several other people that he is happy.
"I woke up and hoped that it is true."
On that note, I will end my one and only 'Letter from England' and
write next from Palestine. With love, Jenny James
PS Quote from Krishnamurti: "It is not a sign of health to be well
adjusted to a sick society."
Personal email: jennyjames1@eircom.net
~ End Green Letter 57 ~
Although I could have entered Israel alone, I made the decision to
return to Jordan and accompany Mary whilst we decided how to solve her
passport problem. This decision resulted in my stay in the Middle East
acquiring an entirely different aspect from what we had expected: we were
faced not with tanks and machine guns, but with equally distressing facts
of Middle Eastern life, such as the horrendous ‘honour killings’ of any
woman even suspected of having physical contact with a man before her
(arranged) marriage.
Through the necessity of waiting for papers to acquire a ‘clean’
passport for Mary, we spent a month in Jordan, and then a couple of weeks
in Egypt (the nearest Irish Embassy is in Cairo). During this time, we
never stopped talking to Arab women, in depth, Mary in particular having
access to their normally hidden side through her massage work, whilst my
own contact would come through political conversations and teaching
English.
We lived in a permanent state of shock. We had landed on an unknown
planet, a separate reality. Never having studied Arab culture – we were in
the Middle East simply in response to a human tragedy unfolding in
Palestine – we mostly felt like two-year-olds, wide-eyed and our mouths
agape learning about the nightmare world we found ourselves in.
Our position was uncomfortable in the extreme. We were supposed to be
‘helping the Palestinians´, yet found ourselves in total disaccord with
every aspect of the culture we went to protect and preserve. Daily we
agonized about our seemingly absurd situation and daily we asked more
questions …
The very first thing we had to cope with, apart from the unrelenting
stifling heat, the dusty ugly traffic-ridden towns, the utter absence of a
single blade of greenery, the unrelieved desolation of the desert
landscapes (not ‘desert’ as in National Geographic photos, with smooth
dunes and elegantly placed camels – but desert strewn for mile upon mile
with the wrecks of cars and the black plastic bag detritus of uncaring
capitalism) – was being woken up each morning at 4.0 a.m. by hideous
amplified wailings from the Mosque next door (there is always a Mosque next
door, no matter where you live).
Now I am a permanent early-riser, but I am used to waking to the
sounds of birds and goats and cockerels. And as a militant atheist, not
known for my tolerance of oppression in any form or colour, I lived in a
permanent frenzy of outrage at this domination of our daily lives. Ten
times a day – at the beginning and end of each ‘service’ – there would be a
repeat of this painful earbashing, at full pitch, organized to criss-cross
the whole town so that there was no escape anywhere.
On the few occasions I have ended up, through our theatre
presentations, in small Colombian country towns at weekends, I have always
been indignant to be assailed by the same aural bullying from competing
Evangelical and Catholic churches. I am astonished that any population
anywhere in the world puts up with having their lives ruled in this way.
But that was just the ‘decorations’. We had only been in Jordan a few
days when we first heard the fatal words ‘honour killings’, an intrinsic
part, evidently, of Arabic culture, whether Christian or Muslim. We made
the acquaintance of what must be a unique species: a Welsh Muslim woman,
who told us that one day on a beach, her 5 children playing in the sand had
discovered .. a Foot. She and her Arab husband went to investigate and it
was the shallowly buried body of a 16 year old girl. Every week in the
excellent English-language newspaper ‘The Jordan Times’, there are reports
of these killings. And this is ‘just’ Jordan, and ‘just’ the year 2002.
We continued our investigations and discovered this phenomenon has been
going on for thousands of years all over the Arab world, predating both
Christianity and Islam, along with the unthinkable barbarity of female
genital mutilation.
Mary worked for a while as assistant to a highly educated Jordanian
Christian school nurse and they never stopped talking – and arguing – about
women’s issues.
The nurse at first tried to deny that the ill-named ‘honour’ killings were
a widespread problem. “For instance,” she said, “in my family, only two
women have been killed …”
She later confessed, in tears, that she was once in danger of her only
daughter being killed as the girl fell in love with a Muslim man, which
would have brought – fatal – disgrace upon the family. “Luckily” she
contrived to swerve the girl’s affections on to a ‘suitable’ Christian man.
The nurse readily admitted she would have had to agree to her daughter
being killed ‘if it was necessary’. Indeed, we heard that it was often the
mother of a girl who instigated the process, and always her father or
brothers who would carry out the murder ‘to cleanse the honour’ of the
family of some imagined sullying.
Mary and I made a deliberate habit of bringing this subject up
wherever we went, as we could hardly talk about the weather with our minds
in such a state of shock. A young lawyer woman we met in a desert village
at a women’s centre in North Jordan – one of the few openly sexual women we
ever met, in closefitting tee-shirt and skirt, free in her movements and
full of life – immediately agreed it was a horrible social problem. Her
best friend, a girl of 19, was being forced to marry an old man she hated
and she told her father she would kill herself if he persisted in his
ruling. The father ignored her. The girl poisoned herself and dropped
dead at her wedding feast.
This Green Letter will turn into a book if I cite the dozens of
cultural horror stories we were told. In Jordan, we stayed nearly the whole
time at the excellent Jordanian Women’s Union headquarters in Amman, where
some very dedicated and brave women – the two leaders are atheists, a very
rare breed in Arabia – are spending their lives trying to help women who
are the victims of the incredibly suffocating social system, where a broken
marriage automatically results in the woman losing all her children, and a
divorced woman can never marry again and is forced to return to live with
her parents whatever her age. Many of the women of the centre are lawyers,
trying to turn the clock forward to wrench their society out of the dark
ages, and meeting with regular Government shutdown of their organization,
sometimes for years at a time.
About 70% of Jordanians are actually Palestinian – refugees and
descendants of refugees from various Israeli military campaigns.
Politically, we were always 100% on their side. Culturally …
We visited a Palestinian family whose relatives Mary had stayed with
the other side of the Forbidden Frontier – forbidden that is, to
Palestinians who cannot visit their relatives just a few miles away. I got
talking to the eldest son who had some English, about how marriages were
arranged. When he had finished telling me how a man would acquire a wife,
I asked not-innocently “and how would a woman indicate that she liked a
man?” This brought forth incredulous guffaws of laughter. “It can’t
happen” he asserted confidently.
We were taken on an outing to one of the most horrible places on earth
– the Dead Sea. There I watched, glazed by now with so much oddness, as
whole groups of women clad from head to toe in thick black clothes (in the
sizzling 40C temperature) waded into the heavy salt water and ‘bathed’ –
and then came out and – I am not making this up – poured fresh water over
themselves, still fully begarbed.
When I mentioned my bafflement at such uncomfortable dress fashions to
a young Jordanian-Palestinian man, he got very annoyed and said why was it
I didn’t complain about women in Africa going around naked. I failed to
make the connection.
The weeks and our brain cells, and all our original passion and
enthusiasm were draining away, but we trudged on, transferring to Egypt
where we were lodged at a house belonging to the Mennonite community.
Cairo is in a class apart in terms of city horror. Sinners needn’t wait to
go to Hell – just go to Cairo. Here the petrol economy that rules the
world and turns its leaders insane can be witnessed in its unmitigated
form, with none of the tinkerings and prettifyings of England or Ireland
like growing millions of poor little baby trees along motorways to pretend
we aren’t committing suicide. In Egypt there is no pretence. It is an out
and out military dictatorship, kept in place of course by American dollars
and dedicated to breeding CARS. Cars rule. I realized how extremely
Western I am when I couldn’t get over the fact there are no pedestrian
crossings, no traffic lights, no traffic police and quite simply, no way of
crossing the road. And no gaps in the unbelievable streams of cars, night
and day. Mary and I would stand helplessly at the side of the road until
we could join groups of berobed Muslim women who would wade without
thinking out into the battlefield. The cars wouldn’t hesitate, slow down,
and of course not stop. Pedestrians have to dodge in and out of them,
schoolchildren, blind people, the old and young alike.
But Egypt is at least rebellious. Mary and I, two middle-aged ladies,
had the remarkable experience of being courted in the streets in a manner
familiar to us from our teenage. Not here the pious lowering of the eyes –
or deliberate turning of male backs as occurred to me once in Amman when I
had the audacity to approach some men to ask them the way … And I bring
home from Cairo the memory of the best chat-up line I ever heard, as we
sweated in the damaging heat at the side of a road, trying to pluck up
courage to cross … “How do you like Alaska?” We cracked up laughing and
began an interesting if brief friendship with two Egyptians who introduced
us to the male side of Arab oppression.
The first thing we discovered is that there is no such thing as an
‘ordinary Israeli’. Every single one is an absolute individual, matching
each other only in the outrageousness of their opinions, the extremity of
their views, the tremendous desire to talk, the fierceness of their
attitudes – and an absolute belief in themselves as Eternal Victims, no
matter that most of the rest of world can see clearly that the whole State
of Israel was founded upon an untenable aggression.
I agreed with none of them, but found most of them fascinating to
talk to. It was a tremendous relief to see women free in their movements
and dress in charge of their own bodies and lives. But a shock to see
young girls in alarmingly tight-fitting army dress, huge weapons slung
carelessly over their shoulders, smoking, gum-chewing, loudly laughing,
swaggering around with their young male counterparts, the young kings and
queens of Israel ruling at gunpoint.
And after the first pleasant impression of wellorganized roads with
Pedestrian Crossings and no hourly ear-assault from religious loudspeakers,
one starts to feel uneasy, then queasy, then downright uncomfortable. Hey!
There’s a war going on – and here is the country at war living in obscene
modern luxury, unaware it seems of the Other Israel called Palestine, the
land of roadblocks and homes reduced to rubble, daily and nightly assault,
thousands of disappeared prisoners and weekly lists of men, women and
children shot ‘by mistake’.
Sometimes the pressure-cooker the Palestinians are being forced into
boils over and some of the blood and rubble hits posh middle-class Israel.
Mary met a man who was driving in his car one day when the bus in front of
him blew up and he found himself dragging dead bodies out of the wreckage
and handling parts of people… We stayed with the brave parents of a young
girl killed by a suicide bomber as she walked along a street to school.
Instead of joining the chorus of warcries, they joined the peace movement
saying “The Occupation killed our daughter.” On their very tasty Jerusalem
front door they have a notice saying “Free Palestine”. They have done
talks all over the world calling for justice for the Palestinians, and the
man appears in John Pilger’s maligned documentary “Palestine is still the
issue.”
We went to accompany Palestinian peasants in their olive-picking
harvest, watched over, but not protected by, the Israeli Army, and
regularly attacked by the Israeli settlers – the most violent and marginal
elements of Israeli society, lured by financial reward to live as weapons
of war on the tops of hills overlooking Palestinian villages. The man
organizing the trip and the person who drove us to the olive groves was,
astonishingly, a tall young Rabbi from an unlikely group called “Rabbis for
Human Rights”. In such people lies a glimmer of hope.
Sitting at the side of the dusty road after the day’s work, Mary was
informed by a handsome young Israeli driver passing by that she was an
‘Arab-lover’ and that he was going to ‘kill us all.’ Another, with
amazingly good aim, covered my shoes in spit. I was so surprised, all I
could do was burst out laughing and commend his precision, not that he
stayed to hear me. I don’t expect it is very funny for the Palestinian
peasants who have to watch their crops wasting, or risk their lives picking
them.
It took me a week to land. I was in a glazed nightmare state from all
I had seen and felt in so many alien lands. Bogota the Awful looked
beautiful to me. Aeroplanes, previously viewed as unlikely monstrosities,
seemed friendly. I’m not sure which felt more unreal: looking down on
clouds, looking up at mindbendingly violent films on the myriad TV screens,
- or suddenly finding an unknown Colombian girl kneeling down in the aisle
next to me saying “Excuse me, but aren’t you Jenny from Atlantis?” It was
several moments before I could speak, my brain reeling. We were 35,000
feet in the air – how could anyone up here know me? “I have seen you in a
documentary film in Paris where I study”, she “explained”. I still stared,
quite braindead with the weirdness of it all. The documentary was made by
a film student in Bogota, who had met our kids, including Tristan, when we
were refugees and they were juggling and singing in the parks to pay for
their next meal …. She was in the middle of making the film about us when
Tris and Javier were murdered. The theme of the film then swerved
radically and evidently it is now being shown in film competitions.
I arrived in a psychic space-helmet in the Southern town of Popayan,
which suddenly looked picturesque to me, with horses and carts and
variegated buildings, instead of the unrelenting modernness of the Middle
East with its uniformly hideous square concrete block buildings. Normally
I regard Popayan as a place to run from as fast as possible back to the
mountains.
No-one at home. Ah well, I’d learnt to be stoical in the last 6
months. An insane hot bus-ride for hours and hours over the mountains to
the South of the Department of Cauca, hanging precariously out of the door
as inside was a suicidal sardine-can of crushed peasants … to a mountain
village called Balboa where the whole family were about to put on a theatre
show. Even as they all hugged me, a mound of loving female daughters and
stepdaughters, I still hadn’t landed. I said to Anne “I just need to walk
and walk to wake up from the mental nightmare I am stuck in.”
Be careful what you wish for. The day I left Popayan to travel the
normally 7-hour journey home to the farm, there had been a national strike
against the new US-backed paramilitary-fomenting rightwing Colombian regime
– but the bus company, when telephoned, declared that buses would now be
running.
Not wanting to wait two hot hours in the bus-station, I started
walking out of Popayan in the direction of Purace National Park – our farm
is on its borderlands, but on the far side, in the Department of Huila.
First, I walked along the sad island of blackened trees in the centre of
the two traffic lanes, commiserating with each tree as I passed, then at
last, a turning out of the town and suddenly – it all stopped. The
nightmare ended. No noise. Hardly any traffic. Fields. A road going up
and up. And up. Hours slipping smoothly by. Grateful legs walking.
Grateful lungs breathing. A head full of desert sands and cultural
nightmares clearing, cleansing, becoming thought-free. Greener and greener
and higher and higher. Then I noticed the time. Uh-uh. No bus.
I didn’t care. I kept walking. Eventually I thought perhaps the
sensible thing to do might be to hitch a lift. A lumbering old lorry
stopped immediately and I was taken 30 kilometres to the village of Purace
where the only street was thick with the gaily coloured tribal clothes of
the mountain Indians who are my neighbours. A cup of milk for dinner, then
on again for another 15 kilometres with the same driver till he turned off
the road to a sulphur mine. We were on the outskirts of the deserted – and
feared – Purace park and it was late afternoon. “You must stand here and
wait for the bus”, he said, “there are no settlements further on.”
Well I knew there weren’t. I had travelled that road a dozen times by
night with our milk lorrydriver friend on journeys between the urban and
rural branches of our commune. The road was feared as it was guerrilla
territory and it was along there in the loneliest spot that the FARC
guerrilla army had massacred 9 innocent people, 7 of them hillwalking
ecologists whose families we later got to know in Bogota. This had
happened not so many months after the loss of Tris and Javier and
unconsolable grief had united us all.
Several people I had approached had said, “Yes, yes, a bus will come.”
It never did. I had walked all day, on legs practically unused for 6
months. I ached, but I was happy. Travelling the cold heights of Purace
park by milk van, one gets the impression of quite a short journey .. I
guessed about 2 hours’ walk.
I guessed wrong. I had to reach the other side where there would be
peasant shacks where they would take me in for the night. Fooled by the
thought of a bus, I had on only a short-sleeved blouse and a light poncho.
If it rained, I was in serious trouble. If I stopped, I would quickly
freeze. If I carried on, my legs might give out. I searched the paramo
for any landmark on that long road that I might recognize from previous
journeys. I was too happy ever to seriously worry, though it did occur to
me I might be calmly walking myself to my death before ever seeing my farm
again – not death from the guerrilla, whom I felt confident of talking to,
but from climate shock and exposure: when the lorry dropped me, my lungs
caved in, unaccustomed to the altitude. I remembered the sick headache I
had felt at several hundred feet below sealevel at the Black Sea not so
long ago … I breathed very carefully, shallowly, realizing the road was
still climbing …
Signs appeared, of a different nature: a rainbow flashed brilliantly
on the screen of the sky telling me all would be well. Night fell and a
shooting star repeated the message. A satellite flashed brilliantly
catching the light of …what? Sun on the other side of the world? I
couldn’t work it out.
My hands started to freeze. Without stopping – too dangerous to stop
– I got my thin little socks out of my bag and used them as gloves. I
moved my hands constantly, put them against my hot stomach to keep them
alive. I marched on and on. No moon. But the sky with its trillions of
bright stars reflects the water in the potholes in the road so you can
avoid them … earlier I had noted with some alarm man-sized bottomless
potholes where a stream passing under the road had forced itself through,
creating death traps for silly people with failing legs and their head in
the stars walking the forbidden road of Purace.
“FARC order: anyone travelling between 6.0 p.m. and 6.0 a.m. will be
fined a million pesos,” announced a huge banner slung high across the road
that I could just read as the light failed. “Or worse”, I thought – but I
knew they would be more scared of me, not knowing who on earth I was, than
I would be of them.
Eventually it was pitch black and I could only navigate by the sound
of water rushing either side of the road in that high damp paramo that
keeps half of Colombia green. I passed the point where the 9 people had
been shot, one after the other, and thrown down a steep ravine. I agonized
yet again with each of them as they faced their death. I passed the
deserted cabin of the peasant man who had been kept in jail for months
falsely accused of responsibility for the murders and whom we eventually,
through dogged persistence, got released. And the road blessedly started
to go downhill.
Five hours quick trot – I could not believe how long that road was. I
worried that even if I did come to huts on the other side, I would be too
embarrassed to scare the people by calling out so late at night. I risked a
quick sitdown, very brief in case my legs seized up. Sat on my hat in the
middle of the dark road. And I heard fairy music. OK, so my mind has
given out. Nice sound though. I dismissed the hope, thinking it might be
a trick of the night air bringing the sound from miles away across the
mountains.
Suddenly there they were: two lighted peasant huts, with loud music
playing. Oh dear. How do I explain my existence? The door of one hut was
open. I pushed away my impulse to keep walking insanely on for fear of
frightening them and shouted boldly: “excuse me, I have walked across the
Park (no-one ever does that) and the night fell and I need shelter.”
I was immediately surrounded by armed guerrilla soldiers. I kept
talking. I was never worried. I knew all the names of my neighbours, of
the milkman, I could chat happily about where I lived. “Are you North
American?” one asked, unsubtley. No, I am European, would you like to see
my passport? He received it as a precious gift and they all went off into
a huddle to study it. I was by now sitting – oh blessed word – by the
dying embers of the blackened stove chatting happily to the peasant owner
of the house who knew the area I lived in, still so many miles away. A
guerrilla soldier came back smiling and said, “Are you the mother of
Alicia?” Indeed I am. “I like her,” he said (she is wellknown as she has a
little motorbike and is forever doing people favours by giving lifts in a
transportless area). “Of course you do,” I laughed, “she is very
beautiful.”
On a losing platform, Anne spoke at the meeting, pointing out that
blood always follows oil. The paramilitaries will come in. There will be
local warfare in the scramble for protection money from the multinationals
that will arrive. As one lone wise peasant put it “They will take the
riches, and we will be left with the rubble.”
The local families of course think only of money for next week’s food
bill … The tree cutting has been stopped. Now this. Our environmental
battle continues.
Until next Green Letter, goodbye and love, Jenny
~ End Green Letter 58 ~
Note from Jenny James: this Green Letter is much longer than usual as we are
including reports on the excellent anti-war activities of our Irish branch for
those many friends we know will be fascinated.)
Colombia, with the accustomed backing and pressure from the US has taken yet
another swerve towards the Right. There is an all-out attack on past labour
gains: overtime pay, pensions, wages in general. (Maggie Thatcher would be
jealous.) The hordes of street sellers are under constant pressure to disappear
and the war has intensified.
So poverty and the problem of tens of thousands of country people displaced
to the dirty, noisy, polluted cities is increasing, whilst the methods they are
forced to use to survive, like selling pathetic little items on the streets, is
technically banned. One of my Colombian sons-in-law was selling mobile phone
calls on a street corner in Popay…n - the phone was confiscated by the police.
One day in Bogot…, I wept as I witnessed the indignity of an able-bodied young
man dancing grotesquely amidst the heat and fumes with a full-size inflatable
female doll attached to his feet in front of the cars lined up at the traffic
lights, hoping to earn a few pesos before they streamed by: this bizarre scene
summed up for me the degradation of urban Colombia.
Our main money-earner, astrologer Anne, who is forced to spend most of her
life in Bogot…, is also feeling the blessings of the new government. She is
Irish, and this evidently is now a crime in Colombia, since the lengthy
imprisonment - accused of guerrilla sympathies - of three Irishmen, whom she
visits regularly, there being no Irish consul in Colombia. Attempting to renew
her residence visa, Anne has so far been refused. Needless to say, we dont
tend to take matters like this lying down
The FARC guerrilla force, under increasing attack from government forces,
often react somewhat irrationally, to say the least, towards the civilian
population. Here is a firsthand account of an alarming experience undergone by
my daughter Louise (21):
Travelling by bus from Bogot… to Popay…n, we passed through at least 4
checkpoints manned by police and army and I was never asked for my identity
card, which was in Bogot… with Anne, who was struggling to extend my visa.
But in the tiny Indian village of PuracŠ in the mountains between our farm
and our town house, the Guerrilla had a checkpoint where they asked for
everyones papers, going through all the luggage and doing body-checks for
weapons. There were three guerrilla women and two men. The men were quite
friendly, but the women were very hostile to everyone, especially to the women
passengers.
When I explained to a guerrilla woman the situation with my papers, she
said, We will have to keep you here then. Get your luggage off the bus. And
she walked away quickly, not willing to listen to anything I had to say.
I felt quite scared, thinking of my nephew Tristan who was murdered two and a
half years ago after being kidnapped by FARC militia, and I thought of all our
many friends killed or disappeared by the guerrilla for no reason. I got on
the bus to get my bags down and the first thing I went for was my guitar as I
knew singing our very radical social and political songs would be a way of
making friends with them. A guerrilla man was on the bus going through the
luggage with so much armament all over him that he could hardly move. I
explained my situation and asked please would he help me? He just said,
'Theres nothing we can do, get your bags off the bus. You have to stay
here.' At this point, I couldnt help crying. Everyone else was getting back
on the bus, and I was able to tell my boyfriend who was travelling with me
what was happening. As soon as everyone saw my situation, they were suddenly
paralysed and refused to get on the bus without me! Earlier, I had made
friends with the bus driver, a man in his 50s, sitting in the front with him
for about an hour telling him about our work, the deaths of our boys, our
being made refugees twice and he now refused to drive the bus away when
ordered to by the guerrilla, saying, 'She is my passenger and I cant leave
without her.' (Note: this brave move does not always work. Years ago, before
the death of Tris, one of our best friends in the village we lived in in
Tolima was taken off a bus, and the passengers and driver tried to stay in
solidarity with him, but were told they would all be shot if they didnt go.
Our friend, an old man, Don Pedro, beloved by everyone, was crying not to
be left, but they were forced to go, and he was slaughtered.)
My boyfriend was white as a sheet. He comes from a rightwing town north of
Bogot… and had hardly seen a guerrilla soldier in his life. He tried to talk
to one of them, and at one point a male guerrillero asked me if I was a
singer, and I said, Yes, and that if I had to stay with them, I would sing for
them and that all my music was of social content and against the rightwing
government.
Finally, the guerrilla man gave me a long lecture about the importance of
carrying ones identity card, told me never to travel without it again and that
I could go home this time, but that it would be the only time. Once we took
off, everyone in the bus was very kind to me and a drunk man who had been
drinking the whole journey and singing out loud came up to me with a bottle and
offered me some to calm my nerves. I said, Thank you very much, but I never
drink and Im calm already.
Many people are not as lucky as Louise. The point where she was stopped was
very near the place where 9 people were taken nearly 2 years ago, shot and
thrown down a deep ravine. The children of our commune had seen them when they
were captured near our farm, and as it was only a few months after our own boys
deaths, we sought out and made friends with the families of many of the
victims, sharing their grief. We also eventually obtained the release from
prison of a peasant falsely accused of complicity in the massacre.
I had intended to write about some surprisingly humane aspects of the
Colombian prison system, which in general has a justifiably bad press through
hideous overcrowding and terrible internal massacres caused through weapons
being brought into the prisons for the use of the various warring factions and
gangs. Nearly everyone is so poorly paid in Colombia that bribery of the guards
is simple.
On my visits to the incarcerated Irishmen, I had also been astonished -
having in the past been both an internal and external visitor to European
prisons through active political work - to note the freedom, ease and regular
lengthy conjugal visits allowed in Colombian prisons.
Alas, in disbelief I learn that the long hand of the USA now stretches to
control the high security jails of Colombia. My brain cant get around this
one, but it is a fact. Suddenly, our three Irish friends have been moved to
an American prison far far away from population centres, up on the high cold
p…ramo outside Bogot…. Here is Annes unhappy account of her first visit to
Combita, American implant on Colombian soil:
I travelled by bus from Bogot… in the middle of the night, a 3 and a half hour
journey, and queued in the dark with another 60 women waiting to go in. You
have to stand in the freezing air with bare legs - no long skirts or trousers
allowed, only very short skirts which must be neither black nor blue! Soon I
felt boiling hot with anger in spite of the cold as I was now told I could not
wear my jumper, shirt or T-shirt as they were dark green! I was forced to
leave the queue and go and acquire a white shirt!
At least the other women were vociferous in their own complaints, especially
as it got later and later and we were still outside. Eventually we got in, and
I refrained from slapping the woman guard who tried to tell me my identity card
wasnt an identity card (foreigners cards are different). Then came the part
the other women had warned me of: the body search, some kind of weird
US-invented sado-masochistic kinkiness.
Three of us went into a room with three female guards. I got the worst one:
a violent little lesbian punk-rocker-looking thing. Lift your jumper and
shirt. Lift your bra up and down over your head 3 times. I gawked and asked
why. Just do it. So I did, keeping a running commentary for the other two
women who were being searched about the strangeness and inhumanness of it all.
You cannot wear a black bra! Pardon? Its the rules. So I stripped, said I
didnt like wearing bras anyhow, and gave it to her. Then she told me to lift
my skirt, drop my knickers to my knees and do 3 knee bends. I gawked even
more and fruitlessly asked WHY .. I performed a few half-hearted ballet plies
and was told, You must bend your knees more. So I executed the most graceful
full plies I could manage, complete with arm positions, and added a bit of
belly dancing on the way up. The guard turned quite red, and the other two
women visitors and one of the guards were smiling. I said to my guard that if
she liked that kind of work, she has some serious psychological problems.
Everyone stiffened as I was obviously going a bit far for them all. I
announced that I found it very extreme and would be making a complaint about
it.
Then we passed through another checkpoint and repeated the whole charade
except that you only have to do one pliŠ . However, the girl in charge was
totally different in attitude, apologetic, not offensive, and I complained
about her work companion. She did not comment, but there was no bad vibe.
Once inside, I realized that the incidents over knickers and kneebends were
minor and relatively human compared with the feeling of inhumanity that
pervades the place, and most of my conversation with Jim, the friend I was
visiting, was to do with battling with the US gods of steel and concrete that
rule the place. Every little hint of anything soft or natural has been
deliberately wiped out. After months of visiting the men elsewhere, I felt it
was my very first time in a real prison. La Picota and La Modelo (infamous bad
Colombian prisons) are holiday homes in comparison. I felt very homesick for
them, so I can imagine what the fellas feel! The square hate-filled ugliness
of the place is soul-crushing. But its Colombia, so you still have conjugal
visits - but only 20 minutes every 45 days ..Thats cruelty to animals, one girl
said to me. You have to spend the rest of the day in a cold shower
The bus back to Bogot… was driven by a maniac. I have his number and will
complain. He nearly drove a motorbike off the road. I told him what he'd
nearly done and he was quite shaken as I was very angry and upset. I got off
the bus in tears, a taxi driver stopped to offer his services, saw the state of
me and asked me what was the matter. The poor man got a long story about
prisons, the US and bus drivers. He said, Yes, they (the Americans) want to
turn us all into robots like them. He put his arm around me and gave me a
squeeze. I felt bad that I couldnt afford to take his taxi
It needs adding that the three Irishman have not been tried or sentenced,
mainly because there is not a scrap of concrete evidence against them.. They
form part of the thousands of people all over the world now in prison in the
wake of George Bushs phoney war on terror.
The branch of our community that still operates in Ireland is super-active
at the moment, as our friend Mary Kelly, her 13 year old daughter Julie (who
lived most of her life until now with us in Colombia), my own daughter Becky
(40, mother of Tristan, my murdered grandson), and many other friends and
associates have established a permanent Peace Camp at Shannon airport where an
endless stream of American warplanes land and refuel, on their way to cause
generalized catastrophe by bombing Iraq. This is in absolute contravention of
Irelands own neutrality laws.
Here is a report from Mary of the court case of Eoin Dubsky, an Irish peace
activist who achieved to enter Shannon warport as they have now renamed it, and
spray-paint slogans on the windscreen of a bomber plane.
Eoins solicitor asked each prosecution witness what was aboard the plane?
None of them would answer. And what was aboard all the other warplanes that
land? No answer. The realization dawned on all present that the court had no
authority to ask questions or to board those planes to find out what they are
carrying, i.e. that our Government is not in charge of security - effectively
the US is in charge!
The Judge proved to be very thorough, fair, and humourous. The Garda (Irish
police force) came across as .. well, somewhat unconvincing. At one point, one
Garda said the planes might have been carrying food .. the Judge snorted Do you
expect me to believe that these planes are carrying hamburgers for the US
troops! Another Garda said that he thought the Hercules aircraft was part of
an air show.
The Judge was very severe with the Garda. One got such a telling-off for a
procedural error that we almost felt sorry for him! There was a lot of mix up
and confusion amongst the Garda and airport security about protocol and the
Judge was not impressed. Eoins defence solicitor claimed that he did not do
criminal damage but was trying to bring to the attention of the public the
criminal action that these planes were involved in. He asked the Judges
permission to quote from international law and very surprisingly the Judge said
Yes and listened very attentively, wrote copious notes and asked for copies of
all the international laws used!
Eoin took the witness stand and the prosecutor tried to give him hell,
calling him a common criminal. He replied that he did this action because of
his concern for the people in Iraq under threat of war. When asked why he did
not use the democratic process, he said he had done: he had TDs (MPs) asking
questions in the D…il (Parliament) and had joined our campaign to have the
Irish Prime Minister indicted for complicity in warcrimes. The Garda at the
station where he handed in a complaint against the Prime Minister had
threatened to have him arrested for wasting their time.
There was shocked silence at this piece of information and the Judge got him
to repeat the facts twice! Eoin was brilliant giving his evidence for over an
hour, unwavering and using the prosecutors jibes in his favour the whole time.
Later he had an Iraqi woman doctor take the stand and speak at length about the
effects of Depleted Uranium (D.U.) on Iraqi children and unborn babies, the
terrible increase in deformities and multiple cancers, the attacks on water and
sewage systems, and the 300% increase in US/UK attacks over the past few
months. An American woman who went to Iraq with Voices in the Wilderness also
gave shocking testimonies. The Judge sat in attentive silence throughout and
did not even take notes. He deferred making a judgement until a future date.
My reading on this is that he is scared to give a decision, as it was obvious
he wanted to rule in favour of Eoin, but that this would cause a legal riot.
He has huge responsibility on how to rule in this case, which was reported on
very favourably in the main papers the next day.
During the lunch break, we all piled into a pub. The Garda were in the
front bar. I was slagging them about not being able to give evidence properly
as they were in agreement with us really. I asked them what they thought of
the case, and one of them said, Sure we cant be talking to you, Mary, youll
only put what we say up on your website! He told me they had read some report
where I had called their Superintendent obnoxious - while laughing all along.
Next day I did an interview with W. Cork radio and with Radio Free Eirinn in
New York ..
As I write, all this was just 6 days ago, and since then there has been a
tidal wave of happenings. I am bowled over, stunned at the amount of support,
fantastic solidarity, positivity and non-stop activity that has come out of
this camp. Of course, the Garda came by on the second day and said, Hey, we
thought your protest was just for 24 hours. They said we had to leave -
orders from the owners, Aer Rianta (Irish Airways). I demanded that a
representative of Aer Rianta come on site to talk to us, and he did, but was
horrible and would not even introduce himself. I asked his name and requested
that he prove to me that the land belonged to him. He stormed off in a police
car.
Later he turned up with a map, was very nervous and held the map upside down
when he showed it to us! I said, I cant just believe that map. We need to see
the original title deeds please. He stormed off again.
I went to the Garda station to say we would move as soon as we saw the
documents requested. The Garda on duty was very friendly and said, Quite
right, that they too would want real proof that the land belonged to the
airway before they came to move us! I had been very worried that they would
come in the night and force us to move. He said, No way, we will give you 24
hours notice! Since then we have not heard a word from them.
The Irish Times phoned me up and I gave an interview and they carried the
story the next day. Such publicity gives us immense security. I had told the
Aer Rianta guy that if they moved us, we would end up in a place far more
embarrassing for them. Our initial tents had looked very temporary .. the
arrival of a caravan showed that we meant business. I said, 'Are you telling me
that one caravan is more dangerous than all those war planes you are allowing
through the airport?!' I have plenty of tinker blood in me and he knew
straightaway that I was very serious. I put out an SOS for people to come and
help us in case of eviction. People in the anti-war movement in Dublin
organized a demo. outside the Dept. of Transport there which is the head of Aer
Rianta. So many people around the country have now become involved, as we are
a focal point for people to express themselves on this issue, and we are
getting lots of visitors. They have brought loads of fire wood, donations of
money (including 40 euros from a local bank manager!), a stove, a caravan, an
offer of a mobile home, and there are dozens of articles and photos in the
press every day. We got 3 minutes on the TV news, which Becky reports was very
impactful, showing a Hercules warplane at the airport and a troops transporter
landing; it showed Eoin walking into court, interviews with me and other women,
then clips of scenes from Greenham common anti-nuclear weapons camp showing
50,000 women, many climbing over the fence. The Irish public was saturated
with information all week, as Beckys case (from a former demo at the airport)
and Eoins were also in the news. A big surprise is that the Irish Labour party
has now come out against the use of Shannon for warplanes and the countrys
largest union, the SIPTU is also opposing the Iraqi war.
Julie, Becky and I went to Limerick to join others doing a leafleting-awareness
stall on the main street. People came and signed our petition. Then we went
to the airport just as the hugest Jumbo jet, Evergreen, which also carries
troops and cargo, arrived. Three days ago, there were 10 planes - that means
at least a whole infantry of 4000 men passed through. A Hercules came in on
the same day. Luckily we were there to do our job, alert the media and it got
on telly that night. We also appeared on the Late Show, the most watched TV
programme in Ireland. They tried to twist the story by giving nearly all the
time to a virulent pro-Sharon Israeli soldier who went on about having to put
a gas mask on his grandfathers face when Saddam let off some Scud missiles
during the Gulf War, but after the show, many people from Shannon drove out
at midnight to come and see the camp, and a guy from Cork drove all the way
to offer support. A brother of Christy Moores (famous Irish singer) came and
sang us a song he had written about the situation, and one of the founders of
Greenpeace Ireland contacted me to say she has organized a walk along the
Shannon river to end up at the airport. The local priest spoke out against
the war in the church on Sunday. We also got a call from a friend to tell us
that RED FM, a Cork radio station, has been broadcasting a hate campaign
against us, using a shockjock to call us a bunch of dirty lesbians and say
he would like to bomb us out of it, and he called on people to attack us.
He is a very rightwing American. I phoned the manager to complain.
But a great breakthrough just now: a guy from the Met. Office at the
airport let us know he is willing to help with information. He says there are
four of them who want to stop giving information to the US planes. Many of the
workers are pissed off and dont want to service the warplanes. I have sent a
letter to their Trades Union asking for a meeting between them and members of
the peace camp. We are hoping that they will get the workers to down tools on
this one. Local kids come to the camp every day and sit around the fire at
night. Some of their parents work at the airport.
We have done so many radio interviews all over the country. I was on
Donegal and Kilkenny radio. All of this after 6 days.
I hope that reading this has cured all those who, like us, have despaired at
ever being able to swerve the insane course of world events. For continuing
information, email Becky at:
atlantisfoundation@eircom.net
or Mary at
newpal@eircom.net
- or just go
to Shannon airport!
And now back to Colombia, where I have the impossible task of conveying the
sound of music, the rhyming of Spanish words and the charisma of three young
girls you have never met who are producing some grippingly powerful songs in an
attempt to shift the destiny of Colombia. Songs against drug-taking, songs for
peace and social justice, songs of sorrow for the scarred countryside and songs
of joy for that which remains wild and intact. Katie and Louise, 17 and 21,
sisters, the composers, and Laura, Mary Kellys daughter, also 17, adept
musician, performing daily, mostly free, known already throughout the
department capital of Popay…n, struggling to produce their first CD, paid for
with their own work teaching dancing, music, English . Every time I say, but
surely youre going to put such-and-such a song on the CD, its so powerful .. I
hear, But, mum, we cant, every song costs 500,000 pesos to record.. Thats 200
dollars. For songs that unfailingly get to the core of guerrilla fighter or
soldier, rich rightwinger or poor campesino. Songs that could help change
Colombia.
Up until now, over the years of our campaign, I have mainly only asked for
seeds - the response has been absolutely fantastic. Now I want to ask for help
to Buy a Song. I dont want a single one of their best compositions left off
that CD for lack of pesos. Their musicians play for free, the girls have sold
their beloved piano to pay for 4 of the songs and of course the CD will when
finished wing its way to any contributor (though, sorry, its in Spanish!). For
a selection of the words (translated), please write to me at
atlantiscommune@hotmail.com
or write
to: Jenny James, Atlantis, Telecom, BelŠn, Huila, Colombia.
For newcomers to the Green Letters: Nos. 1-58, plus pictures and other material
are available on: www.afan.org.uk Af…n means URGENCY in Spanish.
~ End Green Letter 59 ~
Well, that's on a good day, but with an outrageous war about to be
unleashed on the world, and with the Irish branch of our community involved
up to the neck in anti-war activities, I have decided to dedicate this
'Green' letter to their trials and travails.
Our long-term (over 22 years) community member Mary Kelly is now a heroine
in Ireland - or a shameful criminal, according to your position on the
US/UK empire-building plans.
Mary's first brush with the law at Shannon Warport happened towards the end
of a demonstration there last August, held to bring attention to the US
warplanes landing there in contravention of Ireland's own neutrality laws.
There were about 150-200 people on it. Here is Mary's own account:
"After marching to the airport, we gathered outside the terminal and many
of us made declarations and speeches, including myself. I spoke about my
recent experience in Palestine and about the fact that Iraq was only about
7 hours away by air and of the need to get active about the US using our
airport to refuel. I directed a lot of my words to the Gardai (Irish
police) who are protecting this illegal use of Shannon. Afterwards, we did
a 'die-in' in front of them (ed.: where protesters lie in the road to
represent the dead in a war), and after that, some of us tried talking to
them. They were blatantly denying that any US planes land there to refuel,
and kept saying things like 'You've done your protest now, why don't you go
home, we want to go home for our tea'. I said, 'What about the people who
can't go home or are under curfew (in Palestine) or have no home because
it's been bombed?' They would not answer.
"Finally everybody drifted off. I was left with a friend and I talked with
her about how empty and unsatisfied I felt after the protest. I did not
want to go away. I decided I had to push it much further.
"I went for a walk with my friend along the perimeter fence and at the
control tower area, with her help, I was able to scale the fence and get
through the barbed wire, then over and on to the runway. It was about 6
p.m. I had a placard saying 'NO US BOMBERS'. My intention was to get
arrested in order to get the issue into the media.
" A patrol car immediately screeched towards me and a Garda jumped out. I
gave him a good run. When he caught me, he forcibly dragged me to the
patrol car, pulled my hair and twisted my arm up my back.
"I told him to take it easy, that I was going without a fight. He was
really freaked out and I thought he was going to have a heart attack, as he
was so unfit and gasping for breath! He took me to the place where the
baggage comes through and there were loads of passengers there. I yelled
out several times that there were US bombers landing illegally at the
airport. People looked astonished to see me being yanked off into a room.
"The Head of the airport security told me I had committed a very serious
crime and was being charged with endangering the lives of people and
planes! I asked them why they did not protest themselves and that Ireland
would be colluding with the bombing of Iraq as we did over Afghanistan.
They were very rude. I kept myself in good spirits by annoying them.
"Then I was taken to Shannon Garda station and was greeted with, 'Oh No,
not you again.' I kept talking to them and at one point was near to tears
when telling them about Palestine. Suddenly their attitude completely
changed. The previously obnoxious sergeant said, "Look, the Government has
been taking it up the .. for years from the US and they are not going to
stand up to them, and ye don't know the f.ing half of what goes through
here at nighttime!" He said they felt sickened by it themselves but don't
know how to do anything and have not got the will!
"The main guy told me that one night at 4 a.m., he went out and found
Clinton's special jet on the runway with two fighter jets accompanying it,
bearing Chelsea, his daughter on a visit to her pen pal in Switzerland.
This disgusted him. He also mentioned that there was some jet in recently
that they - the airport security guards! - were not allowed near. He
repeated that we don't know the half of it. He then said that the only way
our protest might work was if we got over 1,000 people at Shannon! And do a
daily protest outside the Dail (Irish Parliament) as well!
"They had seen me on TV at the time I was in the siege of the Nativity
Church in Bethlehem and asked me a lot about Palestine, and said that the
Palestinians were a lovely people, as they met many of them in the police
station who were turned down from getting visas to the US. They said they
had listened very carefully to all our statements about Shannon and were
impressed! The main guy gave me his name and address and said he would
like some information about what goes through there!
"And then they let me go!! They did not want to charge me as it would
cause too much publicity. A reporter phoned while I was there but they
denied that I had been arrested .
"If the people lead, the leaders will have to follow" (quote found on the
Internet)
Then came the setting up of Shannon Peace Camp as described in the last
Green Letter. The story continues in Mary's own words:
"On January 28, numerous US warplanes were still coming into Shannon. That
night, I scaled the fence and went into the airport at around 5 a.m. with a
heavy tool, a mixture of a big axe and a lump hammer. It was a rainy and
stormy night and I felt unable to do the job I wanted, i.e. to get to one
of the US planes, as it was nearing dawn and they were parked too near the
brightly lit terminal. So, I considered it a practice, mended the barbed
wire and returned to camp!
"Next day I talked to Becky about the extreme frustration of not being able
to stop this war and the reality of people being killed, the brutality and
senselessness of it all. That night on Irish-language TV, there was an
interview with 2 fluent Irish speakers from the peace camp, and they told
us they had inside information that there would be three US planes in that
night. . From the perimeter fence, I noticed there was a US Navy plane in
and parked well away from the airport. It was a chance not to be missed. I
climbed the 7 foot fence, and started walking across the rough ground
towards the runway. It was a dry night. I felt very calm. Beforehand,
back at camp, I had sat in our huge empty Teepee and thought strongly of
all the American Indians who had been slaughtered by the US . and I
imagined the huge space in front of me as I crossed the airport as a desert
in the Middle East, as I made my journey towards the white plane with US
Navy markings. "As I got near, I noticed a car parked almost next to it,
and it looked as if there were four people inside. That stopped me in my
tracks, but I decided that I had come this far and wanted to get a swipe or
two at this killing monster before I got arrested. "I went to the left
front wheel. I had heard that the fuel lines are near there. I saw them
and gently gave a few thuds with my new untried axe. The metal was soft
and soon I had destroyed them without making much noise. I had been told
that the nose cone holds the most sensitive equipment, so next I went and
struck a couple of blows there. I really had to swing the axe high above
my head and whack hard. It took two good strikes to make it penetrate the
metal. Then I saw that it was fairly easy to do, in fact as easy as
chopping a hard log of wood. I got hot and took off my heavy dark jacket
and left it on the ground with a bag with a bottle of water inside. I had
on dark trousers, a hat, and a bright fluorescent high visibility half
jacket so that I might look like an airport worker at first glance. I
swung the axe many times all over the nose cone, then moved on to the wings
where I was told the engines are encased. They were covered by a huge hard
strong material. I started slicing through it trying to get at the engine.
It was surprisingly tough material.
"Then the car suddenly drove right up to the plane and I could see
someone's legs walk towards the plane and pick up my coat and bag which I
had left near the wheel and bust fuel lines. I saw his legs walk back to
the car, then he returned to the plane. He walked all around, and as he
did, I would slink into the shadows. Then came the moment when he saw me.
I took one last swing at the back end of the plane, then dropped the axe
and shouted that I was a peace activist and was disarming a war machine, as
he caught me and twisted my head saying, "I'll break your fucking neck"
(that used to be my colonel father's favourite expression when he got
angry).
"He was really hurting me badly so I started screaming at him to let me go
and that I was unarmed and to please calm down! My hat had fallen off and
he could see my woman's face. He marched me with my head held in a lock
grip towards the airport building. I slowed right down to try and calm him
as he had probably received a fierce shock.
"He was demanding to know where my accomplices were. I insisted I was
alone. He took me into a building that said, 'Immigration control' and into
an office where a detective jumped up to attention and my captor explained
he had caught me. They got a Garda to come in and mind me while they had a
quick conference in another room. The new detective was very slimey and
cynical towards me. I told them all that I was doing the job they should
be doing, and I spoke about the innocent people in Iraq who are living in
terror and we in Ireland are contributing to the unjust war being waged on
them. "That's what YOU believe," he said. Another younger Garda that I
knew came on the scene after having seen the plane and said, "Thanks VERY
MUCH Mary." A cheery-looking burly Garda who was minding me grinned and
said, "You haven't made some people's day!" He was nice, a bit of sunshine
in a horrible downpour!
"I was pacing up and down refusing to sit. I could see the arrivals and
departures listed on a TV screen and I commented to them that none of the
US planes were listed on them, as if it doesn't happen. About 50 minutes
after being captured, 3 of them took me to a squad car, and a World Airways
plane came in quite near us. I said, 'Hey, here's another US warplane.'
They denied it outright.
"They drove out of the airport and soon we were passing the sleeping peace
camp and saw the sign "Beep for Peace". "Ah, c'mon, beep for peace!" I
said to them. Stony silence.
"We got to Shannon Garda Station and a cheery Garda on duty introduced
himself to me as Liam. He was very correct, polite and did everything by
the book. He brought me a lovely cup of weak tea as I'd asked for and
said, "I like it weak too, nothing worse than strong tea which sticks to
the roof of your mouth!" There was a nice older Garda present who ticked
Liam off for giving me a cup which had some slightly rude sex joke on it.
"The detective who arrested me was a real farmerish looking bull of a guy
and he soon paired up with another detective and they both had the coldest
looking eyes that made me quite scared. I kept talking to Liam and asked if
I could make a phone call. I phoned Tim and said, 'I've been arrested for
damaging a US warplane. Please could you phone Becky and tell her my news.'
Mary's story continues:
"It was past 6. a.m. and they called for a female Garda to hurry up and
come on duty and do a body search. She was a very nice buxom woman in her
30s who told me her name and said, "My God, you're a mighty woman!" She
was very kind and not intrusive when I had to strip. She asked with
interest about the bottle of Rescue remedy I had in my pocket and I
explained it was great for shock or when dealing with new experiences!
"Then I was taken out for questioning. When this ended, I asked them to
let me call Becky, but I couldn't even speak to her, I was in bits. She
quickly let me know she was coming up straightaway. I was shaking with
relief as everything suddenly felt huge, much bigger than I could handle.
I was trying not to cry. The friendly Garda woman said to me, "Maybe now
is the time you need a drop from your bottle?" I asked her to put a few
drops of Rescue remedy in a glass of water and within a few minutes I was
right as rain and able to laugh and joke again!
"Later I was told I was going to court about 30 miles north. As I walked
outside with a friend who had come to be with me, TV3 and RTE (Irish TV)
were filming us. I chatted in the car with the detective beside me and
invited him to come and visit the Peace camp and added that he could come
in disguise if he needed to keep his identity concealed from his
colleagues. He said, No way, 'If I visit I will come as myself.' He then
said he respected my beliefs and that I had acted according to them!
"The court hearing took place in Killaloe. The TV cameras were outside and
the press were already inside. The charges said I had done upwards of HALF
A MILLION euros damage to a US plane. I nearly fainted! I thought I had
just given it a few bashes. I looked around and all my friends from the
peace camp were struggling not to laugh out loud. The court clerk looked
at us all with daggers.
"The prosecutor said he believed I was dangerous and would continue to do
more damage. My solicitor, Joe Noonan, said that I did what I did with
lawful excuse, I was not a criminal and it would take a long court case
involving international law to present my case fully. He had the task of
fending off a pack of wolfhounds baying for my blood. We were all full of
admiration for his handling of the case.
"The Judge said that to get bail, I was banned from entering County Clare,
had to pay 5,000 euros, surrender my passport and sign on three times a
week at a Garda Station. He then walked out. I told my solicitor no way
would I accept those conditions and I would go to prison. Then I said
goodbye to everyone, made a statement to the Press and was taken to the
Garda Station. The Sergeant in charge was very nice indeed - he was from
West Cork and was delighted when I said I was too. He made a cup of coffee
for me.
"Then we set out for Limerick jail, with one driver and one detective. The
guy who arrested me had fallen asleep at Killaloe Station and so they left
him behind.
"The Gardai at Limerick were amazingly friendly, delighted to say hello and
some of them said, "You're one of our own." Even some visitors and
prisoners were trying to get a look at me, as it was now 6 p.m. and it had
been No. 1 item on the news. The four guys working in the office where I
had to give in my few possessions were all smiles .
"Then I was delivered to the women's prison. Immediately two female screws
told me to take off my clothes. The most senior one, a blonde fatty
misery, said she did not believe my age (50) and asked how I kept looking
good. I said it was my lifestyle and invited her to come and visit me at
the peace camp. She said, ''Tis you that will be spending many a long year
with me in here m'dear!'
"I was then put in a cell with a huge bruiser of a woman, very bitter
looking, and I was upset to find she was a heavy smoker. I had to sleep on
a bunk above her and she smoked throughout the night. I hadn't slept for
two nights and was relieved to collapse, but I woke hardly able to breathe
with a stinking headache. At 8.0 a.m. I was asked if I wanted to speak to
the Doctor. He shook my hand and said, "Well done, I'd love to take you
out for a drink some time." I said, 'Forget that, I am dying and need your
help. I came in here healthy, sound as a bell, and now my health is
deteriorating very fast.' I said I would go on hunger strike if I did not
get a cell of my own or with a non-smoker.
That afternoon, my cell mate was moved out.
IRELAND ON SUNDAY, 9th Feb. 2003
Imagine - all it takes to make our Government look thoroughly ridiculous
and inept is a handful of peaceniks. The Shannon agitators . achieved all
their aims with devastating impact, then dismantled their tents and left. .
The protest has been an unqualified coup for the peace brigade . Gulf-bound
US troops .. have been diverted to Germany. I call that game, set and
match . What a public relations disaster for Bertie (ed. The Irish P.M)
this has been: silly doesn't begin to describe his handling of the affair.
.. Just look at the sequence of events. Mary Kelly sneaks in and manages
to do 500,000 euros worth of damage on a US Navy plane and Bertie responds
by despatching one Garda to protect it. Then five more saboteurs breach
defences and carry out additional damage to an aircraft . belatedly, 120
soldiers are ordered to do sentry duty at the airport, just as it emerges
that World Airlines planes carrying troops will refuel in Frankfurt
instead.
No wonder the peaceniks packed up .. obviously there wasn't enough room in
the camp for them and their enormous grins . We've had several ministers
lecture us on neutrality, attempting to define its nuances for us, when
it's news to me that there are any. Then we have Bertie whining about how
much it's costing us in lost revenue because the Americans aren't paying
landing fees any more..
It's a good job Mary Kelly doesn't belong to al-Qaeda or Shannon Airport
would be a smouldering chasm by now.
Some words from 13 year old Julie, Mary's daughter.
"I spent a few weeks in the camp at Shannon. The camp was just at the side
of the road where all the business people pass to their jobs. We had signs
up saying Beep for Peace and some of the airport workers would beep! But
some of them would tell us to get a job and to f. off. We had a banner
saying, "We don't trust you Mr. Bush" and some young boys came up with a
banner saying, "In Mr. Bush we trust, in Mr. Bush we believe," but ran off
as soon as they saw us coming.
"Sometimes I would go plane spotting with Tim (he knows everything about
planes) and once or twice I saw Soldiers eating crisps and drinking coke,
some of them were looking at magazines and relaxing around the airport
waiting for the planes to be refuelled. It made me so angry to see the
young guys, black and white, small and tall, just going to kill innocent
people ."
Excerpt from a letter from a gardening penfriend in the US, a middle-aged
man:
"Many of the people in my neighborhood believe, as I do, that we should
stay out of the political affairs of other nations, not only in the Middle
East, but elsewhere also. Whenever the economy or the stock market goes,
we (the US) have to start trouble to boost it back up. .. Instead of
spending on arms, I believe we should be confronting situations in the US.
Years ago, I knew a young man who froze to death in a snowbank because he
had no place to go."
I would like to end with some slogans copied from placards held aloft on
the massive anti-war demonstrations in the United States . here is a
sample:
~ End Green Letter 60 ~
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