Civilian Peace Service: the German experience - by Gisela Duerselen

Our vision is the development of a world wide, nonviolent peace corps with several thousand peace specialists. This is what the 90 member organizations of the Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP) do:

In its Civilian Peace Service, the Federal Republic of Germany is the first and only country to have created an institutionalized service for regions in crisis in which not the military but civil society sets the tone. The CPS is a dispatch service for experienced women and men, who have undergone four months training for nonviolent conflict management. The CPS is a civil society project financed by the state: the implementation rests with the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). Church and non-church sponsors work together in a consortium for the Civilian Peace Service (ZFD). They include:

Action Committee Service for Peace (AGDF), Association of Development Service (AGEH), Christian Services International (CFI), German Development Service (DED), Eirene- International Christian Service for Peace, Church Development Service (EED), Community Services (WFD), and since 2007, the Civil Peace Service Forum (forum ZFD).

In 1999, the first peace specialists went abroad. What has the CPS achieved in ten years?

At the start of 2009, ten German peace specialists are working in Afghanistan. More are taking care of projects in Africa and Asia, in Latin America, the Kosovo and in Israel/Palestine. In order to be really effective they would have to number at least 500. What all have in common is depending on dialogue instead of soldiers, on nonviolent communication instead of armed power.

They work with partners in the crisis regions on projects of reconciliation and are present also where there is no shooting, but imminent danger of a violent confrontation. About 200 civilian peace specialists a year begin their service in many of the world’s crisis areas.

The success of German CPS is also evident in the constant growth of its budget, from five million marks in 1999 to 14 million Euros in 2006, 19 million in 2008, and 30 million Euros (about $50 million Canadian) in 2009.

Difficult Beginnings

In 1994 the Evangelical Church in Berlin-Brandenburg and political scientist Theodor Ebert proposed a corps of as many as 80,000 peace professionals, both men and women, on the same basis as military service. This proposal caused divisions. Some peace organizations feared both government influence, and reduction of existing peace and development services. Others objected to new taxes. Thereupon the Federation for Social Defense developed its own concept of a voluntary corps of 100,000 volunteers, with financing to come from progressive reductions of the national defense budget. In 1995 government approved only an emergency peace service: a rapid deployment of much smaller numbers of experienced professionals. In 1997 the first 70 took part in a 4-months pilot training program by the Rheinland-Westfalen state government. Then in 1998 the Social Democrat / Green federal government coalition promised the establishment of a Civilian Peace Service in its platform.

It took some time for the CPS was able to define responsibilities and cooperate effectively with the established federal Development ministry. Today CPS specialists work directly in conflicts, while the development experts in cooperative deal with structural improvements. The transition is flowing smoothly. Anti-poverty work limits the potential for conflict. Post-conflict work prevents renewed violence and, in turn enables development. Experience has shown that the special strength of the CPS lies in prevention, which is long-term and unspectacular; public donations for catastrophes are much larger. This makes the CPS dependent on government funding. Many peace activists fear that their independence will be compromised by current government policy of "civilian-military cooperation" in Afghanistan.

To strengthen their profile, all EU activists have united in the European Network for Civil Peace Services (EN CPS). In this network, quite different approaches to peace work are brought into contact and coordinated.

Translated from the original German by Hans Sinn.
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See also: Canadian Department of Peace movement and CitoyenNEs pour un Ministère de paix, a table comparing military cadets and proposed peace service; PASC in Colombia; Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) and Peace Brigades International in many countries; Trail of Dreams World Peace Walk; publications of CCSG.

3 poems from Chicago

Lake Michigan at Lincoln Park: photo Richie Diesterheft

Skyscraper (1916) by Carl Sandburg

By day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and has a soul.
Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are poured out again back to the streets, prairies and valleys.
It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and out all day that give the building a soul of dreams and thoughts and memories.
(Dumped in the sea or fixed in a desert, who would care for the building or speak its name or ask a policeman the way to it?)

Elevators slide on their cables and tubes catch letters and parcels and iron pipes carry gas and water in and sewage out.
Wires climb with secrets, carry light and carry words, and tell terrors and profits and loves—curses of men grappling plans of business and questions of women in plots of love.

Hour by hour the caissons reach down to the rock of the earth and hold the building to a turning planet.
Hour by hour the girders play as ribs and reach out and hold together the stone walls and floors.
Hour by hour the hand of the mason and the stuff of the mortar clinch the pieces and parts to the shape an architect voted.
Hour by hour the sun and the rain, the air and the rust, and the press of time running into centuries, play on the building inside and out and use it.

Men who sunk the pilings and mixed the mortar are laid in graves where the wind whistles a wild song without words
And so are men who strung the wires and fixed the pipes and tubes and those who saw it rise floor by floor.
Souls of them all are here, even the hod carrier begging at back doors hundreds of miles away and the bricklayer who went to state’s prison for shooting another man while drunk.
(One man fell from a girder and broke his neck at the end of a straight plunge—he is here—his soul has gone into the stones of the building.)

On the office doors from tier to tier—hundreds of names and each name standing for a face written across with a dead child, a passionate lover, a driving ambition for a million dollar business or a lobster’s ease of life.

Behind the signs on the doors they work and the walls tell nothing from room to room.
Ten-dollar-a-week stenographers take letters from corporation officers, lawyers, efficiency engineers, and tons of letters go bundled from the building to all ends of the earth.
Smiles and tears of each office girl go into the soul of the building just the same as the master-men who rule the building.

Hands of clocks turn to noon hours and each floor empties its men and women who go away and eat and come back to work.
Toward the end of the afternoon all work slackens and all jobs go slower as the people feel day closing on them. 20
One by one the floors are emptied… The uniformed elevator men are gone. Pails clang… Scrubbers work, talking in foreign tongues. Broom and water and mop clean from the floors human dust and spit, and machine grime of the day.
Spelled in electric fire on the roof are words telling miles of houses and people where to buy a thing for money. The sign speaks till midnight.

Darkness on the hallways. Voices echo. Silence holds… Watchmen walk slow from floor to floor and try the doors. Revolvers bulge from their hip pockets… Steel safes stand in corners. Money is stacked in them.
A young watchman leans at a window and sees the lights of barges butting their way across a harbor, nets of red and white lanterns in a railroad yard, and a span of glooms splashed with lines of white and blurs of crosses and clusters over the sleeping city.
By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul.

Chicago Thaws into Spring 16 Mar 09 by Trey Ratcliff

The Woman Hanging From The Thirteenth Floor Window (1983) by Joy Harjo

She is the woman hanging from the 13th floor
window. Her hands are pressed white against the
concrete moulding of the tenement building. She
hangs from the 13th floor window in east Chicago,
with a swirl of birds over her head. They could
be a halo, or a storm of glass waiting to crush her.

She thinks she will be set free.

The woman hanging from the 13th floor window
on the east side of Chicago is not alone.
She is a woman of children, of the baby, Carlos,
and of Margaret, and of Jimmy who is the oldest.
She is her mother's daughter and her father's son.
She is several pieces between the two husbands
she has had. She is all the women of the apartment
building who stand watching her, watching themselves.

When she was young she ate wild rice on scraped down
plates in warm wood rooms. It was in the farther
north and she was the baby then. They rocked her.

She sees Lake Michigan lapping at the shores of
herself. It is a dizzy hole of water and the rich
live in tall glass houses at the edge of it. In some
places Lake Michigan speaks softly, here, it just sputters
and butts itself against the asphalt. She sees
other buildings just like hers. She sees other
women hanging from many-floored windows
counting their lives in the palms of their hands
and in the palms of their children's hands.

She is the woman hanging from the 13th floor window
on the Indian side of town. Her belly is soft from
her children's births, her worn levis swing down below
her waist, and then her feet, and then her heart.
She is dangling.

The woman hanging from the 13th floor hears voices.
They come to her in the night when the lights have gone
dim. Sometimes they are little cats mewing and scratching
at the door, sometimes they are her grandmother's voice,
and sometimes they are gigantic men of light whispering
to her to get up, to get up, to get up. That's when she wants
to have another child to hold onto in the night, to be able
to fall back into dreams.

And the woman hanging from the 13th floor window
hears other voices. Some of them scream out from below
for her to jump, they would push her over. Others cry softly
from the sidewalks, pull their children up like flowers and gather
them into their arms. They would help her, like themselves.

But she is the woman hanging from the 13th floor window,
and she knows she is hanging by her own fingers, her
own skin, her own thread of indecision.

She thinks of Carlos, of Margaret, of Jimmy.
She thinks of her father, and of her mother.
She thinks of all the women she has been, of all
the men. She thinks of the color of her skin, and
of Chicago streets, and of waterfalls and pines.
She thinks of moonlight nights, and of cool spring storms.
Her mind chatters like neon and northside bars.
She thinks of the 4 a.m. lonelinesses that have folded
her up like death, discordant, without logical and
beautiful conclusion. Her teeth break off at the edges.
She would speak.

The woman hangs from the 13th floor window crying for
the lost beauty of her own life. She sees the
sun falling west over the grey plane of Chicago.
She thinks she remembers listening to her own life
break loose, as she falls from the 13th floor
window on the east side of Chicago, or as she
climbs back up to claim herself again.

from She Had Some Horses copyright © 2006 by Joy Harjo. Reprinted by permission of Thunder's Mouth Press. Also on her vocal CD Native Joy for Real (2004)

Nikki-Rosa (1968) by Nikki Giovanni. photo: blackademics.

childhood remembrances are always a drag
if you’re Black
you always remember things like living in Woodlawn
with no inside toilet
and if you become famous or something
they never talk about how happy you were to have
your mother
all to yourself and
how good the water felt when you got your bath
from one of those
big tubs that folk in chicago barbecue in
and somehow when you talk about home
it never gets across how much you
understood their feelings
as the whole family attended meetings about Hollydale
and even though you remember
your biographers never understand
your father’s pain as he sells his stock
and another dream goes
And though you’re poor it isn’t poverty that
concerns you
and though they fought a lot
it isn’t your father’s drinking that makes any difference
but only that everybody is together and you
and your sister have happy birthdays and very good
Christmases
and I really hope no white person ever has cause
to write about me
because they never understand
Black love is Black wealth and they’ll
probably talk about my hard childhood
and never understand that
all the while I was quite happy

from Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgment, copyright © 1968, 1970, courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers and Poetry Foundation. Woodlawn and Hollydale are Chicago neighbourhoods. Listen to Nikki Giovanni on her video and CDs.

What will stop population growth? - Hans Rosling

Swedish professor Hans Rosling has just been named by Time as one of the top online profs. According to his interactive video What stops population growth it is rising life expectancy and GNP -- with Africa the current exception. His statistic presentation shows that to stop the exponential growth of population, we must ensure that poor children do not die.
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below: a snapshot from his Gapminder video

Rosling began as a doctor in rural Africa discovering konzo, a rare paralytic disease, and its cause: malnutrition and poorly-prepared cassava. He co-founded Médecins sans Frontièrs (Doctors without Borders) in Sweden, wrote a textbook on global health, and has initiated key research as professor of international health at the Karolinska Institut in Stockholm. See the fullscreen display in his Gapminder World, with instructions on how to make your own interactive videos of UN development data. See also Quaker doctor Dick Grossman's blog population-matters.org

Our home and native land: the Attawapiskat story

In the video, Chuck Strahl is shown in his favourite cowboy role.

Imagine how the public would react if this happened to a white community. 30 years ago, 30,000 gallons of diesel oil leaked into ground under the school. Indian Affairs is responsible both for the school and the oil installation. In 1984 a government report said “immediate steps” must be taken. In 2000 parents pulled their children out because of toxic fumes; the old school was finally closed, and children were jammed into portable classrooms, twice as many as the Ministry's own standards allow. After 8 years of delay, the Harper government demolished the old school and promised to build a new one. Last year, that promise was broken when Indian Affairs funding was slashed under Chuck Strahl.

That was when the Ontario Public School Boards Association unanimously urged the federal government to reverse its postponement of 29 desperately needed native schools. Harper, however, wanted the money for tax cuts to white voters.

The demolition of the old school has left an “open wound”. The stench of diesel emanating from the pit is overwhelming. Teachers, children and parents complain of headaches, nausea, skin rashes, nosebleeds, chronic diarrhea in infants, and children just "passing out". The local MP and MPP say those symptoms are consistent with exposure to benzene, toluene and ethyl benzene, chemicals known for causing leukemia, bone marrow damage and kidney failure. Attawapiskat wants all children from the community to be evacuated until site remediation is completed.

Minister Strahl called the MP/MPP visit a “a publicity stunt”. This is the same man who as a rightwing Reform MP from Chilliwack attacked “the never ending dependence of these aboriginal people on the taxpayers of Canada”, called for privatization of native land (the policy known in the USA as termination), and threatened racial violence against natives asserting their aboriginal fishing rights on the Fraser River (“there are going to be lives lost over this“). In 2007 Prime Minister Harper appointed him to Indian Affairs -- putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.

A comment on the latest Attawapiskat video says, "If a family did this to their children they would lose their kids, be charged and possibly be imprisoned, but it is again the government mistreating its own!"

Meanwhile, diamond companies like DeBeers expect to make $billions in profits in the area. Ontario's Minister of Northern Development and Mines boasts that Canada is now the world's third largest supplier of diamonds.

*****

Strahl quotations from Hansard 1993-2001. See also the international petition supporting Attawapiskat First Nation; and a tourist's photos and comments on the impact of diamond mining in the area.

Neglect, or racism? - water and native rights

Water walk: courtesy of NWAC

On 13 April 2009 native women in Canada, the USA and and Australia held a National Water Day calling for action. Local events included traditional water ceremonies, vigils, feasts, prayers, and walks.

Black Tickle NF is a Métis community which depends for water on wells in summer and running brooks in the winter.” “In January, 2000, there were 404 visits to the clinic (out of a population of 268).
People know the water is not fit. But there is nothing else to get. It don’t taste proper. Sometimes it leaves a brown scum. But we still don’t have better water for drinking for sure. That’s where you get your sickness… from the water. There’s a lot of stomach sickness, stomach flus, vomiting and diarrhea.”
National Aboriginal Health Organization brief 2002

For decades, Ottawa dozed on similar problems in hundreds of native communities across Canada, issuing periodic “boil water” advisories. Provinces ducked responsibility, saying native health is a federal matter. Until 7 whites died of bad water in Walkerton Ontario in 2000, the media ignored the issue; but then for weeks headlines called for a public inquiry.

In October 2005, Kashechewan ON suffered from waterborne diarrhea, scabies and impetigo. Chlorination was increased to "shock" levels. Then residents had to be evaculated, at a cost of $16 million: CBC 9 Nov 06. Many native communities still run such risks.

The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples held five years of hearings in the 1990s. It said starkly, The main policy direction, pursued for more than 150 years, first by colonial then by Canadian governments, has been wrong. But the Harper government refuses to act on its numerous recommendations (see the RCAP CD in most libraries).

Opposing last year's declaration of aboriginal rights at the UN were Canada, Russia, USA, Australia and New Zealand.

*****

See also Council of Canadians World Water Day , BC-based Peace Earth & Justice news, Navajo Nation Water Haulers videos, Peoples Water Forum protests in Istabul March 2009; and subsequent PWF activities,

350.org: Bill McKibben in Shanghai, jovenes en Poznan

Bill McKibben takes 350 seconds to explain why 350 ppm is the most important number in the world, as he rides a riverboat through New Shanghai.


Unos jóvenes participando en las negociaciones internacionales envian un mensaje a los jóvenes sudamericanos de la iniciativa TUNZA-GEO, y ellos responden con su apoyo. (Youth participating in the international climate negotiations in Poznan, Poland send their message to South American youth from the TUNZA-GEO network, and they send messages of support back.)
Jóvenes internacionales unidos frente el cambio climático, en Poznan, Polonia al COP-14.
See other McKibben and Tunza videos. Links to Tunza: UNEP site, TakingItGlobal, Tunza-India on WiserEarth. The August 2009 Tunza International Youth Conference on the Environment in Daejeon, Korea will present its findings on climate, green jobs, human security and sustainability at COP-15 in Copenhagen.

Peak fertility passed - new satellite data

photosynthetically active radiation: UNH Global Land Remote Sensing

Poor farmers in Asia, Africa and South America face a double threat: climate change and loss of soil fertility, Alexander Muller of the Food and Agricultural Organization warned 3 years ago.

Food security hangs by a thread: with drought in Africa and China; millions displaced by earthquakes and the 2004 Asian tsunami; the 2008 food shortage, triggered by biofuel speculation, which caused riots in 38 countries. Under-financed like other UN agencies, the FAO has been unable to find permanent solutions for either problem: disaster refugees or the hungry poor.

New satellite-sensing data show that worldwide land fertility has fallen steadily for 20 years, affecting 24% of the earth's cropland and forests -- shockingly higher and in different regions than the 15% estimate by soil experts in the previous GLASOD (Global Assessment of Soil Degradation – see map). The new 20 Mar 2009 report by Bai et al. from Wageningen University warns that unless halted, the loss in NPP (net primary productivity) in these regions – previously productive tropical countries with a quarter of world population – will become an additional driver of global warming.

This loss in ecosystem services is alarming. The Wageningen authors say vegetation loss meant a thousand million tonnes of CO2 was not captured. At a shadow price of $50 per tonne, that is $50 billion. That might be doubled by the unestimated loss of organic carbon already fixed in the soil.

Challenging the usual interpretation of causes, the new study finds only “weak correlations” with traditional culprits: rural population density and drought. Among likely causes are

• industrial: the hamburger connection in Central America, Brazil, now spreading to Africa; other man-made destruction of tropical forests; monoculture, topsoil erosion, forcing crops with irrigation and artificial fertilizers, chemical pollution, and urban sprawl.
• traditional agriculture: overgrazing, deep ploughing, absence of fallow, cutting of fuelwood.

Because all these causes interact, a quick technological fix is unlikely. But because a quarter of the earth's population is at risk, the problem is urgent.

The study shows that the fastest degradation is not in regions already identified by GLASOD as undergoing desertification or erosion, the African Sahel and around the Mediterranean. The worst-affected countries are

• Africa, the Congo, Zaire, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Sierra Leone, Zambia, Asia, Myanmar, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Korea and Indonesia, with over 50% of land area degraded
• Swaziland with 95 per cent land area degraded
• rural China (nearly half a billion people), India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Brazil.
  

What is to be done? The FAO urges developing resilience and using indigenous knowledge in livestock, crop and forest practices. But FAO, under-funded, and therefore over-influenced by corporate lobbying, is apt to suggest patented and GMO seeds, particularly in rice farming. Critics also say the much-ballyhooed green revolution has contributed to soil and water degradation, and a human nutrition crisis.
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See FAO country-by-country GLASOD maps; Wageningen's GlobalSoilMap.net; UNEP Earthwatch; AfSIS; Saba Ganguly's critique of India's green revolution, the most successful; NASA's illustrated explanation of remote sensing and the NDVI vegetation index; the new AgCam which begins operation this year; Encyclopedia of Earth's article on the great transition.

A farm for the future - Rebecca Hosking

Rebecca Hosking: Guardian photo
(See the 5-part video on Youtube. It should be available on DVD from bbccanadashop.com and bbcamericashop.com) In A farm for the future, a 50 min video from BBC's A Natural World series, film maker Rebecca Hosking returns to her family's wildlife-friendly farm in Devon, to become the next generation to farm the land.

Peak oil is a wake-up call. She learns that our agricultural model is completely dependent on abundant cheap fossil fuel, for transport, herbicides, pesticides, GMO crops, fertilizer and industrial food processing. A global food collapse is possible. Can we make the transition to sustainable practices? With advice from oil experts, the Post-Carbon Institute, farmers of an older generation and organic growers, Rebecca learns how permaculture, cooperating with nature, is the key to low-carbon agriculture and food security. (Thanks to Carol Dixon for bringing this program to our attention!)

See other videos from David Attenborough's Natural World series (now a DVD set) including Hosking's Message in the Waves (Natural World 2007) about Pacific albatross killed by plastic garbage; her plasticbagsfree campaign and plasticides.com interview. See also the Bioregional congress of the Americas to be held 4-11 Oct 2009, and 2007 reading list; permaculture blogs and news on thefarm.org; Jon Cooksey's How to Boil a Frog site and video:

Other videos: farms of the future and permaculture.
See also US blogs and videos by Peak Moment.

Passing by (thoughts for Passover) -- Elizabeth Ayres

tobacco barn photos: Wikipedia

No shelter here. No defense against the wind that soughs across the weed-wracked field to do time’s evil work: pry the rotting boards off. Peel the rusted tin away. Strip the flesh from this old tobacco barn, pick it clean to the bone.

Like a come-hither finger, it beckoned. Parking my car by the side of the road, I obeyed the summons. Now I stand, shivering, as slatted sunlight casts shadows to replace once-solid planks, and derelict hinges dream of swinging doors, and a medley of criss-crossed beams yearn to bear the fecund weight of tobacco leaves curing in the dark, rich air. Except now the brambles creep in, and the moss, and whatever wild and profuse promptings cultivation holds at bay.

I remember how they were when I was a child, these springtime fields. The white cloth spread like giant wings to protect the fragile seedlings huddled underneath. The plowed and patient earth, her furrows flung out like arms waiting to embrace June’s adolescent transplants.

We weren’t farmers, but in those days, tobacco was the staple crop of Southern Maryland, and month by month the growing of it strung taut warp threads of recurring sights on a year’s loom. Almost shoulder height by late summer. September’s workers in the rows, cutting the stalks, spearing them onto stakes, carting the skewered harvest into the barns to be hung on tiered poles to dry. December’s secrets I learned from kids who missed school to stand for long hours inside those mysterious, gambrel-roofed hives, where they stripped and bulked and barreled the brown stuff. Then the beat-up trucks and horse-drawn Amish carts, headed for Hughesville and the auction house.

We weren’t farmers, but our everyday shuttlings – to store, school, church, doctor’s office – flashed like many-hued weft threads through a fabric larger than any mere comings or goings. Harvests and earth and weather. A pristine, primal tapestry to remind us we are all just seeds in our season.
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C. Coolidge Jr picking tobacco 1923: Digital Commonwealth

I wasn’t here for the 2001 Buyout, when the state offered tobacco growers money to switch to other crops. Now I’m back, and like everyone else I see the barns won’t survive the transition. Inside, they’re filled with heavy rafters crosshatching a maze of small compartments. All that can be stored there is the hanging brown weed they were built to hold. Who can afford to maintain buildings that no longer serve a purpose? They rot where they stand.

This day, rusted bolts pepper the ground. Twisted shags of tin tumble from a fraying roof. White bones of vapor trails litter a sapphire sky. Cars roar by where silence once reigned, and some kid hunkers down in the abandoned field. His remote-controlled model airplane buzzes round and round in a noisy, futile circle. Buzzes round and round, treading the same worn out path.

curing tobacco: Hadley Barn Survey

This day, the great religious feasts of spring are upon us. Passover. Blood on wooden doorposts, the houses empty, their occupants fled in terrified hope to seek a future they name the promised land. Easter. Blood on a wooden cross, the empty tomb, its occupant come forth to tell us: we are all seeds in our season. This day is the promised land.

Last night I dreamt I was hoeing tobacco. I could hear them laughing, the men who built this barn. Who pounded in the shiny nails and thought their shiny thoughts for a new harvest. The auction house is closed now, but that’s no never-mind, Spring is here again, her come-hither finger raised, and yes, it’s sad they’re crumbling, but this I know from religion and the season: it isn’t loss that defines us. Death is a question mark, not an exclamation. And while I can’t say what you might hear it ask, “Who stands at this day’s door, knocking?” is the invitation I’ll hear whispered every time I’m passing by some old tobacco barn.
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Elizabeth Ayres is the author of Know the Way (poetry, Infinity, 2005) and Writing the Wave (how-to, Perigee, 2000), and is completing Land of Our Belonging: Encounters with the Wonder of Earth, Sea and Sky, a collection which includes this reflection. She runs Creative Writing Center retreats in Chesapeake Bay country. She performs her essays on Internet radio Monday evenings at 8:30 p.m. eastern time; you can catch more of her reflections in her blog Encounters with Wonder; or reading her work in a Youtube video.