It started with just one or two people refusing to comply. Instead of obeying instructions, they started asking why some of us acting as soldiers were removing people. More people started to notice, turning from the speaker to watch the detention of festival attendees, and those detaining them. Some moved closer, ignoring the authorities’ commands to stay away.  Before long, the situation could not be contained.

As one of the mock soldiers, I was irritated to find listeners denying my power. We had organised this surprise role-play with the speaker at the 2011 Wild Goose Festival, planning to interrupt his talk with a security check of the audience who were enjoying the warm sunshine on the grassy meadow. All the young men were told to report to our checkpoint, and our uniformed actors assembled them into a line for processing, off to one side of the field, as the speaker resumed his talk. It was easy enough to ignore the few people who objected to our interruption.

Peter Haresnape leads workshop at Wild Goose 2011

Saturday, 5 May marked the two-year anniversary of Kurdish journalist Sardasht Osman’s murder.  CPTers traveled to Hawler (Erbil) to stand in solidarity with Osman’s family, friends, and colleagues, as they remembered the young man.  Osman, who was twenty-three at the time of his death, was in his final year at university in Hawler, and frequently published articles critical of the Kurdish Regional Government and prominent party leaders.  According to the Committee to Project Journalists (CPJ), “the Kurdistan Regional Government issued a 430-word report in September 2010 claiming that Osman had been killed by a member of Ansar al-Islam, an extremist group, for not carrying out work he had promised to do.  The report provided no evidence for the assertion.  CPJ and other press groups said the report lacked credibility.”

On Saturday, CPTers, along with their partner Mohammed Salah, joined a crowd of about 150 people at the cemetery where Osman is buried.  The media presence was significant as well—many present were Osman’s colleagues.  After the ceremony, CPTers met with Osman’s father and older brother, as well as reporters, and CPTer Garland Robertson gave an interview to the Kurdish News Network (KNN).

“By the mixing of our waters, it becomes your responsibility to protect our water, and our responsibility to protect your water.”  Hereditary Chief Pete Erickson of the northern British Columbia Carrier Sekani First Nation completed the final water ceremony before a crowd of over four hundred supporters in downtown Toronto on Wednesday, 9 May 2012.  As representative of one of the five-member First Nations of the Yinka Dene Alliance, Chief Erickson, along with a delegation of over fifty First Nation representatives, had just completed the ten day Freedom Train journey across Canada’s west to highlight the nations’ opposition to Enbridge corporation’s proposed Northern Gateway tar sands pipeline through their territory.

The Yinka Dene territories are located in the headwaters of the Fraser, Skeena and Mackenzie/Arctic watersheds. Their people have relied on salmon since time immemorial. Their territory is 25% of the 1,177 km through which the proposed pipeline will carry raw tar sands crude from Bruderheim in the Alberta Tar Sands to the inland coastal community of Kitimat, British Columbia. Citing the infamous Exxon Valdez tanker spill, the Yinka Dene and supporters fear contamination from pipeline ruptures and tanker spills of catastrophic proportions.

During our Learning Experience in Colombia at the end of April, we visited the community of Garzal in the Simiti municipality of the southern Bolivar province.  CPT Colombia has accompanied Garzal and the neighboring community of Nueva Esperanza since 2007.  Jenny Rodriguez and Stewart Vriesinga of the CPT Colombia team hosted Brian Young, Sarah Thompson, Chris Sabas, Merwyn De Mello, Rey Lopez, Eric Olfert and me for the visit to Garzal.

 The Magdalena Media region is rich with natural resources such as fertile land, minerals, and potentially oil.  Many different actors, including paramilitaries, guerrillas, state forces and multinational corporations, are not hesitant to use lethal violence, economic coercion, institutional pressure, and unjust political or illegal means to possess and extract these natural resources.  Consequently, civilians who, by law or tenure, have land rights are reduced to mere collateral in a high-stakes game of control and exploitation of valuable resources.

PRAYERS FOR PEACEMAKERS, May 16, 2012

Pray for Palestinian prisoners on a hunger strike to protest detention without charges or trials, and other punishments. CPT members joined the fast May 15, the anniversary of the 1948 expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes.

The organizers hoped that the Green Festival would bring some of these issues to the attention of the Kurds of Suleimaniya.  And they were successful.  Around 2000 people left their leisurely stroll around the park to listen to Kurdish and American music and look at the displays.  They were able to see that the ubiquitous 250-millilitre water bottle could be threaded onto a wooden frame to create a green house.  They heard from high school students that wind and solar power might work well in the region.  They saw the advantages of placing trash into receptacles that would go to the dump.  They took in the beauty, through nature photographs and paintings, of their region, which reminded them that they must find ways of preserving it.

CPTnet
11 May 2012
AL-KHALIL (HEBRON) ACTION ALERT: Fast with the prisoners of Palestine

On Monday 7 May 2012, the Israeli High Court of Justice denied the petition of two hunger-striking Palestinians against their administrative detention, meaning the Israeli authorities have never charged them with any crime or given them a trial.  The two prisoners continue their hunger strike, are now on their seventy-fifth day, and are in critical condition.  Their attorneys said they were not allowed to see classified material that the state had cited as grounds for imprisonment.

One thousand six hundred prisoners joined the hunger strike and are now in their twenty-fourth day.   The prisoners are demanding an end to administrative detention, solitary confinement and other punitive punishment measures taken against Palestinian prisoners, including the denial of family and lawyer visits, especially to prisoners from the Gaza Strip to whom the Israeli authorities have denied family visits since 2007.

Prisoners have  face harsh collective punishment from the beginning of the hunger strike.  Some have received fines between 250 (€50) and 500 (€100) shekels for each day of their  strike.  In Naqab prison, prisoners are experiencing daily random inspections that last for approximately forty to fifty minutes.  These inspections include cell and body searches.  In addition, prisoners are no longer permitted to leave their rooms for the daily break period. 

This 15 May 2012 marks the 64th anniversary of the Nakba, when pre-Israeli state paramilitary forces expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes and land in 1948.  The annual Nakba fast this year is focusing on the plight of the prisoners.  CPT Palestine is gravely concerned about the health of the prisoners and in an act of solidarity, team members will be joining the fast.  The  team invites you to join the fast from 7:00 a.m. on 15 May.

In the regional capitol of Erbil/Hawler, the team conducted an action at the entrance to KRG Parliament facilities with banners, posters, and a flyer with a message and a photo of Internally Displaced Persons in the riverbed camp they were forced into last spring.  At the Turkish and Iranian consulates, also in Erbil/Hawler, the team explained that suspending attacks on villages for the entire year would be a courageous and compassionate response by powerful governments to the challenges they recognize in the continuing struggle to secure their national sovereignty.

PRAYERS FOR PEACEMAKERS, May 9, 2012

Give thanks for the CPT Holy Week delegation to Southern Bolivar, Colombia. Pray for delegation members as they work in solidarity with communities ravaged by internal conflict with their lands coveted by armed groups for their wealth of natural resources.

At 8:30 on the morning of 2 May 2012, the team received a call from a friend in the Beqa’a valley to inform the Christian Peacemaker Team in Hebron the Israeli military was destroying his cousin’s reservoir. Two CPTers went to the valley. Upon arriving, they saw two army vehicles, two intelligence service vehicles, and a power shovel digging up the ground on the hill below the friend’s house and filling dump trucks with this material. The friend told them to follow the truck.