October 14-19

After three flights, hours of layovers, and the struggles of adjusting to changing time zones, our delegation arrived in Suleimaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan early on the morning of Sunday, October 17th.  Our delegation - consisting of four Americans and one Iranian Kurd - was planning to spend ten days assisting the full-time team members in their efforts to build a more peaceful future in Kurdistan. 

In our first couple days in the country, our schedule has been focused on learning about the Kurdish culture and about the history of the Kurds in light of their interactions with their neighbours, most notably the Iraqi Arabs, Turks, and Iranians.  Unfortunately, a lot of this history is violent. 

On Sunday we visited Amna Suraka, a prison where Saddam Hussein kept Kurdish dissidents and political prisoners.  We walked through the facility and listened to our guide tell us stories of merciless torture, overcrowded cells, and unsanitary conditions for men, women, and children.  We also sat down afterwards and listened to Hussein, another visitor that we met while on the tour, tell of his uncle's captivity in the prison and the armed fight to liberate the prisoners in 1991.  In addition, Mohammed, our translator, told us of his experiences as a child who was present in the vicinity of the prison's liberation and was close enough to hear the shooting throughout the day.

On Monday we travelled southeast to the village of Halabjah, where the Iraqi government used chemical weapons to murder more than 5,000 Kurdish civilians, almost two-thirds of which were women and children, in March of 1988.  We were treated to images and video of innocent civilians with burned and peeling asking and frozen looks of horror.  The only crime they had committed was being Kurdish.  We were told of how the bombing of Halabjah was just one of several hundred villages that were bombed in an orchestrated genocidal plan.

The things we saw and heard were disturbing, and they were designed to give us an understanding of some of the challenges that Kurds have faced in the recent past.  However, they also got our group talking about the very nature of evil itself.  Tiffany, one of our delegation members from Washington D.C., noted that violence of this nature was what happened when there is a lack of accountability amongst people, and the more I've pondered this idea, the more I've realized that each of us houses the necessary items to commit unspeakable acts of cruelty. Because of sin, each of us has been poisoned to consider violence as an acceptable means of resolving conflict; when we are allowed to explore that option without any kind of deterrent, it tends to grow and expand like a cancer until it has dominated our lives.

We tend to think of peacemaking as stopping one group of people from killing another, and while that is part of it, it is merely addressing one specific manifestation of the violence in the world.  The true essence of peacemaking involves forcing people to examine the attitudes and prejudices in their hearts and exchange them for love, forgiveness, mercy, and friendship.  It is a method that involves not just convincing an army to lay down their weapons, but a person to ignore the violent impulses in their nature.  By changing hearts, minds, and souls, we attack the very nature of the problem and not just a symptom.  I am learning about how CPT is doing this in the way that they have forged powerful and lasting connections to members of the Kurdish community.  In time, the hope is that enough people will undergo this transformation so that violence is taken off of the table as a viable option for future conflicts.

We got to see an example of this in Halabjah.  Both of the men that guided us through the exhibit were able to point at pictures on the wall and identify corpses of their family members that had been killed in the chemical attacks.  This came as an instant shock to me that a man could set aside the anger in his heart in order to face the bodies of his loved ones on a daily basis.  When asked why they continued to face their demons in this way, they replied that they wanted to teach the next generation about what had happened so that it would never happen again. 

My hope is that in my life, both in Iraq and back at home in America, I can embrace forgiveness and mercy in the manner of our new friends in Halabjah.  May I always choose to reject anger and violence, embrace forgiveness and non-violence, and teach others to do the same.

Matt Andrews

Modesto, California, USA

October 20, 2010

October 21-23, trip to Choman district, KRG

As our van rumbled over the gravel road winding steadily up the side of the mountain, we saw the sun setting against the backdrop of a solitary house and the moon reflecting its light across the opposing side of the sky. The road on which we travelled was safely situated between fields of landmines, with little skull-and-crossbone signs keeping us moving forward. Our driver parked the car outside a makeshift fence that surrounded the house, and a family of three with smiling faces met us with a warm Kurdish greeting.

We had arrived at the home of Mahmud and his family. Mahmud lost his right leg below the knee after a landmine explosion on his property many years ago. The family still lives here, perils and all. It is how they make a living. They still grow some crops in areas not overtaken by explosives. They raise turkeys and other animals (although sometimes the livestock wander into a nearby landmine field and don't make it back). They have to travel back and forth between this remote homestead and the city, because their son is still in school and they want him to finish his education. No school is located in any neighbouring village. Sometimes they travel back and forth and stay in one place for months at a time; sometimes they travel back just for a quick weekend to tend to the animals and make sure they haven't wandered away.

It's a difficult life, and the family struggles to make it work. Although they love it here in the mountains, they talk about the difficulty of making ends meet, of never knowing whether more bombs or military attacks will hit them, of no services being provided for families like theirs who exist on the hope of small annual agricultural crops. They tell us about the feeling that there will never be peace, not lasting peace. There will always be tension between their people, the Kurds, and neighbouring Arab, Turkish, and Iranian countries. They feel as though the violence will never stop. No one is coming to dismember the landmines, so most of the land in the region cannot be farmed. Little education is available. Farming subsidies that are commonplace in the West are unheard of here. Farmers cannot get help with crops or treatments for killing pesticides. The uncertainty of knowing whether bombing will drive them away from their home makes long-term horticultural planning difficult.

Our evening was filled with the exchange of stories and music, a mix of cultures gathered on rugs covering a concrete floor. We loved getting to meet Mahmud and his family. We loved learning about their joys and sorrows. And we were all struck with the complexity of the problems surrounding the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. There has been such a history of violence and there is so much distrust. It's hard to know where to begin in an effort to promote peace and reconciliation.

While the complexities can be overwhelming to us, Scripture is full of stories of God protecting his people, providing solutions to problems that seemed overwhelming. He often chose to provide this protection in really creative ways.

In the book of Judges, Gideon starts off with an army of 32,000 men to protect the people God has given him charge over, but God wattles that number down to 300. He explains that he will help those 300 men win the battle so that the nation "will not boast...that her own strength has saved her." (Judges 7)

Another story tells of God hearing his people crying out in fear against a pursuing army. God hears and takes action. When his people awake the next morning, they find that the opposing army is looking at the streams surrounding the hillside and becoming terrified because the water "appears to them as blood." They freak and run, and the Israelites are saved. They did not lift a hand, did not shed a drop of blood in the process.

The Old Testament also tells many stories about God "hardening" and "softening" hearts, as in the days of Pharaoh and King Nebuchadnezzar, when he caused leaders to reject the obvious to their own peril or show great compassion leading to miraculous freedom.

War reminds us of the depravity of human nature when it is left unchecked. It also reminds us how quickly we as humans forget that God is all-powerful and that the hearts of individuals, government leaders, and military commanders are ultimately subject to him. In working to undo the effects of violence or helping to facilitate the healing process, it is tempting to forget that reconciliation can only happen when God reaches down and touches lives. Any of our efforts apart from the work of God will be flawed and inadequate.

The Apostle Paul, no stranger to violence, spent his early years as a religious leader, killing off Christians. He did this in the full belief that he was doing the will of God - until God met him on the road to Damascus and informed him otherwise. Paul did a 180 and spent the rest of his life being persecuted as a follower of Christ. In his letter to the church in Ephesus, he exhorts that the church accept this persecution, and reminds his fellow believers, "Our struggle is not against flesh and blood...but against the spiritual forces of evil." In other words, "If it bleeds, it's not your enemy."

If we are going to "get in the way" of violence, we have to remember that our enemy is not one made of flesh and blood. We also have to remember that the only way to stop cyclical, systemic violence is through God reaching down and changing hearts. Over the last several days, as our team visited families and villages tucked away in the mountains along the Iranian border, we heard stories of how violence brought about by bombs, land mines, guns and forced displacement had forever changed the lives of the mountain people. They long for a day when they can walk outside their house to a plot of farmland instead of a fenced off field of land mines. They long for a day when they can leave a camp for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) and go home without fear that any house they build or produce they grow will be destroyed by another set of bombings. They long for a day when it is not their people (the Kurds) vs. other people - when it is simply their people being allowed to carve out a life for themselves without the ever-constant threat of violence.

The situation here is complicated. It involves a conglomerate of ethnicities, national boundaries, religions, languages, political parties, economic challenges, urban vs. rural discrepancies and distrust between everyone. But let us not think that the situation is beyond the hand of our Almighty God. Maybe he doesn't want us to be able to boast "that our own strength has saved us." Maybe He is waiting for us to open our hands, surrender all the pieces, and be willing to respond to his creative resolution with a faith that maintains the nonviolent consistency of Jesus.

Tiffany Aurora

Alexandria, Virginia, USA

October 25, 2010

October 21-23, trip to Choman district, another perspective

Our CPT delegation team traveled to Choman, Haji Omaran, and the villages to visit the places shelled by Iran. After Choman and Haji Omaran we visited the IDP (internally displaced persons) camp in Zharawa for villagers who fled the shelling by Iran. This is an area with huge mountains and some villages close to Iranian borders. These villages were bombed by Iran during the past 3 years and because of the bombing a huge group of people were displaced and some the villages destroyed almost completely when the people left the villages.

The CPT delegation  met some of these villagers and talked with displaced people.  We also  spoke with the people who had to remain because they had nowhere to go.  Most of them have been displaced since 2008. One group was placed in the IDP camp and the others traveled to one of the cities in KRG to live with their relatives.

In the Kani Spi village the delegation team met one of the remaining families. There are around 4 families that live there now and the others left the village. There were some 53 families before the bombing. Now there is no bombing and shelling but there is no guarantee that the shelling will stop completely and yet there is a military base  that was built during the past months. The people said there are around 300 Iranian soldiers. The people are victims of Iran's power politics  because they are farmers. They live on their farms  but Iran bombed the villages near the borders.  Iran says that the reason for bombing is the PKK party in that area. But when we asked the people, they said there was no PKK members at all. One of the Kani Spi’s resident is Mahmud. He said that Iran wants to control this area to do anything they want as well as send terrorists via this border.

Another problem in the Choman area and the villages near the border are the mine fields. There are some big mine fields that remain from the Iraq-Iran war and the mine fields are very  close to the roads between the villages. Mahmud is one of those disabled by mine fields. Now he has only his left leg and 3 of his relatives were killed by mines. He said that Saddam always said,”We are not in Kurdistan now but our silent soldiers (hidden soldiers) are yet in  Kurdistan". Saddam meant the mine fields.

Yes, there is no violence such as terrorist suicides or explosions in the cities of KRG, such as there are in Arabic cities (such as Baghdad). However, there are other kinds of violence such as bombings by Iran in Haji Omaran borders. There are some men, women and children who are displaced because of the shelling. The children have not been able to go to school for a period of time. People can’t farm, shepherd their flocks, etc. because there is no guarantee of safety.

Power politics throughout history have sacrificed victims around the world. I think all  peace maker teams should expose  the hidden violence in our world to all people and governments. Victims can’t do it themselves but they tell us the stories of their deep pain.

Also we went to Haji Omaran with a population of around 500-600 families right now, whilst it was around 70-75 families in 1980’s. This town, only 2 to 3 kilometers from the border and only 15 kilometers from the nearerst town in Iran, Piranshahr. Haji Omaran has  amazing natural beauty. In past summers, there were  lots of tourists from southern cities in Iraq, but in the past 3 years total number of tourists decreased because of the shelling.  In Haji Omaran there are just a few mine fields that remain from the Iraq-Iran war because Haji Omaran was very quickly controlled by Iran.

 The CPT delegation talked with the family of Pshtiwan there.  That family did not go to another place even during the shelling because they said they had nowhere else to go.  Pshtiwan shared his story wish us and it was filled with pain and sadness. During Saddam regime’s they were displaced for a long time and in the past few years because of the shelling by Iran they still have a sense of fear all the time.

 I can’t imagine that situation, no one can imagine it. All of us would learn from hearing the stories, feeling the depth of the  pain when the family is waiting. A bomb may come down and destroy the farm, house and maybe killing the family. There is nowhere else to go to live and farm.

I think that God gave us more possibilities  than those families and also more than some people around the world. But what we have is  not only for our relaxation but to help others who have a lot of unwanted problems made for them by some governments. Also there are a lot of children waiting for a smile, a lot of hands waiting for help, a lot of  mothers waiting for the day they find their children that were lost in the violence and a lot people waiting for peace.  


“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” --Mother Teresa


Ramyar Hassani
Sanandaj, Kurdistan, Iran

November 10, 2010

Final reflection, October 27

Can your ears reach our land
is your attention here anymore
Have you stepped out to relieve yourself
Do you hear our shed blood
Can you taste the tears of our mothers
Bring your good times
to our shanty
Love breath us into
symphony
Teach us to dance
through the pain
Your daughters are snapped like twigs
...where was I...
Your children are tended like cattle
...where was I...
Your sons invent new ways to die
...where I am...
I rail at the sky and step on your echo
I call for conveyor belts to drop from the heavens
and miss you in the face of an illiterate refugee boy
and in the friendship of a fisherman's son.

Leland Grammer
Nevada City, California, USA
October 27, 2010