CPTers had the opportunity to interview Ana Teresa Lozada, a long-time member of the Popular Women’s Organization (OFP) and a leader in the Women’s Social Movement Against War and For Peace (MSM).  Lozada discussed the impact of the armed conflict on women, particularly in the Magdalena Medio region of Colombia.  Following are excerpts.

by Pierre Shantz

Which of these two pictures is more frightening?  Logic would say it’s the masked man with a machine gun.  He is a member of a Colombian right wing paramilitary death squad.  However, unless you travel to Colombia and actively speak out against his activities and pressure governments to arrest and convict him for the terrible crimes he has committed, he will probably never be a threat to you.

by Julie Myers

Fourteen July 2010 marks one year since the displacement of the Las Pavas community from their land.  One year since riot police showed up and forced 123 families out of their homes.  One year since 60 hectares of their food crops were uprooted, 14 of their houses demolished, their trees cut down, and everything burned.  One year since they began sleeping under plastic tarps.

by Stewart Vriesinga

…For the millions in a prison,

That wealth has set apart –
For the Christ who has not risen,
From the caverns of the heart –
For the innermost decision
That we cannot but obey
For what’s left of our religion
I lift my voice and pray:
May the lights in The Land of Plenty
Shine on the truth some day.
- Leonard Cohen

CPTers Scott Nicholson and I, along with our Colombian partner organization CAHUCOPANA*, spent Holy Week hosting a national delegation that came to learn about the reality of oppressed rural communities in the northeastern part of the department of Antioquia.  It was a profound and moving experience for all of us. 

Despite physical and economic threats, IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons) from nine area villages are still working hard on their idea of building one new village together in a safe place, so the displaced families can break the cycle of conflict and start normal village life again.

The month of April saw a sharp increase in human rights abuses by the Turkish government against the Kurds, including the sentencing of the Makhmoor camp’s peace delegation from last October. 

In March, CPT-Iraq interviewed eleven Peshmerga (Kurdish armed forces, literally “those who face death”) and Iraqi Border Patrol officers whom members of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) have harassed because of their support of the Goran (Change) Party.  Since that interview, many more stories of persecution have surfaced, cracking the façade of a completely fair election.

by Sam Jerome, delegation member

The Barzani: a clan, a people from Barzan;
Barzani: their leader, inciting rebellion against Saddam;
Saddam: the intolerant, hatred untamed;
He storms in and transports 10,000 of the clan
to the south,
to Baghdad.

In the early morning on 31 May 2010, Israeli forces intercepted a flotilla of 6 ships bound for the Gaza Strip, carrying nearly 700 people and a cargo of medical supplies, pre-fabricated homes, building supplies, and educational materials.

Marilyn Paarlberg participated in a delegation, jointly sponsored by CPT and the Reformed Church of America, to Palestine in April, 2010.

“We need windows to the outside world – windows to let our story out, to let in the light.  We need you to be our windows.  Will you be a window?  Will you?  And you, and you?”

1:30AM

by Johann Funk, CPT Reservist

Jesh! Jesh!
searchlight sweeping
headlights framing
Nicoletta’s outstretched arms
STOP!  STOP!

by Paulette Schroeder

"That’s insane!" I often insist as Palestinian friends tell me about one more restriction in their daily lives.  Here are just ten of these many insanities:

Kairos-Palestine (www.kairospalestine.ps/), a Palestinian Christian organization with whom CPT-Palestine partners, calls on Christians around the world to contact Israeli authorities regarding a new military order that could separate families.

by Sarah MacDonald
My teammate, Laura, and I spent the morning with a very dear family from Tuba, helping them harvest.  A couple weeks earlier, we had also visited this family; I learned how to use a sickle that day – and discovered that harvesting grain by hand is back-wrenching work.  This time we were gathering the sheaves, stacking and tying them into enormous bundles for the donkey to carry home.  This, too, is hard work, hot and dusty, the stalks of grain scratchy and sharp as sticks.  Yet it was one of the most joyful experiences I’ve had in the South Hebron hills.

CPT Aboriginal Justice Delegations to Treaty #3 Territory (Northwestern Ontario) are scheduled for 13-23 August 2010 and 24 September-6 October 2010.

by Carol Rose

For years CPT has informally used the motto “Getting in the Way” because of the playful double meaning which, as far as I know, only really works in English.

“The Way” is the most ancient word for the early church – that community making the powerful choice to follow Jesus.

CPT seeks to get in “the Way” of Jesus.  We follow “the Way” of Jesus who opened a way to love enemies that actively undermines their violent oppression.

by Tracy Hughes

CPTer Tracy Hughes works for BorderLinks, a Tucson-based bi-national non-profit organization that hosts experiential education delegations to communities along the Arizona USA/Sonora Mexico border.  For information on CPT’s past Borderlands work, see www.cpt.org/work/borderlands.

 My colleagues and I went to Phoenix to join hundreds of concerned citizens protesting SB1070, the unjust and racist immigration legislation signed into law by Governor Jan Brewer.  I held a sign which read “I WILL NOT COMPLY” to state clearly that I will not turn in my neighbor or anyone else I encounter who might be undocumented.

by Myrla Baldonado & CPTer Kryss Chupp
Myrla Baldonado, a CPT supporter from the Philippines, works to get the USA to clean up toxic waste at its former military bases there.  She currently lives in Chicago.

 Every Friday, from a small, unassuming brick building tucked away behind huge factories in a suburb west of Chicago, undocumented men and women – mostly men and mostly Latinos – are boarded onto buses and taken to O’Hare airport to be deported.

Every Friday, people of faith gather there, at the Broadview Detention Center, to pray – for those being deported, for the families they leave behind, for a change in the inhumane policies that criminalize migrants, and for those responsible for carrying out those policies. 

On 27 April, paramilitaries in Oaxaca, México attacked an aid convoy and killed Alberta "Bety" Cariño Trujillo, director of CACTUS (Community Support Center Working Together) and Jyri Jaakkola, a Finnish human rights observer.

Cariño was one of the community leaders whom CPT accompanied during its presence in Oaxaca in December 2006.  Bety is survived by her two children and her husband, Omar Esparza, also a CACTUS leader previously accompanied by CPT, who is now under death threat.

On Monday, June 14, twenty-four activists with Witness Against Torture were acquitted in Washington, D.C. Superior Court of charges of “unlawful entry with disorderly conduct.”  

Peacemaker Delegations

• Aboriginal Justice: 13-23 August; 24 September-6 October 
• Colombia: 14-27 July; 13-26 October
• Iraq (Kurdish North): 14-28 October
• Palestine/Israel: 20 July - 2 August;    5-18 October; 16-29 November

Listing of CPTers and delegation members and location of service.

Signs of the Times is produced up to four times a year.  Batches of 10 or more are available to institutions, congregations, and local groups for distribution.  Any part of Signs of the Times may be used without permission.  Please send CPT a copy of the reprint.  Your contributions finance CPT ministries including the distribution of 16,000 copies of Signs of the Times.