Sister Anne Montgomery examines the damage done to Yarmouk college, Iraq (photo: CPT)

New York Times
By Ian Urbina

In a place where everything seems broken, she has been a fixer. At a time when most other American civilians were leaving the country, she was just arriving.

Sister Anne Montgomery, a 78-year-old nun, avoided the United States-patrolled Green Zone when she moved to Baghdad, opting instead to live in Karada, a mixed Shiite-Sunni neighborhood across the Tigris River from the American Embassy.

“You can’t possibly do the type of work we sought to do with Iraqi civilians unless you live with them,” she said in a recent interview from her home in East Harlem. She rotated into and out of Iraq regularly, from soon after the war started until April, when she returned home to take a break and get treatment for skin cancer.

As a member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, an ecumenical antiwar group based in Chicago and Toronto, Sister Montgomery was among the handful of American civilians still based in Baghdad last year and early this year.

She worked with Iraqi civilians seeking answers to basic and often desperate questions: When will my son be released from detention? Where is he being held? Can we visit him?

They are questions that have become more difficult to answer, Sister Montgomery said, as the violence has grown. The group’s goal has been to serve as a neutral intermediary between the United States military and the families of the detained, she said, while not taking a position on the guilt or innocence of the detainees.

“We walk a very fine line,” she said. “And to this day we still have good relations with all sides.”

When a teenage girl, who suffered burns in an explosion, needed medical treatment that was not available in Iraq, Sister Montgomery spent several days ushering her around to get the needed paperwork done so she could leave the country.

When an elderly man sought help finding property that he said had been taken by United States soldiers from his house during a raid, Sister Montgomery, who uses a translator, spent a day calling around to figure out who had conducted the raid. Later she escorted the man to the right office to file a claim.

But most of her time has been spent aiding families of the detained.

Iraqis often do not know where to turn for answers or how to fill out paperwork, she said. Others are afraid to navigate the process alone. Often the search for information becomes a race against the clock, especially when sick people are held without their medication.

Sister Montgomery is no stranger to conflict. As a veteran antinuclear activist, she has been arrested more times than she can remember. But it was the nearly two decades that she worked with high school dropouts in Albany and New York City that best equipped her to handle some of the rage that she has encountered in Iraq, she said.

“The kids had a lot of pent up feelings,” she said. “But it taught me a sense of timing which has been useful in dealing with angry people because it helps me know how long to wait before responding to this kind of emotion.”

The child of a military family, Sister Montgomery was born in San Diego and spent her childhood changing cities and schools every couple of years. She remembers her father, a Navy officer, growing increasingly disenchanted during his deployment in World War II.

For high school, she went to a boarding school in Pennsylvania run by nuns of the Religious of the Sacred Heart, where she was drawn to the order for its balance of contemplation and direct involvement in society, she said.

After college, she trained as a nun and became increasingly involved with tutoring children in urban areas. Her involvement with the antinuclear movement through the 1980’s introduced her to other antiwar groups, and eventually she joined the Christian Peacemaker Teams, which sent her on several trips to the West Bank. There, she said, she worked with Palestinian families whose homes had been destroyed by Israeli soldiers.

“That confronted me with a lot of tense situations,” she said. “But things in Iraq have gotten as bad as anything I’ve seen before.”

While most major international aid organizations have pulled out of Iraq over the last year because of the kidnappings and bombings, the Christian Peacemaker Teams have maintained a steady presence in the country.

But the group has taken increased precautions, Sister Montgomery said. Members no longer give their Baghdad addresses to strangers, and rather than take cabs directly to their apartments, they are dropped off nearby and walk home.

“People in the neighborhood look out for us,” she said. “But you still have to be careful.”

The worst part is the confusion, Sister Montgomery said.

For Iraqis trying to locate detainees, the transition from the American coalition authority to Iraqi control has been a mixed blessing, she said. There are now more offices throughout Baghdad where people can go to inquire about the status of detainees, but there is even less uniformity in the way they handle the inquiries, she said.

This frustration seems to be shared on all sides.

When American soldiers confided in her that one of the toughest parts of serving was not knowing how long they would be deployed or where they would be dispatched next, Sister Montgomery said, she took the complaint on their behalf to their commanding officers.

“I think there are a lot of people working in the dark over there,” she said. “It’s not a pretty situation.”

© New York Times