by Peggy Gish
Christian Peacemaker Teams

We planned to spend the evening and night with a renowned writer, Halla,* and her family and friends. Three CPT women would sleep with her on the roof of her Baghdad home and see her off early the next morning to her birth country, Syria, where she would reunite with her sister, daughter and their families.

It would be Halla’s first time to see her three grandchildren. Because she had married an Iraqi of Palestinian origin, she had not been able to travel outside Iraq for over twenty years. Her son, who had been imprisoned for eleven months in Iraq under US forces, had been released, and she was finally recovering from the cloud of grief and worry this caused her. Her family and friends were here to share in her joy and hope for new possibilities in her life.

By Peggy Gish
Christian Peacemaker Teams
February 26, 2005

Three CPTers and three delegates, along with an Iraqi driver, translator, and journalist approached the entrance of Camp Samawah, the Japanese military base in southern Iraq. We had the impression that the Japanese were avoiding many of the negative ways other international forces have had of operating and had better relationships with the Iraqi people around them. We made the four- hour trip to Samawah to talk to Japanese soldiers and learn about their experience and presence here.

At the first checkpoint, a guard told us that we couldn’t talk to any officials because we didn’t have an advance appointment. We persisted, “Are there any lower rank officers or any common soldier we could talk to?” We started chatting with the guards. One said they were mostly engineers and here to help with reconstruction. We noticed everyone carried guns.

Meanwhile the Iraqi journalist with us had found out that there was a public relations department, and asked if we could meet their staff. The guards finally relented, and soldiers took us to another gate.

By Peggy Gish
Christian Peacemaker Teams

“I guess if we want to be safer, we should move to Fallujah,” one of my teammates, here in Baghdad, said jokingly when he read a news article that said Fallujah is the safest city in Iraq. I picked up the article and read that 8,000 people from Fallujah, a city of 300,000, had voted in the election.

I found the article’s observation sobering. It reported that some refugees had returned to Fallujah and were trying to clean the rubble and prepare to rebuild. The premise was that it is safe now, because insurgents are gone. But the journalist also described other conditions: little water and electricity, heavy curfews and restrictions on moving around the city.

By Peggy Gish
Christian Peacemaker Teams

“Our organization, the Iraqi Human Rights Watch in Kerbala (IHRW) has been documenting human rights violations of the former regime. We were the first organization to find mass graves after the war,” said Jamal,* when he introduced himself and the IHRW to a representative of the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Army director of Civil Affairs at the base. Jamal and two other human rights workers from IHRW were meeting along with four CPTers at U.S. military base outside of Kerbala, on February 1, 2005. “We also have been documenting violations caused by the U.S. during and after the war, violations to personal properties, directly to people, and to their land and farms. We have been helping Iraqis to apply for compensation for these violations, and I am sorry to say, the response has been minimal, like a drop in the bucket.”

By Peggy Gish
Christian Peacemaker Teams

The agenda for our first CPT post-training meeting with the fledgling Muslim Peacemaking Team (MPT) in Kerbala, seemed pretty straightforward and functional. The group proceeded to establish a coordinating committee to move the group toward establishing their goals and bylaws and plan for facilitating another nonviolence training for students and staff at the Al Uhl Beit University in Kerbala. One long-range goal mentioned was to spread MPT throughout Iraq, and even beyond to other areas of the world.

Then, what we thought would be a quick discussion of a suggestion for their consideration, turned into an animated time of serious searching and sharing. Cliff Kindy shared about CPT in Hebron and Israeli groups helping to rebuild homes of Palestinians that had been demolished. He went on to say that the Iraq CPT team is exploring the possibility of helping a refugee family from Falluja rebuild their destroyed home and invited the MPT group to join them if that worked out.