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Michele Naar-Obed: 'We have a lot to offer
the world'
13.3.2008
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March 13, 2008
Sulaimaniyah, Kurdistan region 'Iraq', --
Michele Naar-Obed, 51, of Duluth, has been to Iraq
five times in the past five years, working for
peace. She is currently in Kurdistan, working with a
group called Christian Peacemaker Teams, recording
the stories of victims and teaching nonviolence.
These are her words:
One of the things we’ve been working on is
accumulating the stories of the * Anfal under Saddam
and the chemical gassing of Halabja. These are
pieces of information that many people in the U.S.
know nothing about. We were kept pretty dumb as a
nation as Saddam was doing this to his people, and
we were kept dumb for political reasons.
The Kurdish people here felt that the world had
turned its back on them as they were being
obliterated. Now what they’ve seen is Turkey being
able to come in with the permission of the United
States,www.ekurd.net
and what they’d been
asking the United States for was to bring Turkey to
the diplomatic table so that this could be worked
out without bloodshed. |
Peace activist Michele Naar-Obed. Photo.Star Tribune |
Things are beginning to
destabilize here, and it’s getting quite scary for
all the people here because this has been the one
relatively stable and secure area of the entire
country. So to see this go down the drain is not
good news at all.
Being away from our country and being in another
part of the world where the U.S. has such strong
influence makes me see things in a different light.
We have a lot to offer the world, and there are
people who kind of rely on us to help them develop.
Unfortunately, what people here are seeing primarily
is the offer of military [force]. And we’re better
than that. And I wish we could show that better part
of who we are to the rest of the world.
Many of the people I meet and work with have known
nothing but violence and war from the time they were
born. But I get encouraged when I see that there’s a
common basic quest for living peacefully, decently,
humanely. What is it in people? Where does that
light come from?
People who have come this way from central and
southern Iraq have said that in terms of violence,
there has been a reduction. But they did it by
walling off entire neighborhoods so that people are
physically separated. There’s this sense that once
this U.S. power is taken out,www.ekurd.net
those walls will
eventually come down, and what’s really needed is
some kind of political and diplomatic and
humanitarian reconciliation process in order for the
whole thing to not fall apart.
There’s always the possibility that violence can be
reduced by choice, involving that little piece that
is in every human being — I am convinced of it, that
it exists in every human being — that wants to live
with higher ideals.
Naar-Obed’s comments were edited from a longer
interview by staff writer Larry Oakes.
*
Anfal was an anti-Kurdish campaign led by the former
regime between 1986 and 1989 and involved a series
of military campaigns against the Kurdish Peshmerga
fighters as well as the mostly Kurdish civilian
population of southern Kurdistan 'northern Iraq'.
The campaign, in which chemical weapons were used,
The Anfal operation crackdown that killed nearly
200,000 Kurdish civilians and guerrillas.
Copyright, respective author or news agency,
startribune com
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