seeing the invisibles

here is a gorgeous example of the tactic I've blogged about recently - of how famous people can use their voice to open space for the voices of those less likely to be heard. In this case the gorgeous Gael Garcia Bernal talks to 'invisibles' - watch it to see who they are. It's a short film in four beautiful and hearwrenching parts, this is just the first, the others are here. It's well worth watching until the end just to see the train.

protection manual

Protection International has a new online Protection Manual for Human Rights Defenders (3rd Edition)

Research and text by Enrique Eguren Fernández and Marie Caraj, 2009, 213 pages

chapters include (for live links to these and more PDF's go their site)

CH 1.5 - PREVENTING AND REACTING TO AGGRESSION - download: PDF

* Assessing the likelihood of different kinds of aggression taking place..
* Preventing possible direct aggression against defenders..
* Carrying out counter - surveillance..

CH 1.8 - IMPROVING SECURITY AT WORK AND HOME - download: PDF

* Assessing security at work or at home.
* Planning, improving and checking security in offices and homes.

CH 1.9 - SECURITY FOR WOMEN HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDERS - download: PDF

* Looking at security from the perspective of women human rights defenders.
* Providing both women and men human rights defenders with additional security/protection knowledge and tools.

CH 2.2 - MAKING SURE SECURITY RULES AND PROCEDURES ARE FOLLOWED” - download: PDF

* To think about what makes members and organisations unable or unwilling to follow security plans and procedures, and find appropriate solutions.

CH 3.2 - DETENTION, ARREST, ABDUCTION AND KIDNAPPING OF A DEFENDER” - download: PDF

CH 3.4 - SECURITY AND FREE TIME - download: PDF

they have lots of other great publications here

EAPPI: Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine and Israel

EAPPI has a one of the best "who we are" pages of any accompaniment group, here, with this photo (love the candles) and short bios of each of their current 36th group serving, made up of 26 accompaniers from eleven countries (Australia, Germany, Finland, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, UK and the US). One of the Swiss accompaniers is originally from Colombia. His bio reads:

Jorge

Originally from Colombia, Jorge has been living in Switzerland for the last 5 years. He has a BA in Psychology, a MA in Psychosocial Research and is about to finish his PhD in Neuroscience. He has researched stress, emotions and the psychobiological mechanisms related coping with chronic stress. Now he is interested on going from the lab to the field and as a EA he wishes to focus his efforts on the area of mental health in the conflict. As a Colombian, he is constantly mistaken for an Arab or Israeli, so decided to come and look for his roots!

Several of the EAPPI accompaniers have blogs, listed here with their bios. One recent intriguing entry is titled, Give young people a space - not a place - but sadly the rest of the entry is in Swedish!

"In the Company of Fear"

I *finally* got my hands on this documentary about accompaniment in Colombia made in 1999 by Velcrow Ripper (yes, yes, get past the odd name), with funding from the fabulous National Film Board of Canada. I'm afraid there is no trailer online to embed here, so I hope you will take my word for it - it's worth watching! Even eleven years later it is still timely, true, and well done. It includes some truly amazing footage. I wish it were more easily available! I've encouraged Velcrow to put it online and you can too. He's easy to find on facebook!

la zona campesina

another short video by PBI, this time about the zona campesina, a 'small farmer reserve zone'

charity stinks

Here's another one of those fabulous animated big thinker videos - this time its Zizek going on about the dangers of charity, "and so on and so on". What he frustratingly fails to do then is talk about how solidarity is different. Still, fun to watch.

Our own settler reality

I appreciated this post sent by Christian Peacemaker Teams so much I'm reposting it in its entirety. (For the record, cpt does do accompaniment in aboriginal territory in Canada (see picture). For more on their work see cpt.org)

27 September 2010
AT-TUWANI/ABORIGINAL JUSTICE REFLECTION: Seeking the peace of Palestine by engaging our own settler reality.

by Steve Heinrichs

A life-changing thought came to mind this past week while I was serving in the village of at-Tuwani. I was out with Palestinian shepherds, watching the Jewish settlers of Ma'on construct another large chicken barn on stolen Palestinian land. As I watched, all of a sudden, the armed Jewish settlers and their bulldozers vanished from sight, only to be replaced by other white settlers—persons of European origin, carrying Bibles, guns, and Christian civilization. Then the Palestinian shepherds next to me, a couple of young Muslim teenagers, also disappeared, and in their place stood two men of First Nations origin. And before I knew it, the desert land beneath my feet began to tremble, and thousands of huge Douglas Firs erupted from the hillsides, while a raging river full of salmon and steelhead burst forth from the rocky valley below.

There was no mistaking it. I was in my “home and native land,” my country of Canada, my province of British Columbia. And as I looked around, I perceived the disturbing truth of the dream.

Historian Norman Finkelstein thinks what happened to the indigenous of Turtle Island (North America) is the best analogy one can draw on to understand current events in Palestine—the ethnic cleansing, the theft of lands, the racist policies. But I'm pressing beyond illuminating parallels. Could it be that the oppressions of these two peoples are connected in some deeper way? And could it be that we North Americans who seek justice in Palestine cannot actually do this work with efficacy, let alone integrity, unless we are seeking the same justice for the host peoples in our countries?

We see (or read about) the Israeli colonialists grabbing more and more land, and getting rid of more and more natives. We see and we cry out; we rage and resist. But where is the similar protest on behalf of the peoples who have suffered the largest holocaust the world has ever known? Conservative estimates assert that there were at least 10 million Native persons living on Turtle Island when Columbus came. By 1900, only 250,000 were left.

Where is our rage? And where is our repentance as inheritors and benefactors of the North American settler movement? If we condemn today's Israeli settlers for stealing Canaan from the Palestinians, what will we do about the Promised Land our settler forefathers wrested from indigenous people, land that we've inherited, land that we live on (and land, of course, symbolizing all our stolen wealth, power, privilege, culture, etc.) Is that simply all in the past?

We North Americans who are seeking justice and peace for the people of Palestine need some new priorities: to get to know the “Palestinians” back home, to hear their stories, and seek justice in solidarity with them. If we did, greater integrity would certainly come our way, but also something much more important. For in a cosmos in which Creator has made everything interrelated, the fight for justice in both places (abroad and at home) might mean that both peoples will experience some kind of just peace sooner.

The distinguished Palestinian poet Mahmoud believed and proclaimed that Palestinian and Native suffering were profoundly connected. In his poem, “The Speech of the Red Indian,” he tells settlers of all stripes—be they Jewish or North American like us —the posture that we need to adopt in order to heal our one human body. It is not a comfortable posture for us settlers. But it is the right and necessary one, and so deserves the last word:

There are dead who light up the night


of butterflies,

and the dead who come at dawn


to drink your tea


as peaceful as on the day your


guns mowed them down.

O you who are guests in this place,


leave a few chairs empty

for your hosts to read out


the conditions for peace


in a treaty with the dead.

Empire and Solidarity conference

I wish I were going to the third annual Empire and Solidarity in the Americas Conference in New Orleans this coming weekend. If you live nearby, go for me! The theme this year is Legacies of Central American Solidarity. The good news is that many of the papers are online here. Check it out!

accompanying the accompaniers

Just as I was complaining about the underuse of online video by accompaniers, PBI Colombia has taken off and gone gangbusters with a whole series of them. This one shows them accompanying the accompaniers - which happens quite often. In this case PBI is accompanying Colombian human rights workers as they travel out to accompany the Wiwa indigenous community.

(In other news, I'm having a great time at the Latin American Studies conference where yesterday I went to a session on solidarity at which Aviva Chomsky yet again wowed me. I hope to post both her paper and the others here soon)

speaking of the space provided by accompaniment

This is my favorite of the recent short videos by PBI Colombia, because this one so clearly opens a space for the voice of one of the people that they accompany. What is odd is that he seems to say that he also has armed bodyguards - which is against PBI policy I thought. So maybe PBI just accompanies the organization that he works with (CREDHOS) as a whole, not him. It's not quite clear here. What IS clear here is that when he says PBI gives CREDHOS more space, he means not just political space but very literally that with PBI along they can go further out into more dangerous countryside to do their work.

bringing attention to unheard voices

The theme of famous people bringing attention to otherwise ignored people and places continues - this video is by Greenpeace of a trip the actress Marion Cotillard did to an area of the Congo being devastated by logging. Rather than fetishizing the people of the jungle like the Cameron piece, in this one they're real people that can talk and tell their story - more so in the latter episodes than in this first one. Great explanation at the end of the traceability principle. These videos would be a great tool to foster discussion in class about commodity chains.

a message from Pandora

I continue to be in awe of the organizers of Amazon Watch's good work of getting James Cameron, the director of Avatar, down to the Amazon to meet with real live people facing environmental destruction of their lands in real live "Pandora". This little video above is him telling of his trip, and I'm sure it will get the story of the destruction of the Amazon out to far more people than would otherwise have heard of it. Not so surprisingly, it suffers from the same white man saviour syndrome that the original movie did. sigh.

using privilege to pee

If you wanted to use a nice clean bathroom and knew you could walk into a fancy restaraunt and use theirs without being hassled because of your race/class/passport privilege - would you do it?

Would you do it if you were with a friend who would NOT be let in?

Or would you try to walk in with her?

If you were the one who would normally be hassled, would you walk in with your friend?

These simpler questions might be a good way to start a conversation about how, when, and why accompaniment uses privilege. One way to make these exercises more interactive and kinesthetic is to do a sociogram with them. Rather than have people stand along a line of just a yes/no response, you can ask them to position themselves around the room in ways (sitting, standing, facing away, close to the facilitator in the center or far) that reflect the various aspects of their position.

does accompaniment do jiu-jitsu?

The book People Power: Unarmed Resistance and Global Solidarity (London: Pluto Press, 2009) has several articles on accompaniment, including "Making Accompaniment Effective", by Brian Martin, which is also available online, here.

This short article argues against understanding accompaniment as working through the 'jiu-jitsu effect' and for instead using a 'backfire framework'.

Protecting space for peace

That's the name of this new short video by PBI about the zona campesina, check it out. I'm thrilled that accompaniers are finally doing more online video!

circle of solidarity, circle of life

Mulatos Peace Village, June 2010 from Fellowship of Reconciliation on Vimeo.

This short video is a "video letter" from the FOR accompaniers with the peace community of San José de Apartadó. It shows the new buildings at the hamlet (vereda) of Mulatos that is part of the peace community. Mulatos is where Luis Eduardo Guerra, a leader of the community, was murdered, along with his family and another family. I went to Mulatos with the community in March of 2008 on the third anniversary of that massacre. On that trip a few brave families were returning to live in Mulatos. When I was there the only buildings were the abandoned health post and a simple roof only chapel they had built to commemorate the massacre site. It was great to see in this video how much more they have built and how many more families have moved back!

The peace community is an important example of how to resist nonviolently, engage in collective civil disobedience in the middle of a war, and make space for peace and life. It is an honor to be part of their circle of solidarity.

accompaniers support community in pressuring the body shop

In this video by the Colombian Christian Peacemaker Team they open space for the voices of a community they have been accompanying. The community has been displaced by a palm oil plantation that sells their palm oil to, of all places, the Body Shop.

solidarity is sexy

Vancouver status of women used this as the title for "a night of connection poetry and music to build VSW's volunteer base and raise support for Haiti"that they held last February.

I think solidarity IS sexy, but we don't often acknowledge that, or talk about it in those terms. It's certainly rare to recruit turnout with a slogan like that! I love that it was a feminist group that used it.

What does it mean that solidarity is sexy? There are the loaded relationships between Latin Americans (usually men) and North Americans (usually women) that come out of solidarity work. But I'm not just thinking about that, though certainly some more open talk about that would be useful for solidarity organizing.

It's not just the people that do solidarity work that are sexy, but something about the very idea itself. Making connections across difference to be more powerful in our organizing for a better world - it's hot!

Hearing the silences in the stories

It's important to remember that we can't hear it all or really 'know' another's experience when we listen to their personal stories. I've posted before about using fade outs. (Wim Wenders had women from the DRC telling their rape stories and their images fading in and out while they were telling them. It works to remind you that you can't fully see them.) The video above uses a strange black and white cut in that seems to serve as a similar reminder.

the Warsaw ghetto says free the Gaza ghetto

this "liberate all ghettos" graffiti in hebrew was painted on the walls of the old Warsaw jewish ghetto. great solidarity action!

Yonatan Shapira, former Israeli Air Force captain and now refusenik and BDS activist, said:

‘Most of my family came from Poland and many of my relatives were killed in the death camps during the Holocaust. When I walk in what was left from the Warsaw Ghetto I can’t stop thinking about the people of Gaza who are not only locked in an open air prison but are also being bombarded by fighter jets, attack helicopters and drones, flown by people whom I used to serve with before my refusal in 2003.

I am also thinking about the delegations of young Israelis that are coming to see the history of our people but also are subjected to militaristic and nationalistic brainwashing on a daily basis. Maybe if they see what we wrote here today they will remember that oppression is oppression, occupation is occupation, and crimes against humanity are crimes against humanity, whether they have been committed here in Warsaw or in Gaza’.

thanks to the people's geography site for this one.