Press Action ::: 'Sooner or Later It Will Snap'

Monday, December 05, 2005

'Sooner or Later It Will Snap'

Tom Fox is one of four members of the Christian Peacemaker Teams being held hostage by the previously unknown group calling itself the Swords of Righteousness Brigade. Fox, a 54-year-old Quaker from Clear Brook, Va. (a few miles north of Winchester, Va., near the West Virginia border), had been working with CPT in Baghdad, documenting cases of human rights abuses and promoting peace. Most recently, Fox (on right in photo above) had been working to develop Muslim Peacemaking Teams in Baghdad. Fox kept a blog, detailing his work in Iraq.

The kidnappers have accused the hostages of being spies and have threatened to kill them if Iraqi prisoners are not released from US-controlled and Iraqi jails by Dec. 8. Here is the text of Fox’s last email message to the Langley Hill Friends Meeting the day before he was kidnapped on Nov. 26:

Friends,

I hope everyone had a restful and enriching Thanksgiving. I don’t usually follow political developments here or elsewhere but the initial reports about the communiqué from the conference in Cairo sponsored by the Arab League are very hopeful. If the initial reports are correct the various religious and political factions in Iraq have called upon the U.S. for the establishment of a timetable for withdrawal of troops. This would seem to be a significant development in that both Sunni, Shi’a and Kurdish leaders have put aside their significant differences on other issues and united on a call for foreign troops to start immediately to leave their country.

I wish the news on the ground level were as hopeful but the amount of sectarian violence seems to escalate here in Iraq and Baghdad in particular daily. Not a day goes by without the assassination political or religious figure. All factions have been affected and there seems no end in sight. We are hosting a visiting delegation of folks from Canada, Great Britain and New Zealand for ten days and they have upcoming visits with the major Shi’a cleric in Baghdad as well as the Muslim Scholars Association, which is the major Sunni religious organization in the country. It will be instructive to see what is their assessment of the situation.

Yesterday, the delegates visited Hana Edwar who is the head of a human rights organization called Al-Amal. She is a rather amazing person with a very realistic but positive vision for Iraq. Her greatest concern was the current Iraqi constitution’s potential for putting more restrictions on women’s rights that is even now the case. She is concerned that if Sharia law (the interpretations of the Qu’ran that are the basis for religions law in Islam) trumps civil law in all cases then some of the rights currently in place for women in Iraq will disappear. Her current main project is running a conflict resolution program for high school students three days a week for three hours after school. Her organization has put this program in place in Baghdad, Basra, Kut and Erbil. We got to observe part of a session that was looking at racial bias when we met with her.

One exciting development is that a number of international NGOs are considering returning to Iraq. Two have asked if we could assist them in reintroducing them to the current situation and the team is very supportive of the idea of helping in any way we can. Of course there is still a great deal of danger in internationals living and working in Iraq but I think these groups realize that it is worth the risk to reestablish a presence here.

On a day-to-day level things here in Baghdad are rather dismal. We passed a gas line of at least three miles yesterday. Here in a country with 22% of the world’s known oil reserves people wait up to six hours to fill up their cars, cars they can drive on alternate days depending on the last digit of their license plate. We are currently getting about four hours a day of power from the city electric grid. Employment is getting somewhat better in that private construction projects have picked up. Of course the security situation is as dismal as ever. I went to the Iraqi Airways office today to pick up tickets for the delegation’s return trip to Amman. The office is in the Palestine Hotel, which was the site of a double car bombing two weeks ago. It was the first time I had been in the building since the attack. What really struck me was that in the front part of the lobby there is a small exchange shop where we have changed money in the past. Each time I have been there an older gentleman has been running the shop. He always was very kind and helpful. This little shop was totally destroyed from the force of the blast. I couldn’t help but wonder if he was working there when the attack took place.

The people here are perhaps the most resilient folks I’ve ever met. But just as with a rubber band if you keep stretching it and stretching it sooner or later it will snap. I just pray that they can hold on for a bit longer until the U.S. troops leave and the other foreign fighters leave with them. Iraqis will still have to work on resolving their internal conflicts but I don’t think that is possible until Mr. Bush’s troops and Mr. Bin Laden’s troops find some other place to kill each other.

peace,

Tom