PEGGY GISH does not strike me as your typical peace activist. I had been half-expecting to find her speaking loudly through a microphone to hundreds of people. Instead, I discover her sitting at the back of an empty church in a small, intimate circle with a dozen or so good-looking, well-dressed students, who are hanging on her every word.
Dressed in a flowing skirt covered by a warm winter coat, her long grey hair tied in a loose ponytail, Gish, 62, is a softly-spoken organic farmer from Southern Ohio on an unlikely mission. Over the past two years, she has spent thirteen months on the ground in Iraq hearing the harrowing stories of Iraqi men and women who claim they have been wrongfully imprisoned, tortured and beaten by the occupying forces.
Gish is the author of Iraq: A Journey of Hope and Peace and the Iraq team co-ordinator for Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), a broad-based ecumenical programme aimed at enlisting “the response of the whole Church in conscientious objection to war, and the development of nonviolent institutions, skills and training for intervention in conflict situations”.
Since 1993 CPT has been recruiting individuals for its Christian Peacemaker Corps. Trained in “peacemaking skills” and “nonviolent direct action”; the teams can be sent to areas of conflict around the world, their aim being to “bring the redemptive love of God to violent situations”. Full-time corps members agree to serve for a three-year term. They are supported by a larger reserve corps of people committed to working for up to eight weeks a year for CPT.
Gish and I are meeting at Sacred Trinity Church in Salford, Greater Manchester, where she is winding up a talk organised by Speak, a network of young adults and students who campaign and pray for peaceful solutions to conflict. The interview has barely begun when her mobile phone rings from the front pocket of her skirt. She takes the call and then informs me that we have just over half an hour to talk before she is whisked off by taxi to another interview at the BBC.
She offers no apology for cutting our meeting short. Neither does she switch off the mobile which rings incessantly throughout the interview. When she hears it she answers, but more often than not she is too engrossed in her story to realise it is ringing.
Gish is a member of the New Covenant Fellowship, a communal church affiliated to the Church of the Brethren, historically a pacifist church. She has been involved with CPT in the West Bank and Iraq since 1995.
Her faith is at the heart of her work. “I’ve been taught that to be a Christian is to be a peacemaker. We don’t fight terrorism with great force and military might. We try to bring justice, love our enemy, and pray for those who persecute us. That’s what Jesus was about.”
She went to Iraq for the first time in October 2002. At the beginning, she only intended to stay in the country for six weeks. Instead, she ended up spending six months there. “I couldn’t leave,” she explains. “I felt such a strong call to be there. It’s love that empowers us to do things that are risky.”
She probably would have stayed longer but she and other peace activists were deported by the Iraqi Government in April 2003. When she was allowed to return two months later, Iraqi families had already started to approach some of her colleagues with tales of torture and abuse against detainees in US military facilities.
After carefully collating the claims of abuse, CPT posted them on websites in the United States and Canada and urged people to lobby government officials. The findings, says Gish, were being widely circulated long before the release of the Abu Ghraib prison torture photos in May 2004.
In December 2003, Gish and her team compiled a report based on the testimonies of 72 men. She explains: “There were so many men with similar information and stories. We felt strongly that what they were saying was plausible and couldn’t be made up.”
Neither Gish or her colleagues have witnessed the alleged abuse first hand or been inside the military prisons. Apart from the International Red Cross, which was granted limited access, no other non-governmental organisation has been allowed in.
Outside prison, however, Gish insists that the situation is equally desperate. Violent house raids are routinely carried out in the dead of night, she says, often against unarmed civilians. Theft, destruction of personal property, wrongful arrests and the withholding of information about detainees to their families are all commonplace.
In a situation like this, CPT organisers are realistic about what their particular intervention can and cannot achieve. But the group’s mission statement insists: “There is a continuity to our witness reaching back to the age of the Old Testament prophets . . . Christians can be free of worldly confinements and eager to witness for truth in difficult times and dangerous places. The original CPT vision called for 100,000 peacemakers. By moving ahead one step at a time we believe that is possible.”
In Iraq, one step at a time, Gish and the CPT team produce regular reports on the situation, including profiles of individual detainees and of the families who are often left traumatised and in ignorance of their fate. She explains: “When I first began to share these stories, people didn’t want to believe them. When the stories of abuse at Abu Ghraib eventually came out people had to acknowledge what was happening. When I returned to Iraq this summer, we were still hearing stories of extreme violence.”
In the US, meanwhile, CPT has organised an “Adopt a Detainee” campaign, aimed at matching individual detainees to church congregations, synagogues, peace groups and mosques. Supporters are encouraged to distribute leaflets near US military bases from which troops are likely to be sent to Iraq. They also lobby senior figures in the military and politicians both in Washington and Iraq.
“Our governments are starting to go in the right direction,” Gish says, “but we’re asking them to go further. We’re asking our governments to see Iraqi prisoners are treated with respect and the due process of law is applied even for the guilty.”
At the same time, the Baghdad CPT team has launched Advent to Easter action: a call to prayer. On Tuesdays from now until Easter, the group will gather at 9am Eastern Standard Time (1400 GMT) for an hour of focused prayer. Supporters, around the world, are invited to join them.
Christian Peacemaker Teams at www.cpt.org
