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Religion and Public Diplomacy: Network and Sister Simone Campbell |
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Progressive religious leaders have a unique role to play as citizen diplomats.
At a time when many religious people around the world perceive our country as a locus of intolerance and aggression, progressive religious leaders can show another face of America.
Recently I had the opportunity to sit down with Sister Simone Campbell, Executive Director of the Catholic anti-war lobby group NETWORK. Sister Campbell is a person who embodies the concept of citizen diplomacy, in her case guided by a faith perspective. From her bio, we read about her years of progressive activism as an attorney, lobbyist, and citizen:
Prior to coming to NETWORK, Simone served as the Executive Director of JERICHO, the California interfaith public policy organization that work s like NETWORK to protect the intere st s of people who are poor. Simone also participated in a delegation of religiou s leader s to Iraq in December 2002, just prior to the war. Since returning, she has spoken and written extensively on her experience.
Before JERICHO, Simone served as the general director of her religious community, the Sisters of Social Service. She was the leader of her sisters in the United States, Mexico, Taiwan and the Philippines. In this capacity, she negotiated with government and religious leaders in each of these countries.
In 1978, Simone founded and served for 18 years as the lead attorney for the Community Law Center in Oakland, California. She served the family law and probate needs of the working poor of her county.
Since joining NETWORK, Sister Campbell has taken pride in a number of accomplishments. She cites the lobby’s involvement in the Living Wage, SCHIP, the Low Income Housing Trust Fund, and the inclusion of economic development funding for Iraq in the last supplemental bill as major milestones. NETWORK has also laid out a progressive plan for Iraq which Jason reviewed here. They have opposed the war since before the invasion in 2003.
In addition to these efforts, Sister Campbell has also actively chartered a course of citizen diplomacy toward Iraq, visiting the country and its neighbors several times in recent years. These trips, she said, have given her a personal connection with the region and its people. They have also helped her pierce through the Bush administration’s propaganda. For example, she told me that “Syria is nothing like our government wants us to believe: Syria is a multi-religious, secular society.”
Her most recent trip, where she lead a delegation of Catholic Sisters to Lebanon and Syria in January of this year, focused on learning about the situation of Iraqi refugees in these countries. She told me that the situation of refugees in each country is complex, and complicated by the competing demands of religious constituencies in each country. Moreover, the population influx is putting strain on these societies, contributing to social and economic tension. She calls for attention to these problems, and along with NETWORK supports increased efforts to resettle refugees in this country and increased funding for refugee services.
Faith, Sister Campbell said, shapes her work. Faith allows her to relate to people in Iraq or in our own government in a unique way, recognizing their humanity and speaking to them at the level of their values. As a progressive, Sister Campbell feels that faith helps her avoid a trap many progressives fall into: the arrogance of just wanting to be right. If progressives only focus on tactics and victories, they risk losing sight of what’s important, and what’s human, about our values.
“We have to keep letting our hearts be broken,” she says. “There is a juncture of heartbreak and policy that is required.”
A faith perspective, moreover, could prove helpful in healing our country once the war finally ends. She noted that not only refugees, but also veterans, will return home carrying a great deal of pain. “We have to be ‘in relationship’ with returning soldiers,” she says. “We have to hear their stories and be respectful.”
At home and abroad, we need more citizen diplomats. The terrible toll of the last seven years of war and corruption cannot be overcome simply by electing new leaders - our country needs a new sense of civic participation and outreach in order to forge new connections with the world and with each other. Progressive religious activists like Sister Campbell and the rest of the NETWORK staff are making an important contribution to that effort.
Srinagar, January 4, 1990. Aftab, a local Urdu newspaper, publishes a press release issued by Hizb-ul Mujahideen, set up by the Jamaat-e-Islami in 1989 to wage jihad for Jammu and Kashmir’s secession from India and accession to Pakistan, asking all Hindus to pack up and leave. Another local paper, Al Safa, repeats this expulsion order.
In the following days, there is near chaos in the Kashmir valley with Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah and his National Conference government abdicating all responsibilities of the State. Masked men run amok, waving Kalashnikovs, shooting to kill and shouting anti-India slogans.
Reports of killing of Hindus, invariably Kashmiri Pandits, begin to trickle in; there are explosions; inflammatory speeches are made from the pulpits of mosques, using public address systems meant for calling the faithful to prayers. A terrifying fear psychosis begins to take grip of Kashmiri Pandits.
Walls are plastered with posters and handbills, summarily ordering all Kashmiris to strictly follow the Islamic dress code, prohibiting the sale and consumption of alcoholic drinks and imposing a ban on video parlours and cinemas. The masked men with Kalashnikovs force people to re-set their watches and clocks to Pakistan Standard Time.
Shops, business establishments and homes of Kashmiri Pandits, the original inhabitants of the Kashmir valley with a recorded cultural and civilisational history dating back 5,000 years, are marked out. Notices are pasted on doors of Pandit houses, peremptorily asking the occupants to leave Kashmir within 24 hours or face death and worse. Some are more lucid: “Be one with us, run, or die!”
* * *
Srinagar, January 19, 1990. Jagmohan arrives to take charge as governor of Jammu and Kashmir. Farooq Abdullah, whose pathetic, whimpering, snivelling government has all but ceased to exist and has gone into hiding, resigns and goes into a sulk. Curfew is imposed as a first measure to restore some semblance of law and order. But it fails to have a deterrent effect.
Throughout the day, Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front and Hizbul Mujahideen terrorists use public address systems at mosques to exhort people to defy curfew and take to the streets. Masked men, firing from their Kalashnikovs, march up and down, terrorising cowering Pandits who, by then, have locked themselves in their homes.
As evening falls, the exhortations become louder and shriller. Three taped slogans are repeatedly played the whole night from mosques: ‘Kashmir mei agar rehna hai, Allah-O-Akbar kehna hai’ (If you want to stay in Kashmir, you have to say Allah-O-Akbar); ‘Yahan kya chalega, Nizam-e-Mustafa’ (What do we want here? Rule of Shariah); ‘Asi gachchi Pakistan, Batao roas te Batanev san’ (We want Pakistan along with Hindu women but without their men).
In the preceding months, 300 Hindu men and women, nearly all of them Kashmiri Pandits, had been slaughtered ever since the brutal murder of Pandit Tika Lal Taploo, noted lawyer and BJP national executive member, by the JKLF in Srinagar on September 14, 1989. Soon after that, Justice N K Ganju of the Srinagar high court was shot dead. Pandit Sarwanand Premi, 80-year-old poet, and his son were kidnapped, tortured, their eyes gouged out, and hanged to death. A Kashmiri Pandit nurse working at the Soura Medical College Hospital in Srinagar was gang-raped and then beaten to death. Another woman was abducted, raped and sliced into bits and pieces at a sawmill.
In villages and towns across the Kashmir valley, terrorist hit lists have been floating about. All the names are of Kashmiri Pandits. With no government worth its name, the administration having collapsed and disappeared, the police nowhere to be seen, despondency sets in. As the night of January 19, 1990, wears itself out, despondency gives way to desperation.
And tens of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits across the valley take a painful decision: to flee their homeland to save their lives from rabid jihadis. Thus takes place a 20th century Exodus.
* * *
Srinagar, January 19, 2005. There are no Kashmiri Pandits in Srinagar, or, for that matter, anywhere else in the Kashmir valley; they don’t live here anymore. You can find them in squalid refugee camps in Jammu and Delhi. As many as 300,000 Kashmiri Pandits have fled their home and hearth and been reduced to living the lives of refugees in their own country.
Two-thirds of them are camping in Jammu. The rest are in Delhi and in other Indian cities. Many of them, once prosperous and proud of their rich heritage, now live in grovelling poverty, dependent on government dole and charity. In these 15 years, an entire generation of exiled Kashmiri Pandits has grown up, without seeing the land from where their parents fled to escape the brutalities of Islamic terrorism, a land they dare not return to, although that land still remains a part of their country.
A large number of them are suffering from a variety of stress and depression related diseases. A group of doctors who surveyed the mental and physical health of the Kashmiri Pandits living in refugee camps, found high incidence of ‘economic distress, stress induced diabetes, partial lunacy, hypertension and mental retardation.’ Statistics reflect high death rate and low birth rate among the Kashmiri Pandit refugees.
And thereby hangs a tragic tale that has been all but wiped out from public memory.
An entire people have been uprooted from the land of their ancestors and left to fend for themselves as a weak-kneed Indian state shamelessly panders to Islamic terrorists and separatists who claim they are the final arbiters of Jammu and Kashmir’s destiny. A part of India’s cultural heritage has been destroyed; a chapter of India’s civilisational history has been erased.
Had this tragedy occurred elsewhere in Hindu majority India, and had the victims been Muslims, we would have described it as ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide.’ We would have made films with horror-inducing titles. We would have filed cases in the Supreme Court of India. Our media would have marshalled remarkable rage in reporting the smallest detail.
But, this tragedy has occurred in Muslim majority Kashmir valley, and the victims are all Hindus, that too Pandits. What has been lost is part of India’s Hindu culture, what has been erased is integral to India’s Hindu civilisation.
Therefore, the government makes bold to record that the Kashmiri Pandits have “migrated on their own” and their ‘displacement (is) self-imposed;’ the National Human Rights Commission, after a perfunctory inquiry, refuses to concede that what has happened is ‘genocide’ or ‘ethnic cleansing,’ though facts add up to no less than that, never mind that 300,000 lives have been destroyed.
And, our jhola-wallah brigade of secular activists rudely turn up their noses to the plight of Kashmiri Pandits: Hindu sorrow, inflicted by Islamic terror, stinks.
Today, on 31march the 18 Year of the forced flight of Kashmiri Pandits, look back at India’s wretched history of secular politics and consider the terrible price the nation has paid at the altar of appeasement because the Indian State has, and continues to, toe the line of least resistance.
If we want the world to be free of terror there is need to end the terrorism in kashmir first and the most victim of terrorism should get the land to live freely with their all human and fundamental rights .As we are human beings then why we are treated as animals .
We are asking one question to all the leaders /Politicians /social workers /U.N.O that WHAT IS ABOUT OUR FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS AND HUMAN RIGHTS.
Manish -