On August 9, 1983, three people dressed as U.S. soldiers saluted their way onto a U.S. military base and climbed a pine tree. The base contained a school training elite Salvadoran and other foreign troops to serve dictatorships back home, with a record of nightmarish brutality following graduation. That night, once the base’s lights went out, the students of this school heard, coming down from on high, the voice of Archbishop Oscar Romero.
「我想特別向士兵、國民警衛隊和警察發出呼籲:你們每個人都是我們中的一員。 你殺死的農民是你自己的兄弟姊妹。 當你聽到有人告訴你要殺人時,請記住上帝的話:“不可殺人。” 任何士兵都沒有義務遵守違背上帝律法的法律。 以上帝的名義,以我們受折磨的人民的名義,我懇求你們,我懇求你們; 以上帝的名義,我命令你們停止鎮壓。”
樹上拿著擴音器的三個人不是士兵──其中兩個是牧師。 他們播放的錄音是羅梅羅大主教最後一次講道,是在他被暗殺前一天發表的,就在三年前,由準軍事士兵發表,其中兩人曾在這所學校接受過訓練。
Fr. Larry Rosebaugh, (who was killed in Guatemala on May 18, 2009), Linda Ventimiglia, and Fr. Roy Bourgeois, (a former missioner expelled from Bolivia who was later excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church because of his stance on women’s ordination) were sentenced to 15 -18 months in prison for the stirring drama they created on the base that night. Romero’s words were heard loud and clear, and even after military police arrived at the base of the tree and stopped the broadcast, Roy Bourgeois, who would later found a movement to close the school, continued shouting Romero’s appeal as loudly as he could until he was shoved to the ground, stripped, and arrested.
In approaching the nightmare of renewed, expanded U.S. war in Iraq, I think of Archbishop Romero’s words and example. Romero aligned himself, steadily, with the most impoverished people in El Salvador, learning about their plight by listening to them every weekend in the program he hosted on Salvadoran radio. With ringing clarity, he spoke out on their behalf, and he jeopardized his life challenging the elites, the military and the paramilitaries in El Salvador.
I believe we should be trying very hard to hear the grievances of people in Iraq and the region, including those who have joined the Islamic State, as regards U.S. policies and wars that have radically affected their lives and well-being over the past three decades. It could be that many of the Iraqis who are fighting with Islamic State forces lived through Saddam Hussein’s oppression when he received fierce and unconditional support from the U.S. during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Many may be survivors of the U.S. Desert Storm bombing in 1991, which destroyed every electrical facility across Iraq. When the U.S. insisted on imposing crushing and murderous economic sanctions on Iraq for the next 13 years, these sanctions directly contributed to the deaths of one half million children under age five. The children who died should have been teenagers now, –are some of the Islamic State fighters the brothers or cousins of the children who were punished to death by economic sanctions? Presumably many of these fighters lived through the U.S.-led 2003 Shock and Awe invasion and bombing of Iraq and the chaos the U.S. chose to create afterwards, using a war-shattered country as some sort of free market experiment; they’ve endured the repressive corruption of the regime the U.S. helped install in Saddam’s place.
聯合國應該接管對伊斯蘭國的應對工作,人們應該繼續向美國及其盟國施壓,要求不僅將應對工作交給聯合國,而且交給其最民主的組成機構聯合國大會。
But facing the bloody mess that has developed in Iraq and Syria, I think Archbishop Romero’s exhortation to the Salvadoran soldiers pertains directly to U.S. people.
Suppose these words were slightly rewritten: I want to make a special appeal to people of the United States. Each of you is one of us. The peoples you kill are your own brothers and sisters. When you hear a person telling you to kill, remember God’s words, ‘thou shalt not kill.’ No soldier is obliged to obey a law contrary to the law of God. In the name of God, in the name of our tormented people, I beseech you, I implore you …I command you to stop the repression.”
The war on the Islamic State will distract us from what the U.S. has done and is doing to further create despair, in Iraq, and to enlist new recruits for the Islamic State. The Islamic State is the echo of the last war the U.S. waged in Iraq, the so-called “Shock and Awe” bombing and invasion. The emergency is not the Islamic State but war.
We in the U.S. must give up our notions of exceptionalism, recognize the economic and societal misery our country caused in Iraq, recognize that we are a perpetually war-crazed nation, seek to make reparations, and find dramatic, clear ways to insist that Romero’s words be heard: Stop the killing.
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A very moving appeal which reminds me to try and do more.