CPT searches for hope at Amna Suraka

by Peggy Gish
published Feb. 2, ' 09

Peggy Gish is serving in the Kurdish north of Iraq with Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), a peace organization of the Mennonite and Brethren churches that deploys peacemakers to areas of conflict throughout the world. Muslim Peacemaker Teams (MPT), newly organized in Iraq, partners with CTP to promote nonviolence.

Bullet holes and broken walls show marks of the battles during
the 1991 uprising, when Kurds in Iraq took control of Amna Suraka, a Baath Regime prison in the northern Iraqi city of Suleimaniya. Weathered tanks from the Iraqi military line one wall of the courtyard. The buildings have not been restored; they’ve been allowed to remain as a museum, recording the cruelty of Saddam’s regime. Rooms of pictures depict the atrocities of the chemical attacks of Halubja, and the mass killings of Kurds in the Anfal genocidal campaign of the ’70s and ’80s. Our desire to understand the suffering of the Kurds, rubs up against our internal resistance to emotional overload.

We are taken to the “secret” prison where Kurdish prisoners were interrogated, tortured and killed. We peer into solidarity confinement cells, where prisoners wrote or scratched messages or poems into the walls. In other rooms, realistic looking statues depict torture.

During these past years in Iraq, I have witnessed a lot of pain. I work now to contain the expression of my grief to minimal tears. The tour ended in a special memorial room where 182,000 broken pieces of mirror on the walls represent the official number of people killed in the Anfal, and 5,000 tiny lights on the ceiling represent each Kurdish village destroyed in that campaign.

Before I left home this fall, my son advised me, “When you write, include stories of hope.” At times like this, however, when such cruelty seems overwhelming, it is hard to feel hope or to see God. Our government is right in being horrified by the atrocities of Saddam’s regime, but in turn, has also killed, tortured, and terrorized civilians here and around the world in the name of “democracy” or “the war on terror.” If it looks, it will see its own refection in the mirrors. Walking out into the bright sunshine, I look for hope in the fresh new grass, sprung up from winter rains, in roses still in bloom. I resist getting caught in a feeling of powerlessness. I affirm the power of life-giving realities that are more powerful than any evil remembered here. I reclaim the reign of God that is received in the gentleness and openness of a little child, but which also compels us to act to resist evil and make room for ways of living together that are healing and just.

The lights and pieces of mirror, and the voices they represent, demand that such atrocities never happen again. They speak the truth about the futility of the violence and cruelty used by institutions of power to hold on to their power and wealth.