“Arise and Witness,” a collection of Sr. Anne Montgomery’s poems and essays, along with reflections about her life, issues a call to rise and protect life. It reminds me of the work of Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese poet and peace activist whose witness on behalf of a nonaligned Buddhist movement helped build worldwide support for ending the Vietnam War. In one of his poems, he summons the grasses and plants to rise.
Rise grasses and plants
The long night is over
Protect the seeds of life bursting on the cradle’s rim.
We both kept his work in mind when I lived with Anne in an unusual tent encampment, close to the Iraq-Saudi border, prior to and during the 1991 U.S. Operation Desert Storm waged against Iraq. Along with 73 other campers from various parts of the world, we were part of the Gulf Peace Team. Our intent was to intersperse ourselves between the warring parties. But as it turned out, the war opened with aerial attacks. On a shivery January night, we heard U.S. warplanes roaring overhead. Bundled under our blankets and sleeping bags, we sat on the ground, wondering what would be left of Baghdad and other areas if each of the bombers flying overhead dropped explosives on cities below.
It seemed that every dog in the region had begun barking. Perhaps they had never heard planes flying overhead. I think the dogs may have barked till they were hoarse, or possibly worse.
The image of those dogs, and the work of Thich Nhat Hanh, may have been on Anne’s mind when she wrote, in a poem called “Psalter: The Second Watch,” about when
in the moon’s darkness,
we first woke to the sound of bombers.
Each evening they return, the mighty nations,
and prowl the darkness;
they snarl like dogs across the sky;
they howl for their prey:
the city,
its children
their mothers.
A year later, in an essay about the Gulf War, Anne observed how the war had been perpetuated in the economic sanctions. In several visits to Iraq following the 1991 Gulf War, Anne was sadly realizing that the economic war was far more devastating, far more lethal, than even the worst of the bombing. UN reports estimated that a half million children may have died as a direct result of the economic sanctions.
Writing about one of her return trips to Iraq, she referred to the 1991 Operation Desert Storm as “the crucial violent event of our time, deliberately setting a future pattern.” The pattern involved systematically destroying electrical facilities, sewage and sanitation plants, roads, bridges, infrastructure, health care, education, and livelihood.
Iraqi authorities evacuated our team to Baghdad 10 days after the 1991 war had begun. Another evacuation was happening as Iraqi forces, many of them young conscripts — hungry, disheveled and unarmed — poured out of Kuwait along a major highway, later called “the Highway of Death.” Iraqis attempting to surrender were stuck in a long line of Iraqi military vehicles. They were systematically slaughtered.
“It was like shooting fish in a barrel,” said one U.S. pilot of the air attack. Another called it “a turkey shoot.”
Anne Montgomery was a staunch walker. The combination of her relentless curiosity and her physical ability to walk for miles in urban areas helped her map out cities. She found an ideal place for Western activists to stay, in Amman, Jordan. For years, we based ourselves at the Al Monzer Hotel where a fountain of relationships developed, all of them crucial for the 70 delegations that eventually defied economic sanctions against Iraq, delivering medicines and supplies to Iraqi hospitals and communities.
Anne’s 1992 essay concludes by urging us to risk repentance. “We must walk from end to end our imperial city,” she wrote, “ourselves clothed in the sackcloth of self-knowledge.”
Yes, we should repent for viewing Iraq as a “target rich environment” and then believing we somehow had a right to the oil in Iraq’s land. We should deeply regret that many of us lived so well because we were consuming Iraq’s precious and irreplaceable resources at cut-rate prices.
We should be sorry for slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Iraq’s children through economic sanctions and then expecting them to thank us for liberating them. We should regret having wrongfully accused Iraq of harboring weapons of mass destruction while we looked the other way as Israel acquired thermonuclear weapons.
We ought to feel deep sorrow for traumatizing Iraq’s children through the 2003 “Shock and Awe” bombing, filling their broken-down hospitals with maimed and bereaved survivors of the vicious bombing and then causing enormous wreckage through our inept and criminal occupation of their land.
Anne Montgomery’s call, repeated in every page of “Arise and Witness,” beckons us to seek ways to make reparations for the crimes we have committed. As more companies and countries become dependent on the profits of war, it becomes more difficult to shift funding towards other urgent priorities. Devastating problems remain unsolved. “Arise and Witness” helps issue an urgent call to action for repentance, reparations, and nonviolent resistance on the part of people living in a permanent warfare state.