Mike Ferner, author and executive director of Veterans for Peace, spoke Thursday at Pray-Harrold about participating in last year’s peace delegations to Afghanistan by Chicago-based Voice for Creative Non-Violence.
Images and videos flooded a screen in the auditorium of room 204 of Eastern Michigan University’s lecture hall before the talk began. Young Afghans expressed their wish for peace in their country before the camera.
More visuals aided Ferner’s presentation, including a map not only displaying the region geographically, but also outlining proposed pipelines in Afghanistan. Pipelines are a way of transporting fuels such as oil and natural gas. Pipelines, Ferner said, are also a reason the U.S. invaded Afghanistan.
Another image showed Kathy Kelly – peace activist, author, three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee and co-coordinator of Voices of Creative Non-Violence – at a meal in Afghanistan with a group of young women.
“Kathy talks about this meeting that they had over dinner, and she asks them if they had ever heard of Sept. 11 or if they had ever heard of large airliners flying into buildings in New York,” Ferner said. “And none of these women had heard a thing about either of those two things. And I don’t know how representative that is of the whole population, but something tells me that a lot of people in Afghanistan had no reason why we started bombing.”
David Swanson, a writer mentioned in Ferner’s talk, wrote an article for globalresearch.ca titled “Afghanistan: A Country, Not a War.” Ferner made a point using that notion.
“We have to remember [Afghanistan] is more than a war,” he said.
An image of a father and son in a refugee camp around Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, filled the screen as Ferner described his experience interviewing residents of the camps.
“It’s an amazingly tough life,” Ferner said. “And they’ve come in from surrounding provinces after the fighting had swept through and they were looking for someplace safer to go to a refugee camp. Nobody knows for sure, but the guesstimate is about 70,000 refugees [at a camp].”
Ferner also took the time to acknowledge the ongoing Occupy Wall Street movement, a protest of social and economic inequality, sweeping the U.S.
“Anything that any of us can do to support what’s going on in these encampments around the country, I would encourage you to do,” he said. “It’s most important and exciting thing that I have seen. In the life of activism, this is the best thing I’ve seen. People have asked me if I think it’s going to succeed. Well, in my opinion it’s already succeeded by virtue of the fact it happened.”
A question-and-answer session followed the presentation with many participants holding many different perspectives.
“At some point we’re going to leave; this empire isn’t going to last that much longer,” said Ferner, when asked what he thought would happen if the U.S. pulled out immediately. “And if the peace movement can do an effective job, we may be out of Iraq and Afghanistan sooner rather than later. And at some point we’re going to be gone and at some point people are going to have to figure out how to run their own lives the way they managed to do for thousands of years before we came.”
The event closed with two videos, including clips of the youth of Afghan promoting peace.
“I thought the presentation was powerful, including the videos showing the Afghans,” EMU student Ryan Roper said. “They really seemed like they really wanted to put past differences and kind of go forward with peaceful, basically transform into a more peaceful environment. Because, I mean, 30 years of war is a long time.”
Sponsors for the event included the Michigan Peaceworks, EMU’s Muslim Student Association, EMU’s Amnesty International, Center for Multicultural Affairs, the University of Michigan’s Muslim Student Association, the local chapter of Veterans for
Peace, Interfaith Council for Peace and Justice and United Nations Association the Huron Valley Chapter.
