Creating a Zone of Peace
West Papua, the westernmost province of the large island of New Guinea, has its share of troubles. Part of the Dutch East Indies colony for over a century, it was claimed by Indonesia in 1949 after the Dutch gave up sovereign claims to the island. The Indonesian occupation that succeeded the Dutch one lasted some twenty years, finally ending when a UN-sponsored referendum allowed Papuans to decide whether to stick with Indonesia or to form a separate state. Although they chose to remain with Indonesia, a breakaway movement that favored independence rejected the decision. Since that time, West Papuans have endured years of civil warfare between the guerrilla separatists and the Indonesian armed forces.
To make matters worse, ethnic Indonesians, most of whom are brown-skinned and Muslim, tend to treat dark-skinned Papuans, who are predominantly Christian, as second-class citizens. This racial and economic discrimination continues to fuel the guerrillas’ resistance to the government. It also prompts abuse of Papuans by the Indonesian military’s anti-terrorist strike force, which arbitrarily targets churches, schools, and private Papuan homes. Displaced villagers whose homes and livelihoods have been destroyed are forced to flee into the jungles.
Rev. Benny Giay, an indigenous Papuan, has spent years trying to make West Papua a “zone of peace” by working for trust and reconciliation between his people and the native Indonesians. An evangelical minister who earned a doctorate in anthropology from a Dutch university, Giay rejects the violence practiced by the separatists while at the same time refusing to condone Indonesian persecution. But he believes that nonviolent resistance is a more effective response to the oppression than civil war, whose primary victims are innocent men, women, and children. So his efforts have been focused on educating West Papuans to take on leadership roles in their communities and writing and speaking about Muslim persecution of Papuan Christians to let the world know what’s going on.
One of Giay’s most successful campaigns at nonviolent empowerment was the founding of West Papua’s first seminary in 1986. Prior to that time, Christian ministerial candidates were forced to travel far from West Papua to be educated at foreign institutions. Giay’s seminary focuses on offering seminarians educational opportunities that emphasize the principles and methods of liberation theology. He believes that the homegrown training they receive best prepares them for future public leadership in a land that, for all practical purposes, is under military occupation, and whose best chance of liberation is through active nonviolence inspired by gospel principles.
Giay has suffered for his peace work. Many of his books have been banned by the Indonesian government, he has sometimes been arrested, and he regularly receives death threats. But he continues his labors for the “New Papua” he envisions: a land where light-skinned Muslims and dark-skinned Papuans live together without rancor or persecution.
13 January
Thomas Hurndall
27 November 1981—13 January 2004
Defying the Stars for Peace
Jocelyn Hurndall wrote about the death of her son Tom this way: “I am often asked, what is it like to lose a child? It’s like this. Between the instant of receiving the news and the next instant in which you have to comprehend it, you somehow realize that every cell in your body is about to be shaken furiously, and you freeze to delay the moment of impact. Your entire existence becomes concertinaed into the space between the blow and the pain, and nothing will ever, or can ever be the same again.”
Tom’s is a tragically old story: a son who learns the value of the struggle for peace and justice from his mother and then loses his life in the effort; the mother who continues the tradition of peacemaking in memory of her son.
London-born Tom Hurndall was a twenty-one-year-old university student photographing activists acting as human shields to protect ordinary Iraqis in Baghdad when he heard about the death of Rachel Corrie. Rachel was a twenty-three-year-old peace activist crushed under an Israeli bulldozer as she tried to protect a Palestinian family’s home.
In April 2003, Tom travelled to Gaza to investigate Corrie’s story, joining the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) at a refugee camp in the Gaza strip. When shots began hitting the buildings, Tom left his safe position behind a roadblock to lift a small boy out of danger. He was returning for two small girls when an Israeli sniper in a tower shot him in the head. His transport to hospital, which should have taken seven minutes, took thirty minutes because of delays at Israeli checkpoints. Nine months later, never coming out of a coma, Tom was dead.
Jocelyn Hurndall began the frustrating task of making sense of her son’s death within the conflicting context of the refusal of Israeli and British authorities to assume accountability (and their subsequent cover-up) and Yassar Arafat’s praise of Tom as a martyr.
In the end, a Bedouin sergeant, Taysir Walid Heib, an Arab who couldn’t read or write Hebrew, was convicted of Tom’s murder and given an eight-year sentence—the longest for a Israeli soldier since the Second Intifada. Jocelyn wrote that “Tom was a victim of a victim.” She believed the policymakers of the war deserved the heaviest recriminations.
Jocelyn wrote a book in memory of Tom, the title of which echoes the words he had tattooed on his wrist: Defy the Stars.
14 January
Martin Niemöller
14 January, 1892—6 March 1984
A Life Changed for Peace
Martin Niemöller’s early career was theologically distant from the Christian pacifism he later advocated. Born in Lippstadt, Germany, the second son of a Lutheran Pastor, Niemöller grew up in a traditional and perhaps anti-Semitic home. Devotion to his country led him to a career in the Kaiser’s navy during World War I. He quickly rose through the ranks, becoming captain of a U-boat and receiving the Iron Cross for his success in sinking allied ships.
A religious turning point came in 1918 as he navigated through the Straits of Otranto. Niemöller wondered, “Will peace come to us—or shall we, like the Flying Dutchman, spend year after year without rest or respite?” He felt “instinctively conscious of a further mission of some kind awaiting me. Why, otherwise, should God Himself have directed our helm now?”
After the war, Niemöller resigned his commission and, as he later wrote in his memoir From U-Boat to Pulpit, began the transition from German nationalist to Lutheran pastor. Initially supportive of Hitler’s ideals, Niemöller soon saw the dangerous way the Führer conflated German nationalism with “German” Christianity to further Nazi propaganda. In an attempt to stem the Nazi tyranny over the churches and to “obey God and not men,” Niemöller and other dissenting theologians such as Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer formed the Confessing Church.
For his activism, Niemöller spent eight years in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps as Hitler’s “personal prisoner.” His wife, Else, whom he married in 1919, was left to raise their children alone and was allowed only infrequent visits.
At the end of the war, critics called Niemöller to task for his early anti-Semitic stance, a charge that a repentant Niemöller did not deny. In 1959, he wrote that his years in prison were another religious turning point in his life. He initiated the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt, which confessed that the German Protestant churches had not done enough to stem Nazi crimes.
Near the end of his life, Niemöller became a proponent of nuclear disarmament and an ardent pacifist. He visited communist leader Ho Chi Minh during the Vietnam War, remarking, “One thing is clear: the president of North Vietnam is not a fanatic. He is a very strong and determined man, but capable of listening, rare in a person of his position.” Niemöller became president of the World Council of Churches in 1961 and earned the Lenin Peace Prize in 1966.
Looking back on his career on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday, Niemöller said he began as “an ultra-conservative who wanted the Kaiser to come back; and now I am a revolutionary. If I live to be one hundred, I shall maybe be an anarchist.”
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