Colombia

Christian Peacemaker Teams Colombia

cpt_colombia — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 15:45:02 -0600

Jan Passion

Jan Passion — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 13:53:09 -0600

Jan Passion M.A. Currently residing in California, Jan worked in
Sri Lanka for 3 years as the Deputy Director and Team Manager with the
Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP). Prior to
his work in Sri Lanka, Jan worked with NP conducting field research and
outreach in West Africa and Palestine/Israel and also helping develop NP’s
infrastructure. He has worked as a peacebuilding trainer with the Conflict
Transformation Across Cultures Program, (CONTACT), the Karuna Center for
Peacebuilding and with Lesley College in Israel. Jan has been peace activist and war tax resister for over twenty
years. For ten years he worked as a psychotherapist working with perpetrators
and victims of various forms of violence and trauma. Jan has worked as a
bus driver, mediator, self-defense instructor, massage therapist, refugee host,
and emergency medical technician. His
hobbies include sailing, racket ball, frisbee and yoga. Jan's peacebuilding experience includes work
in USA, Macedonia, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Palestine, Thailand, Israel, Sierra
Leone, India, Ecuador, the former USSR, Guinea, Ghana, South Africa and
Cyprus. He earned his BA at the
University of Massachusetts with a self-designed degree on gender and power and
he earned a MA in International and Intercultural Management from the School
for International Training and wrote his thesis on building nonviolent
intercultural peaceteams.

Oscar Acevedo

Oscar Fernando Acevedo — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 21:24:19 -0500

Women Making Peace: Mobilizing Ourselves Against the War

bharris — Fri, 25 May 2007 20:08:21 -0500

By Amanda Lucia Camilo Ibarra, Ruta Pacifica, Colombia
View full notebook in pdf format [SPANISH]. [*note]

Since 1996, the Ruta Pacifica, a feminist, pacifist, anti-military organization, has been organizing caravans of thousands of women from all over Colombia to the regions hardest-hit by conflict. Each caravan is a symbolic gesture against the war and a practical opportunity for women to come together to exchange ideas and demand an end to human rights violations. As a result of the ongoing civil war in Colombia, different areas of the country have become increasingly isolated from one another, as the roads and borders between them are frequently controlled or blocked by the various armed groups. By traveling these roads, the caravans of women break through not only the physical roadblocks, but the psychological barriers of despair and isolation that allow the war to continue.

Ruta Pacifica has achieved ten national mobilizations in the states of Antioquia, Chocó, Putumayo, Magdalena Medio, Bogotá, Cauca, and Bolívar with the participation of close to 20,000 women and a distance of more than 1,700 kilometers. One caravan, to the region of Putumayo, included 100 buses carrying 3000 women who, along with the residents of the area, marched in the streets of the main city and held a convocation about the effects of the war. In order to ensure the safety of the travelers, Ruta Pacifica carefully planned all stages of the mobilization. Before the group left, they developed a map of possible risks, and a contingency plan to deal with those risks.

This notebook shares how Ruta Pacifica implemented the mobilizations and involved the women in training sessions to learn about logistics, protection plans, and to clarify the political ideology they were marching to represent. Equally important in their plan of action was the evaluation and documentation of the marches. For the media and for its own assessment purposes, Ruta Pacifica compiled and archived physical, photographic and audiovisual evidence of each event. Among the results of this evaluation process were the development of an organic and systematic method of mobilization, a more cohesive ideology within the movement, and an improvement in regional and national communication. Ruta Pacifica found that after the caravans, its members had a better collective and individual understanding of what it means to be a pacifist and a feminist and created a more stable network of international connections.

View full notebook in pdf format [SPANISH].

*Note: You need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open the files marked with an asterisk (*). You can download a free version of this program from www.adobe.com.

Side by Side: Protecting and encouraging threatened activists with unarmed international accompaniment

bharris — Fri, 25 May 2007 20:08:14 -0500

Side by Side

by Liam Mahony
View full notebook in pdf format. [*note]

Since the mid-1980s, human rights groups and other activist organizations being targeted with repressive abuses have been calling on international NGOs to provide them with direct accompaniment by international field workers. These field workers – usually volunteers – spend twenty-four hours a day with threatened activists, at the premises of threatened organizations, in threatened communities or witnessing public events organized by threatened groups. The international presence serves as a deterrent against the use of violence. In order to ensure this deterrence, these international accompaniment organizations are part of transnational networks poised and ready to mobilize political pressure against perpetrators should their volunteers witness any attacks or should their clients be further threatened.

"I can say with certainty that the fact that we are alive today is mainly because of Peace Brigades’ work." – Luis Perez Casas, Lawyer’s Collective Jose Alvear Restrepo, Bogotá, Colombia

International protective accompaniment is the physical accompaniment by international personnel of activists, organizations or communities threatened with politically motivated attacks. Peace Brigades International has been developing this tactic since the mid-1980s, sending hundreds of volunteers into different conflict situations around the world. PBI currently sustains a presence of about 80 people working in several conflicts, responding to requests for accompaniment from all kinds of threatened civil society organizations.

Accompaniment can take many forms. Some threatened activists receive 24-hour-aday accompaniment. For others the presence is more sporadic. Sometimes team members spend all day on the premises of an office of a threatened organization.Sometimes they live in threatened rural villages in conflict zones. This accompaniment service has three simultaneous and mutually-reinforcing impacts. The international presence protects threatened activists by raising the stakes of any attacks against them. It encourages civil society activism by allowing threatened organizations more space and confidence to operate and by building links of solidarity with the international community. And it strengthens the international movement for peace and human rights by giving accompaniment volunteers a powerful first-hand experience that becomes a sustained source of inspiration to themselves and others upon their return to their home country. This tactical notebook will analyze how protective accompaniment works, based on the substantial experience of PBI in Colombia, Indonesia, Mexico, Guatemala, Haiti, Sri Lanka and El Salvador. Since the 1990s, numerous other organizations have also provided protective international accompaniment in other settings, modifying the approach according to their particular identity and mission. In the final section of the notebook I will also offer a brief comparative discussion of several of these experiences.

View full notebook in pdf format.

*Note: You need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open the files marked with an asterisk (*). You can download a free version of this program from www.adobe.com.