Photo from Informative bulletin Quarterly of Peace of Peace Brigades International, Columbia, Feb. 2007.

“True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.” — Arthur Ashe

One of the rewards of sticking with activism for a few decades is that time gives you an interesting vantage point. You can see how things that started really small — dream-sized tiny — can grow big and have awesome impact over time.

Let me tell you about one big sober hero of mine.

We're in the mid 1980's in Montréal. Barbara MacQuarrie had been working as co-ordinator of a peace group and as a volunteer cook in an anarchist café. She was dissatisfied. You could see she was just burning to do more. She talked about the need to act on the links between increased militarization, economic exploitation, and human rights abuse around the world.

"I don't have a right to more than anybody else", she would say. "And I believe that if somebody else is under violent repression and extreme poverty, I should be able to accept those conditions too. I have to act in ways that are consistent with that, because if I try to ignore what's happening, I feel a lot of conflict within myself."

That's when she started thinking about joining a project based on a totally new concept at the time: going to protect activists in Central America by being there, as an international presence, in situations of intense repression. When my friend Barbara left in 1985, the whole accompaniment thing was barely starting. A small-scale intrepid outfit on a shoestring. She joined Peace Brigades International, to protect families of the disappeared in Guatemala.

"I had to face the possibility of dying and I couldn't figure out how to deal with that", she said, "except to go and just see what it was like." She would later say that she found it easier to be in Guatemala than to ponder the question in Montreal. She drew her inspiration, courage and resilience from people who didn't even have time to think about whether they might die or be murdered: the activists, the huge unsung heroes she escorted. Heroism is transmissible.

Fast forward twenty odd years.

The initial one-country project of Peace Brigades International in the mid-eighties has now spawned a handful of global organizations using accompaniment in conflict situations around the world. At least as important, a number of key practioners and organizers in the tactic of accompaniment have now developed a comprehensive set of strategic assessment tools and training curricula that can help the method spread even more, and amplify its life-saving effectiveness.

Now do I have some good news for you!

Some of the world's best practioners and theoreticians of accompaniment as a tactic will be joining us here on New Tactics all of this week (Jan. 23 to 29, 2008).

But before you go, start with Side by Side: Protecting and encouraging threatened activists with unarmed international accompaniment, one of the best tactical notebooks I've read, personally. If anything, it will give you ample food for thoughts on the strategic dynamics between social empowerment and repression.

It was written by Liam Mahony, another of my personal heroes — and he can be yours too, I'm not jealous.

Liam will be with us all week. He'll be joined by you (of course!) and David Grant and other members of Nonviolent Peaceforce, plus — you won't believe this — the whole Christian Peacemaker Team active on the ground, right now, in Columbia. News from the frontlines, right here on New Tactics.

So join the conversation. Ask questions.

I have a few of my own, like:

• How is accompaniment different in the various countries where projects are now underway?
• How has the practice changed over the years? How are diversity, gender, religious beliefs and sexual politics changing the make-up of accompaniment teams? How does this impact the tactic?
• How would you compare the depth of commitment from nonviolent accompaniment workers to that of regular soldiers?
• What has the death of Thomas William Fox in Iraq in 2006 meant for you?
• Could unarmed intervention replace armed intervention, if so how?
• Where do you see the future of accompaniment?

— Philippe Duhamel, interTactica.org

(with special thanks to Carl Cuneo, Peace Magazine)

Again, start here, and we'll see you there.