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Picturing Horror How
De Body? By Bill Weinberg Belgium-based Dutch photojournalist Teun Voeten was already a veteran of the bloodbaths in Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Nicaragua when he arrived in the West African nation of Sierra Leone in February 1998. A particularly brutal guerilla army, the Revolutionary United Front, had been terrorizing Sierra Leone since 1991, and Voeten was there to photograph demobilized child soldiers who had been abducted and forced to fight for the rebels. At first, he is almost cynical about the whole ghastly affair, as if jaded to the point of complacency—the cliché of the hard-bitten war journalist. But shortly after his arrival, a ceasefire ended as the country was invaded by a multinational intervention force led by Nigeria. Revolutionary United Front and government troops alike went on a rampage of looting and senseless killing, plundering what they could before Nigerian forces seized the country. As a European journalist, Voeten was an obvious target. He was forced to flee into the bush before he finally escaped across the border to Guinea weeks later. Voeten quickly loses his swagger after a few brushes with death. He was humbled by the selflessness of locals who put their lives on the line to help him survive, hiding him from the rebels, feeding and housing him. Voeten certainly wouldn’t have made it without the bravery and savvy of his colleague, local BBC correspondent Eddie Smith. When Voeten was safely back home in Brussels, Smith was killed in a rebel ambush. Reckoning with the experience sent Voeten back to Sierra Leone a year later—partly to deliver funds to a friend’s school project. It also drove him to dissect and understand the conflict and how it has frayed Sierra Leone’s social fabric. “How de body?” is the common greeting in Krio, Sierra Leone’s pidgin English—which takes on a hideous irony in light of the rebels’ habit of ritual amputation of their victims. “Jamba” (marijuana) didn’t seem to mellow out these killers, who were—and are—also hootched up on amphetamines, heroin and worse stuff—the better to brainwash press-ganged pre-adolescents. As numerous war victims bitterly complained to Voeten, the Sierra Leone violence was even worse than that of Bosnia and Kosovo—yet the world paid little attention. Yet for all his vivid depictions of on-the-ground brutality, Voeten doesn’t overlook the international context for a near-forgotten war in a paradoxically impoverished but resource-rich part of Africa. His investigations also took him back to Belgium, where he interviewed sleazy Antwerp diamond merchants who fund the rebels and launder their “conflict diamonds.” He documents how the British, meanwhile, snuck around an official embargo to sell arms to the government forces, who were hardly less brutal than the rebels. As in so many countries in Africa and the global South, Sierra Leone’s people are caught between hostile forces backed by foreign powers for their own ends. How de Body?, illustrated with Voeten’s own photos, is a testament to the heroism of ordinary people around the world who struggle to keep alive a sense of simple humanity in wars that grind on outside the global media spotlight—portrayed only as decontextualized atrocity pornography, if at all. Voeten’s journeys through Sierra Leone’s nightmares shed light where too many other journalists have only seen hearts of darkness. New York-based journalist Bill Weinberg is the author of Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico (Verso, 2000) and the editor of the online “World War 3 Report,” ww3report.com. A Little Bit of Peace “Reaching
Behind Prison Bars”
At this moment of “crusades” and great judgments, a refreshing video is making the rounds that documents a little-known but vital campaign, the work of the Philadelphia-based Prison Visitation and Support. “Reaching Behind Prison Bars” is an excellent introduction to an approach to prison solidarity work that is often overlooked in the growing prisoner rights movement. The organization’s basic goal, to train interested individuals in becoming consistent and caring visitors to often isolated prisoners held in federal and military prisons, is distinct in its apparently apolitical nature. But the distinction is more apparent than real; by humanizing a population that is more and more looked upon as outcast and irrelevant, PVS provides a bridge between prison and communities outside—a bridge that is becoming more difficult to maintain in times of massive secret detentions. Founded in 1968 by Methodist minister Bob Horton and Quaker activist Fay Honey Knopf, PVS has developed an unprecedented relationship of cooperation with the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. Though parts of the video that demonstrate this relationship may ruffle an activist’s feathers, like the description by a chief Bureau of Prisons chaplain of how PVS serves to “restore the dignity and faith” of many prisoners, the film, on the whole, provides an inspiring and important example of how a simple act can have powerful implications. Sundiata Acoli, a former Black Panther Party leader and current political prisoner, summarizes the PVS ethic this way: “They do not come to judge, and they do not come to encourage. … They come simply to listen and to be a friend.” Active listening in a manner that empowers both parties is easier in theory than it is in practice, and “Reaching Behind Prison Bars” details the ways in which PVS prepares its visitors. The effect is significant, as described by visitor Nan Broeder: “It does something for me to see people light up, and I find that I feel uplifted by the whole experience myself.” “Reaching Behind Prison Bars” is among a growing number of excellent recently released prison-related videos. The California-based Critical Resistance, which has held three massive conferences in three years, documents its own style in two films combined on the 52-minute video “Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex.” Freedom Archives in San Francisco, an extraordinary clearinghouse for progressive audio and video history, has begun to produce films focusing on the more than one hundred U.S.-held political prisoners, with three must-see features, the 28-minute “David Gilbert: A Lifetime of Struggle” and two 20-minute works, “Jalil Muntaqim: Voice of Liberation” and “Nuh Washington.” In the context of these efforts, PVS adds an essential and refreshing contribution. “We are on no great crusade,” says one of the visitors in “Reaching Behind Prison Bars.” “Through their visits,” one prisoner responds, “they bring us a little bit of peace.” At a time of nonstop war, that gift is a special one indeed. To order or for more information:
—Matt Meyer Matt Meyer is a former National Chair of the War Resisters League, and currently serves as co-chair of the university-based Peace and Justice Studies Association. Peacemaker Comic 411 “411 is about peacemakers: people who make sacrifices in the name of humanity. These are people willing to die to keep all of us—on all sides—alive,” writes Bill Jemas, President and COO of Marvel Enterprises, in his preface to a new comic book series. Marvel has chosen to publish what they call the “411 anthology” to tell true and fictional stories of people choosing to fight aggression with information and nonviolent resistance. The first comic book of the series includes three stories, one each from Israel, Ireland and Afghanistan. This impressive beginning is introduced by Arun Gandhi, co-founder of the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence and grandson of Mohandas Gandhi. Marvel sought out contributors from different countries and diverse backgrounds to present what Jemas describes as a “tribute to peacemakers, to people who turn the other cheek in the face of violence—people who refuse to lose sight of the fact that their enemies are part of their own community.” Get to your local comic book store and pick up at least one copy! —Ruth Benn Longtime WRL activist Ruth Benn is a former editor of this magazine and former Director of the WRL National Office. She is active with Brooklyn/Manhattan WRL. |
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