'We have a lot to offer the world'

Joey McLeister, Star Tribune

Michele Naar-Obed

Last update: March 13, 2008 - 4:43 PM

Michele Naar-Obed, 51, of Duluth, has been to Iraq five times in the past five years, working for peace. She is currently in Kurdistan, working with a group called Christian Peacemaker Teams, recording the stories of victims and teaching nonviolence. These are her words:

One of the things we’ve been working on is accumulating the stories of the Anfal under Saddam and the chemical gassing of Halabja. These are pieces of information that many people in the U.S. know nothing about. We were kept pretty dumb as a nation as Saddam was doing this to his people, and we were kept dumb for political reasons.

The Kurdish people here felt that the world had turned its back on them as they were being obliterated. Now what they’ve seen is Turkey being able to come in with the permission of the United States, and what they’d been asking the United States for was to bring Turkey to the diplomatic table so that this could be worked out without bloodshed.

Things are beginning to destabilize here, and it’s getting quite scary for all the people here because this has been the one relatively stable and secure area of the entire country. So to see this go down the drain is not good news at all.

Being away from our country and being in another part of the world where the U.S. has such strong influence makes me see things in a different light. We have a lot to offer the world, and there are people who kind of rely on us to help them develop. Unfortunately, what people here are seeing primarily is the offer of military [force]. And we’re better than that. And I wish we could show that better part of who we are to the rest of the world.

Many of the people I meet and work with have known nothing but violence and war from the time they were born. But I get encouraged when I see that there’s a common basic quest for living peacefully, decently, humanely. What is it in people? Where does that light come from?

People who have come this way from central and southern Iraq have said that in terms of violence, there has been a reduction. But they did it by walling off entire neighborhoods so that people are physically separated. There’s this sense that once this U.S. power is taken out, those walls will eventually come down, and what’s really needed is some kind of political and diplomatic and humanitarian reconciliation process in order for the whole thing to not fall apart.

There’s always the possibility that violence can be reduced by choice, involving that little piece that is in every human being — I am convinced of it, that it exists in every human being — that wants to live with higher ideals.

Naar-Obed’s comments were edited from a longer interview by staff writer Larry Oakes.

Coming Friday: Dominic Thao, a third-generation soldier.