an irrelevant anecdote and an angry outcry
My friend "Giacomo" works for ICBL, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, one of the two co-winners of the 1997 Nobel Prize for Peace. He doesn't get paid for this job, he does it pro-bono, but its amazing work experience and he's extremely likely to get streamlined into some other, equally great organisation, as soon as he's done with this one. About a month before I left Canberra, he asked me to do a tiny little comic/character that he could use on a bunch of business cards he was having made up. He wanted either a picture of himself with "some luggages", or perhaps a little looking land mine with an evil face, or something. I agreed, but never really got very proactive on the producin'. And then it sort of became a joke, sort of, in which I just kept alluding my promise, much to his chagrin.
Anyway, about a month ago we were sitting in a bar here in Oslo and I was drawing on this stack of napkins and we were talking about the West Wing, which "Giacomo" discovered earlier this year and became appropriately obsessed with. So, while we were talking I just started scribbling this sketchy picture of Toby Zeigler, all furrow browed and shoulder-slung jacket, a drawing that was finished in about 25 seconds. "Giacomo" took the napkin and put it in his pocket.
I was against his using it for the business cards. I thought it represented him as a short, bearded, grumpy, balding Jewish man, rather than what he really is, which is a tall, grinning, beardless, goofy-but-loveable northern Italian, with a full head of hair. But he loves Toby and he loves the West Wing and he insisted. He sent off for the business cards to be made, and they were.
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This week marks the tenth anniversary of the signing, in Ottawa, of the International Treaty banning landmines. Here is Oslo, there are celebrations going on. One of the main squares, beside the Hard Rock Cafe and the National Theatre, have been taken over by a simulation mine field, demonstration sniffer dogs and an absolute Leviathan of a truck called a "Minewolf" which looks like cross between a tank, a bulldozer and a combine harvester, and swings thick metal chains out front to detonate mines in large flat areas like fields. Throughout the week a series of conferences and events are being held, which in part commemorate the project, but also draw attention to, and prepare further for the signing, hopefully by the end of 2008, of a similar treaty against cluster munitions.
Yesterday during lunch, I put on a collared shirt and my better shoes and snuck into the afternoon session of the Civil Society Conference. "Giacomo" had been there all day, in suit and tie, schmoozing with the NGO celebrities and meeting his co-workers, previously known to him only by email and skype calls. And there he was handing out the business card, with my little Toby Zeigler scribble. To the ex-head of the International Committee of the Red Cross. To Charmaine Gooch, founder of Global Witness, who initiated, ran and pulled off the campaign to ban blood diamonds. To ICBL members Paul Hannon, director of Mines Action Canada, and Steve Goose, Director of Human Rights Watch - Arms Division. And to his wife, Jody Williams, campaign spokesperson for ICBL, recent head of mission for the UN Human Rights Council in Dafur, and joint winner in 1997 of the the Nobel Peace Prize.
I was there to see Jody speak, along with Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian Judge who also won the Nobel Prize, in 2003. "Giacomo" and I had told a bunch of people in our class about the talks and said how we should be able to just walk in and listen, even though we weren't officially invited, but nobody else came, citing "too much study" or "it'll probably be boring".
It wasn't boring. It was incredible. Jody Williams gave the most inspiring speech I've seen given for a long time. Probably ever. In massive contrast to the other Nobel Peace prize winner I saw this year, the Dalai Lama, there was not one platitude, not one feel-good fuzzy, not one moment of kumbai-ya. There was no apologies, and no set speech, and no big statements, and no soft forgiveness. Jody Williams is angry, she is outraged, she said so many times. She is outraged at governments, she is outraged at the UN, she is outraged at civil society for giving in, or for not pushing harder. She is outraged, and she should be, we all should be, at what has happened to humans, what has happened to the concept of the individual, to the need for human security, to the absolute common fucking sense that says that inventing, testing, producing, selling, stockpiling, threatening to use and actually using all types of purely destructive machinery, from small weapons to land mines to clusters to thermobaric bombs (like Russia's darling newbie) to nuclear monstrosities, is WRONG; that it is not just wrong but disgusting, criminal, evil. Jody Williams sat there, tired eyed and tight jawed, and she ponders these simple questions out loud, and when she asks why, it's not the sort of why you can just make up excuses to. It's the sort of why you just have to listen to, and think about. And get angry about, too.
How, she ponders, can a country like Sweden, with all its platitudes to peace and freedom, how can it still be the leading producer of small arms and clusters per capita in the world? How can the Russians and the Americans produce bombs of massive destruction and then release statements to the world's media about their "pride" and "excitement" at the success? How can government's like Frances - smart men like Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Médecins Sans Frontières - how can they seriously even consider the possibility of war with Iran? How can Western governments continuously backflip and pander and smooth over the truth in Dafur when every day people are being slashed to death and women are raped and there's just not enough food and shade and water and medicines, and they say they want reports that everybody is happy with? How does one act in such a way, when we know the full extent of the destruction our act is causing, but we do it anyway?
And the beauty is that she wonders all this without leftist cliche, without flimsy grand statements about the brotherhood of humans, without inane gestures towards the strength of the human spirit, without always blaming someone else, without using just words. In order to wonder all of this aloud, to cry out about all this she uses truth, she uses outrage, she uses logic, she uses the painful fact that we are all to blame, but that we also all have the capacity to make noise, to learn more, to care.
It's an odd feeling, being filled up with a sad flame of fury, and a hot flame of excitement and energy at the same time. To walk out of a room with a new hero.
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After the speeches "Giacomo" was approached by Paul Hannon, asking whether the balding bearded guy on the business card was meant to be him or Steve Goose. "Oh no, it's meant to be me when I'm older and balder" he said. "But it doesn't look like you at all" replied Paul, "although, it does sort of look like a... fictonal character". Hahaha.
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STOP CLUSTER MUNITIONS, NOW.
http://www.stopclustermunitions.org/
http://www.icbl.org/
Jody Williams' Nobel Lecture, 1997
