Towards Home #15 Letter to Barack Obama

This week I received a letter inviting me to donate to the Barack Obama campaign, and the twist is that five people who donate before the end of the month will be invited to have dinner with him. I sent the following letter outlining the issues I'd like to discuss if given the chance. And that chance is slim - yesterday my wallet was stolen so I am credit card-less and can't make the donation. But I had the letter to him already half-formed in my head, so I sent it anyway.

I am posting it (slightly edited) here, with the "Towards Home" newsletter heading, as it speaks to the connections I see between Indiana and Burma.

-Patrick

Dear Obama Campaign Wallahs,

I have been planning to donate with this “dinner” appeal. (I’m a registered voter in Indiana, but am living in Thailand and have already voted in the Democrats Abroad primary.) However, yesterday my wallet was stolen in Bangkok and I have had to cancel my credit cards. So, as I’ve already donated and plan to donate again, I hope I’ll still be considered as a candidate for this dinner, which I would be honored to attend. As soon as my credit cards come back into use, I’ll be making another donation as well.

Here’s a bit about me, for your consideration. (The reader’s digest version for you skimmers – I’m interested in foreign policy, international justice, and would like to have a nuanced discussion with Mr. Obama about coming to the table with perceived foes. My particular interest is Burma, and by extension, China.)

I was born in Indiana and lived there through university, where I studied to be a Spanish teacher. During my student teaching, I realized how futile it was for me to teach a language when I had such little exposure to the realities of native Spanish speakers, and I also had an itch to see what there is to see outside of Indiana. So I joined the Jesuit Volunteer Corps (a kind of domestic Peace Corps run by the Jesuits, with a focus on community, spirituality, simple living and social justice). I lived in Texas and worked with immigrant youth in a Catholic Charities foster care setting.

The youth were mostly teenagers from Central America, but they also came from Kenya, China, and others countries. Fresh out of college, I was one of those enthusiastic entry-level workers who took on everything I could from fixing computers to weekend outings to, increasingly, analysis of immigration policy and the effects it had on our efforts to reunite families and protect asylum-seekers from being sent back to places where they would be in danger. The task that had the most impact on me, however, was the intake interviews that I conducted with each new kid who arrived in the program. All we really needed to do was fill in a one-page check list, but the final section of the form had room to write additional information. Throughout my four years working at Catholic Charities, my intake interviews started to run two- and three-hours long. Those intakes provided an opportunity for me to learn, through hundreds of individual stories, about the effects of U.S. Cold War policies in Honduras and Guatemala, and it gave the kids a chance to give cathartic release to the stories they’d been keeping in for months or years. The stories the kids told of their homes – mostly of poverty but also of forced military conscription, political violence, and severe domestic violence – were no less harrowing than their stories of their journeys through Mexico and across the border to Texas. They came on foot for days or risked their lives hopping trains, or ended up in life-threatening situations by trusting coyotes ready to exploit their vulnerability.

After four years of that work, I wanted to learn more and I knew I wanted to find a career that entailed ongoing listening and learning, so I signed up for a graduate program in anthropology at American University. Fully expecting to delve into the immigration issue, I found myself drawn more to the political and social developments in the countries where those kids I knew at Catholic Charities had come from. It was the mid-90s, and so the South African Truth & Reconciliation Commission was being highlighted as a model for dealing with past atrocities. As El Salvador and Guatemala emerged from years of civil war, they were also looking at Argentina, where dictators had been put on trial (though later pardoned) as models for how to deal with the legacy of violence in their societies. Around that time, a major player in the anti-apartheid movement came to speak in Washington, DC. He is a South African who had been supporting the development of the TRC and was at that time helping victims and survivors of apartheid engage and critique the transitional justice mechanisms being implemented in South Africa. He hooked me on the issue, and my Master’s thesis looked at how Argentina had dealt with its own legacy of the 1976-83 “Dirty War,” a kind of one-step forward / two-steps-back story of frustration and ongoing struggle.

As I completed my degree, Burma was increasingly present on the U.S. foreign policy map, mainly around debates about economic sanctions but also because of the precedent-setting case of Doe v. Unocal, a case that saw Burmese villagers use the Alien Torts Claims Act to hold the company responsible for human rights violations that occurred in the area of the pipeline it developed in Burma. Having considered how local actors pursuing justice and accountability in South Africa, Argentina, and El Salvador were reacting to the political developments in their countries, I decided to get involved in the pre-transition setting of Burma. For the last ten years I have been helping lay the groundwork for transitional justice mechanisms when political openings allow their implementation. This work entails advising on the development of a human rights database and facilitating exposure to comparative cases of transition.

Since the August/September monk-led uprising in Burma (see footage at http://67.15.187.34/~davenic/misc/burmamedia/ and the Asia Society panel on the crisis in Burma is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tZbKWS4hNs). Since that time, the debates have intensified about how to engage the Burmese military leaders to prompt democratic change. Many Burmese friends, when they learn I am American, want to know when President Bush is going to bomb the generals out of their jungle capital. They cheered the invasion of Iraq, and they prayed for NATO to come ‘rescue’ them when it intervened in Kosovo in 1999. My response has always been “careful what you wish for,” along with a deep-felt sympathy for the desperation implied by their impulse for a strong-hand.

In theory, I agree with Mr. Obama’s view that refusing to talk to foes is a demonstration of arrogance, not strength. But my jury is still out when I think of applying that theory to Burma. A friend of mine, Thet Win Aung, was killed in Insein Prison in Rangoon for simply trying to arrange discussions between Aung San Suu Kyi’s party (the National League for Democracy) and student activists. The communities of my friends are devastated by military campaigns that wipe out entire villages for perceived support of armed resistance to Burmese military rule. And the UN’s efforts to support a negotiated settlement of the conflicts, through the work of special envoy Ibrahim Gambari, have failed because the leading generals seem to have no interest in any sort of dialogue. Activists who have long supported a negotiated settlement are losing hope of a peaceful resolution to the crisis there, and a confrontation between the people and the military is again looming as the rulers have called for a May 2008 national referendum on a sham constitution. It is heartbreaking to see how the failed international diplomacy is leading to another conflict where innocent, unarmed protestors are surely going to be slaughtered.

In this scenario, a key factor is China’s ability to hold the Security Council hostage on any efforts to get the Council’s backing for more serious involvement in protecting the people of Burma. After the international community failed in Rwanda, and as it is failing in Darfur, how is it that such a predictable conflict is being played out while we wring our hands? It comes back to gas and oil, I think – the gas fields on Burma’s west coast, and the port on that same coast, will provide what China’s Yunnan Province desperately needs: fuel. And U.S.-China economic relations keep the U.S. government from pushing China on this issue, and greed holds hostage our more admirable American values of recognizing and supporting the universal desire for human rights, democratic freedoms, and self-determination.

I am steeped in these issues, and to hear Mr. Obama talk about a “re-think” of the U.S.’ role in the world, especially with regard to the U.N. and “talks with foes,” gives me hope that a fresh look and new attitude will allow a shift in what seems to be a doomed and intractable conflict. The Burmese generals are paranoid and xenophobic and convinced that any pro-democracy sentiment among the population is a C.I.A. plot. In the current dynamic, the international community is hamstrung and the pro-democracy forces are desperate and bravely facing another spate of violence with virtually no international support.

We need change in the U.S., and having lived in Thailand for ten years, I know that we need change here as well. The current administration has caused so much damage to the issues of democracy and human rights that I am spending my life working on, but President Bush is still held up as a beacon of hope to the Burmese people because at least he is paying attention. I would like Thet Win Aung’s brother, Pyone Cho, currently in prison after helping lead the August/September 2007 protests, to be at home with his aging parents in Rangoon. I would like to see the Karen communities on the Thai-Burma border live in sustainable communities rather than in camps for internally displaced people. And I would like my colleagues to see an American foreign policy that effectively supports their strategy to bring about peaceful democratic change in their homeland. As Americans, the aspirations of these friends are our responsibility. Mr. Obama’s promise of a progressive, engaged foreign policy seems to encompass this view and I hope that with his eight years in office, he will bring about a shift in U.S. fear of global cooperation and will urge us to find our better selves in our role in the global community.

Please forgive the long-windedness of my note. I hope that Mr. Obama can address these issues, if not at a dinner, than in some other forum. There are, by the way, thousands of Burmese refugees who have resettled in Indiana, particularly in Ft. Wayne, Indianapolis, and Bloomington.

Thank you for your consideration.

Warm regards,

Patrick Pierce