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06635 November 30, 2006
Three Presbyterians may be jailed for trespassing in annual Fort Benning protest
Army arrests 16 as thousands demand shutdown of military school
by Evan Silverstein
LOUISVILLE - At least three Presbyterians, including a minister, were among 16 people arrested on Nov. 19 in Columbus, GA, after they marched onto the grounds of Fort Benning to protest a controversial military school they blame for assassinations, torture and other human rights abuses in Latin America.
The Rev. A. Donald Coleman of Chicago, IL; Philip E. Gates, of Prescott, AZ; and Julienne Oldfield of Syracuse, NY; each face up to six months in federal prison and fines of up to $5,000 for trespassing on military property during the peaceful demonstration.
Coleman and Gates were released after each posted $500 bail. Federal court hearings for the three are scheduled for Jan. 29. It was uncertain how much bail was posted by Oldfield, 69, who could not be reached for comment.
More than 150 Presbyterians are believed to have taken part in the protest, which involved as many as 22,000 demonstrators from around the country. It was thought to be the largest gathering in the 17-year history of the annual demonstrations demanding the closing of the combat training facility once known as the School of the Americas (SOA).
"I knew that I could go to prison and just simply had to anticipate that that might be part of the consequence," Coleman said of his decision to enter the Army post. "But after having done so, I'm even more convinced that it was the right thing to do. In a sense I see the trial as not a trial for me, but a trial for the atrocities that the School of the Americas has performed against people in Latin America."
Federal authorities said 16 protesters were arrested when they went onto the military base during this year's rally organized by a group that calls itself School of the Americas Watch (SOAW). Coleman and Gates said they ventured onto the grounds by slipping through a hole in a chain-link fence.
The protests are held to mark the anniversary of the Nov. 19, 1989, murders in El Salvador of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her teenage daughter. SOAW claims that some of the people responsible for the killings had been trained at the Fort Benning institute, which in the past has offered instruction in practices such as extortion, execution and torture.
The Department of Defense says the curriculum no longer includes such training. Through the years, military officials have strongly denied that the school was responsible for any abuses.
Coleman, 69, is a Presbyterian minister and member of Chicago Presbytery. He and his wife, Ann Marie, are co-pastors at University Church, a Chicago congregation jointly affiliated with the United Church of Christ and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).
Gates, who turned 70 the day after getting arrested, is a retired Scottsdale, AZ public school superintendent. He is an elder at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Prescott, about 100 miles north of Phoenix, an outgoing session member and chair of the church's mission committee.
Coleman and Gates have both visited Latin America in recent years, each claiming that personal experiences they had there weighed heavily on deciding to risk arrest by crossing onto Fort Benning.
"This is dedicated to those people in Colombia," said Gates, who last year spent nine weeks in the embattled South American country as part of a Presbyterian accompaniment program. The self-professed "non-activist" said he retuned home a "changed man."
"They're living their lives in terror, poverty and hopelessness," Gates said of civilians in Colombia. "People like us who know that, who profess to be Christian brothers and sisters, just cannot turn their backs on it."
The SOA, which was founded in 1946 in Panama and moved to Fort Benning in 1984, was replaced in 2001 by the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), moving from U.S. Army sponsorship to the Defense Department.
SOA opponents contend the changes were only cosmetic, even though human rights courses are mandatory at the new school.
The three Presbyterians arrested were among some 60 participants from the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship (PPF), which has long opposed the military training facility.
The crowd also included scores of other Presbyterians from across the country and a number of students from Presbyterian-related educational institutions such as McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago; Maryville College in Maryville, TN; Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, FL; and Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC.
Other Presbyterians attending the rally included: Dick Junkin, former mission worker in Central America, and his wife Nancy; Bill Galvin, counseling coordinator for the Center of Conscience and War in Washington, DC; Joel Hanisek, Presbyterian representative to the United Nations; and Presbyterian peace activist Anne Barstow and her husband the Rev. Tom Driver of New York City.
PPF Executive Director Rick Ufford-Chase, who attended but did not cross the fence line, said that more than 150 people identified themselves as being Presbyterian to peace fellowship members during the three-day event, which included human rights speakers, music and education before culminating with the demonstration on the final day.
The PPF is an affinity group of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) committed to nonviolence and peacemaking. It receives no funding from the PC(USA) but occasionally works collaboratively with the Presbyterian Peacemaking Program on matters of common concern, such as the Colombia accompaniment program in which Gates participated.
Ufford-Chase, who also was moderator of the PC(USA)'s 216th General Assembly in 2004, said the latest demonstration marked the 10th straight year for PPF participation at the protest. He said the reason the group returns each year is twofold:
"One, it's an opportunity to be faithful to what we're hearing from our Latin American sisters and brothers in Central America, Colombia and Venezuela who are insisting that the school, whatever it maybe doing now, stands for torture across the region and it has to be shutdown," Ufford-Chase said.
"The second is that it is our kind of witness," he continued. "That is, it's an entirely peaceful, non-violent worshipful witness. That's why it has felt like a comfortable place for the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship to show up year after year."
The demonstrators paraded, chanted and raised white crosses outside the main gate of Fort Benning, the home of the Army's Airborne, Ranger and Infantry training.
Officials with the Muscogee County Sheriff's Department estimated the crowd size at 14,000, but SOA Watch said they counted 22,000 people.
The number of protesters arrested for trespassing onto the post has varied over the years - 36 a year ago, 16 in 2004, 40 in 2003 and 85 in 2002. More than 200 have served federal prison sentences, including a handful of Presbyterians.
Most of the demonstrators were college-age youths, but there were also toddlers led or carried by their parents, senior citizens and many Catholic nuns and priests, according to The Associated Press.
Veterans of the Iraq war and members of the group Veterans for Peace marched in formation to the demonstration, according to media reports. Also protesting for the first time this year was a movement known as "1,000 Grandmothers," inspired by a song of the same name by singer-activist Holly Near.
For Gates a defining moment in his march toward Fort Benning came last year after visiting 10 displacement communities in northwestern Colombia. The sites are a refuge for many of the millions of people driven from their homes by a four-decade civil war, which has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of civilians.
There Gates said he viewed "deplorable living conditions" and heard victims' stories of abuse at the hands of the Colombian government and its agents. An experience he described as an "awakening" that called him to act.
"I want to help contribute to the effort to keep this whole issue of the abusive treatment of people in Latin America, in which SOA graduates have a significant part, front and center," said Gates, who spent most of his time in Colombia in the cities of Barranquilla and Cartagena.
"I want to be sure that our Congress continues to be aware that there are many of us citizens who are extremely concerned about the SOA and their graduates' roles in the horrific human rights abuses that are going on in Latin America," Gates added.
With Colombia's swirling violence in mind, the Presbyterian Church of Colombia and PC(USA) have forged a partnership to deter violence against church workers and others fighting for human rights.
Over the past two years at least 24 American Presbyterian volunteers like Gates have traveled to Colombia to stand beside those at risk from violence as part of an accompaniment program sponsored by the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship, the Presbyterian Peacemaking Program and the PC(USA)'s former Worldwide Ministries Division.
Marilyn White, a PPF national committee coordinator and former Colombia accompanier, said many Presbyterians involved with the accompaniment program have taken up the School of the Americas issue.
"I think participating in our relationship with the Colombian Presbyterian Church is creating a sense of responsibility in some of the peace fellowship members that we have to do as much as we can to end the civil war in Colombia," said White, who organized this year's PPF contingent to Fort Benning and was herself arrested at the protest in 2002.
Coleman has also seen the work of SOA graduates firsthand during various University Church-sponsored trips to Guatemala as part of a partnership to help rebuild a Mayan mountaintop village called Saq Ja.
Saq Ja was totally destroyed by the Guatemalan military in 1983 during the country's decades long civil war. More than half of Saq Ja's 400 people were massacred, with help from School of the Americas alumni, as part of a government policy to destroy anything or anybody who might possibly give aid to the guerilla army, said Coleman, who also attended last year's protest but did not cross onto the post.
"The crimes that the graduates from the School of the Americas committed on their own people has been atrocious and brutal," he said. "Supporting the SOA is no role for the United States government to play."
University Church became involved with the fate of Saq Ja after a Guatemalan family with ties to the village joined the Chicago congregation after fleeing war-torn Central America in the 1980s.
Prior to this year's demonstration, the Rev. Donald F. Beisswenger, a retired Presbyterian minister from Nashville, TN, was the last known Presbyterian arrested at an SOA Watch protest when he crossed onto the military base in 2003.
The retired Vanderbilt University Divinity School professor - who turned 76 on Oct. 12 - served a six-month prison term.
White, a retired IBM computer programmer, who currently resides in Austin, TX, was arrested during the 2002 protest along with Ann Huntwork, a former missionary in Iran who lives in Portland, OR. The two women served six-month prison sentences for trespassing before their release in October 2003.
"I have nothing but admiration for them," White said of the Presbyterian trio arrested at this year's protest. "I think it shows that the problem of the human rights abuses in Latin America hasn't improved significantly."
Presbyterian ministers the Rev. Chuck Booker-Hirsch of Michigan, and the Rev. Erik Johnson of Tennessee were imprisoned after being arrested at the 2001 demonstration at Fort Benning.
The PC(USA) General Assembly passed a resolution in 1994 calling for the closing of the school after the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, a Maryknoll priest and longtime opponent of the SOA, spoke about the military institution during a GA breakfast meeting.
The Army acknowledges that some graduates who have passed through the school over the years have been guilty of abuses, but argues that the training facility shouldn't be judged on the basis of a few extreme cases.
Army spokesmen have pointed out that all WHINSEC students now receive instruction in human rights and ethics, and claim that the institute is largely responsible for the spread of democracy in Latin America.
"There's not a single example of anybody using what he learned at the School of the Americas to commit a crime," institute spokesman Lee Rials recently told The Associated Press. "While it is true that there are people who committed crimes after attending a course, no cause-effect relationship has ever been found."
Over the past year, the SOA Watch has been working on two fronts to close the school: lobbying Congress to end its funding and visiting leaders of Latin American countries to stop the flow of students. Venezuela stopped sending students last year and Argentina and Uruguay did it this year.
Ufford-Chase said he believes the work of the school's opponents may be on the verge of a major breakthrough. He said he hopes the latest demonstration is the last and that next year's gathering can be a large victory celebration.
He said he was excited by the recent U.S. election, where Democrats won control of Congress for the first time since 1994, and encouraged by new legislation seeking to close WHINSEC.
A House bill that would have halted the school's funding failed by 16 votes earlier this year, but with 35 Republicans who had opposed the bill now out of office, Ufford-Chase likes the chances of the measure passing next year under the new Congress.
"I think there's a good chance that with the democratic Congress that by next year we'll be ready to go and celebrate instead of having another protest. I'm quite optimistic," Ufford-Chase said.
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