wfn.org | Work to Lift Cuba, Iraq Embargoes, Walker Tells Peace Group

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17-June-1998 
GA98061 
 
    Work to Lift Cuba, Iraq Embargoes, Walker Tells Peace Group 
 
    by Jerry Van Marter 
 
CHARLOTTE, N.C.--Presbyterians attending the annual Peace Breakfast here 
June 16 were called to actively support the lifting of the economic 
embargoes against Cuba and Iraq by the Rev. Lucius Walker, founder of the 
Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization and Pastors for Peace. 
    Walker, who has led numerous humanitarian missions to Central America, 
Haiti, Cuba and Iraq, outlined conditions in Haiti, where he said peasants 
have been driven off their land and into the cities to supply factory labor 
at 28-30 cents an hour "producing goods which command the same prices as 
when those goods were produced in the United States at union wages." 
    The rural poor fare no better in Mexico, Walker charged, where in 
Chiapas peasants, too, are either driven from their land by new landowners 
or "go with the land when it is sold -- a form of slavery in the wealthiest 
state in Mexico." 
    Such situations -- in which countries "aided and abetted by the United 
States systematically violate the human rights of their own people" -- 
illustrate "a pathological obsession of the United States to destroy any 
country we can't control." 
    This obsession explains the blockades of Cuba and Iraq "where it is the 
women and children who are suffering, not the governments," Walker 
insisted.  He described visiting the bomb shelter in Iraq made famous by 
the CNN photos of "smart bombs" penetrating the air shafts.  Walker said 
there were "bits of hair and skin still embedded in the walls of the 
shelter where 2,000 women and children died."  His voice quavering, Walker 
asked, "What drives us to such carnage and mass destruction -- it's a 
monstrous immorality." 
    The reason Cuba is such a "pariah," Walker said, "is because it will 
not bow to U.S. corporate interests or U.S. government policy, but is 
committed to giving all that it can to its people."  Such a policy, he 
said, "is an example to the rest of the Third World which the developed 
countries cannot abide because it places people ahead of corporate greed." 
    Walker, who engaged in a 94-day "fast for life" last year to free 435 
U.S. Customs-confiscated computers Pastors for Peace were trying to deliver 
to hospitals in Cuba, urged Presbyterians to "go beyond resolutions to 
concrete actions to bring down these blockades." 
    The Peaceseeker Award of the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship, sponsors of 
the Peace Breakfast, was given to Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, N.C. 
Founded in 1894, the college was founded on principles of individual 
service and broad inclusiveness.  It has long been renowned for its 
international student body. President Doug Orr said that next school year 
every student will have an international experience of some kind. 
    Long time Presbyterian peace activist and former General Assembly 
moderator Clinton Marsh described Warren Wilson College as "hidden away in 
the mountains of North Carolina but an international window on the world 
and a mecca for peace." 

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