wfn.org | 2 PC(USA) pastors indicted

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Note #7166 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

20-May-2002
02184

2 PC(USA) pastors indicted

School of Americas protesters charged with trespassing on military base

by Alexa Smith

LOUISVILLE - Two Presbyterian Church (USA) pastors are among 43 protesters indicted in federal court last month for trespassing on a military base in Georgia.

The Rev. Chuck Booker-Hirsch, of Ann Arbor, MI, and the Rev. Erik Johnson, of Maryville, TN, were arrested during the annual School of Americas Watch (SAW) protest last November.

An estimated 10,000 protesters were on hand, but only 43 went onto federal property, inviting arrest.

The military base near Columbus, GA, is home to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC), formerly known as the School of the Americas (SOA), where Central and South American military personnel are trained. 

The name change came after the Pentagon released manuals in 1996 substantiating activists' claims that techniques taught at the school included torture, assassination and extortion. Since then, human-rights courses have been added to the curriculum, and a board of oversight has been established.

The indictments were filed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Dean Daskal in Columbus. The clergymen could be imprisoned for six months and fined $5,000. Trial dates have not been set.

Seventy-one SAW activists have been jailed since 1983, when the group began its non-violent demonstrations, which have included fasts and prayer vigils as well as incursions onto government property. The protests are held every Nov. 16 to mark the anniversary of the killings of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador in the 1980s.

Booker-Hirsch and Johnson are not the first Presbyterians charged with trespassing in connection with the demonstrations. Elder John Ewers, of Dayton, OH, and another layperson, Dwight Lawton, of St. Petersburg, FL, have served time in federal prison.

Ewers and his wife, Paula, attend Dayton's Community Hill Presbyterian Church, where Ewers is clerk of session. They were arrested again on April 30 when they were among 10 activists who refused to leave the Dayton office of Sen. Mike DeWine.

DeWine was one of the architects of "Plan Colombia," the Clinton administration's campaign to fumigate coca plants and provide $1.3 billion in military aid to Colombia for its fight against drug traffickers. The Presbyterian Church of Colombia has opposed aerial fumigation, which it says kills indiscriminately.

De Wine is also a key supporter of the Bush administration's plans to increase military aid to Colombia.

The Ewers were charged with trespassing and resisting arrest. 

In a May 17 letter to his Ann Arbor congregation at Northside Presbyterian Church, Booker-Hirsch said he has been involved in efforts to ease the plight of Latin American refugees since the early 1980s. 

"One of the primary causes for (the refugees') flight north," he said, "(is) the training of Latin American military officers, still ongoing, in the uses of psychological and counterinsurgency warfare, and even methods of torture  through military resources offered at SOA/WHSC."	

Booker-Hirsch said "thousands" of graduates have been implicated in the killings of priests, nuns and social workers and in massacres of entire villages.

Johnson has been arrested for trespassing once before, but the charge is the first for Booker-Hirsch, who said the government, by its decision to begin arresting first-time offenders, "is sending a message to discourage future non-violent direct action to call attention to the school and what is going on there."

Matthew Smucker, SOAW's media coordinator, told the Presbyterian News Service (PNS) that his organization has "absolutely no indication" that the training offered at the school has changed much since its name change.

Smucker expressed outrage that first-time trespassers may be jailed, while SOA/WHSC graduates still practice "assassination and torture."

"We think it is draconian that (protesters) receive these sentences  for standing up this way," he said.

Johnson, a longtime activist on Central American issues, said the church of which he is interim pastor, the Church of the Savior, a United Church of Christ congregation in Knoxville, TN, has pledged to support him.

"I was initially shaken" upon learning of the indictment, he said, but has accepted that he may go to prison. "I'm at peace with that," he said

A PC(USA) pastor for 33 years, Johnson is a co-chair of the Peacemaking Committee of the Presbytery of East Tennessee. 

"I'm not living any differently than I was at the beginning of my ministry," he said, adding that he is "immersed in the teaching of non-violence in the church. ... Non-violence is central to the Gospel of reconciliation."

Daskal's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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