Peace Brigades International remembers the life and activism of David Hartsough
Photo: David Hartsough.
On March 22, the family of David Hartsough announced his passing at the age of 84 after four years of fighting cancer.
The book Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist notes: “David Hartsough knows how to get in the way! He has used his body to block Navy ships headed for Vietnam and trains loaded with munitions on their way to El Salvador and Nicaragua. He has marched with mothers confronting a violent regime in Guatemala and stood with refugees threatened by death squads in the Philippines.”
Photo: “The first demonstration David Hartsough ever organized was at the Nike missile site near his home in Pennsylvania. Although he was only 14 at the time, the FBI placed him under surveillance for organizing the nonviolent protest.”
Photo: A sit-in challenges segregation at People’s Drug Store in Arlington, Virginia, in June 1960.
A review of Hartsough’s book “Waging Peace” highlights: “We see how his service with Peace Brigades International in El Salvador and Guatemala prepared him for a risky experiment to defend refugees from death squads in the Philippines. In turn this action laid the foundations for Nonviolent Peaceforce, a modern day embodiment of Gandhi’s vision of the Shanti Sena, a standing nonviolent army.”
In 2002, Hartsough cofounded Nonviolent Peaceforce.
In July 2001, Ottawa peace activist Carl Stieren wrote: “This new proposal [for Nonviolent Peaceforce] is based on the techniques and experience of the unarmed bodyguards Peace Brigades International in Guatemala and Colombia, and the witness of groups such as Christian Peacemaker Teams in the West Bank.”
Stieren adds that the proposal was backed by PBI co-founders Hans Sinn and Murray Thomson, as well as by Lyn Adam of PBI-Canada and Tim Wallis who had been the London-based Executive Director of PBI.
Hartsough on PBI in Guatemala
Video: Hartsough reflects on PBI in Guatemala.
After the founding of Nonviolent Peaceforce, Hartsough reflected on his experience of PBI in Guatemala:
“In Guatemala in the early 80s it was genocidal violence against especially the Indigenous population but against everybody who wasn’t 100 percent behind the government… Civil society had ceased to exist, either people were killed or had been disappeared, imprisoned or fled the country.
In that situation, in early 1985, a group called the Mutual Support Group, the GAM, came together. They had all lost family members; they had been disappeared. They came, mostly Indigenous peoples, came to Guatemala City with pictures of their loved ones … walked down one of the main streets … and were chanting ‘where are they?’.
The president of Guatemala got on national television and said these people were all subversives … a licence to the military to open fire. I was with Peace Brigades International, just walking along the street with a little camera, a notepad and some change so we could try to make a phone call. And I had never been so afraid in my life…
Photo of protest from around that time (from the book “Unarmed Bodyguards”).
[After] late-February/ early-March of 85 … leaders [from the GAM] came to Peace Brigades International [and asked] ‘can you accompany us?’. And Peace Brigades International only had three or four people there at the time gulped and said, ‘we will try’.
And so, for two or three years they accompanied them day and night…
Gradually their courage gave courage to others in that society… And people who had fled the country, including Rigoberta Menchu, decided ‘well, you know if I’m accompanied maybe it’s safe enough to come back…’
Those women say we wouldn’t be alive if it hadn’t been for Peace Brigades International. And the other organization people say we wouldn’t have had the courage to be active again if hadn’t been for these women.
So, that’s a small example of where a really small number of courageous, nonviolent internationals, going not to direct what’s going on or to come up with the answers, but to be there as nonviolent bodyguards, to help make it safer for the local courageous people to do their work…”
Hartsough at PBI conference on a “ready response brigade” and “local units”
PBI co-founder Daniel N. Clark has written that Hartsough was also at a PBI conference two years earlier in July 1983 that led to our first work in Nicaragua:
“PBI’s Ready Response Brigade was envisioned as a crisis response unit composed of contingents from various regions able on short notice to place their members in Central America for brief periods… Local units would also be available for peacekeeping in local or regional conflicts in their home areas.
On July 30, we had held a conference … with the specific goal of establishing local units in the San Francisco area. …The conference was attended by about 70 people, and resulted in the formation of local PBI groups in San Francisco, Salinas, and Santa Cruz…
Conference participants included David Hartsough of AFSC [the American Friends Service Committee]… At the close of the conference, Jack [Schultz] was authorized to organize a Santa Cruz contingent of the Ready Response Brigade… Because preparation of the Santa Cruz Brigade was already underway when we received [a request from the Nicaraguan government for an international presence], and appeared to have excellent local support resources, we decided to invite them to respond to the Nicaraguan appeal by organizing a ten-person brigade to be present in Jalapa the last two weeks of September [1983].”
Other reflections
For more reflections on the life and vision of Hartsough, please see Nonviolent Peaceforce and World Beyond War.
To learn more about his book, Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist, please click here.
Photo: Hartsough blocking a weapons truck at Concord Naval Weapons Station, 1988.
0 Comments