Winter 2007 Editorial
Societies that make war on other societies – or on their own people – must find physical places and resources to concentrate the destructive power unleashed in the form of guns, equipment, aircraft, and men and women trained for war. When placed on the territories of other nations, these concentrations of destruction are, as Catherine Lutz says, “political claims, spoils of war, arms sales showrooms, toxic industrial sites, laboratories for cultural (mis)communication, and collections of customers for local bars, shops, and prostitution.” (See feature, page 14.) On land, at sea, or in space, military facilities are also used not only to make war but to coerce political and economic concessions. A few powerful countries have installed military bases on the territories of others: the British in Cyprus, Falklands, and Diego Garcia, the French in Africa and former colonial islands, Russia in several former Soviet republics, and India in Tajikistan. But U.S. foreign military bases – estimated at 737 by the Pentagon, and up to 1,000 by author Chalmers Johnson – represent more than 95% of the military bases on foreign territory around the globe. Typically, civilian society is forced to offer deference to this projection of military power: through payment of taxes, the presence of soldiers in children’s schools to recruit warriors, exposure to images of military identity in movies, news, ads, videogames, etc as heroic, inevitable, and viscerally “our own.” But unless there is civil war, the places where soldiers and technologies are prepared and poised for war are segregated from the rest of society behind fences. Both on domestic and foreign military bases, access by ordinary people is usually restricted. Yet these bases produce enormous impacts on the communities near them, as well as those that become the object of their vocation. These impacts in turn provoke outrage and resistance from affected communities. Despite the enormous public relations effort to promote a warm and fuzzy image through the media and charity to “host communities” (a phrase that sounds as if someone had invited soldiers over for a dinner party), military bases are often fiercely unpopular. So unpopular, indeed, that many movements have succeeded in kicking out the military, often by employing creative and daring nonviolent methods. In Kaho’olawe, Hawai’i, an island bombed by the Navy for more than 50 years, a resurgent movement by Hawai’ian people to re-take their land and usurped sovereignty succeeded through civil disobedience in stopping bombing, transferring land to a Hawai’ian entity and appropriating more than $400 million to decontaminate the island in the 1990s. Bases within the United States have also met opposition. The San Francisco Bay Area, backed by a strong peace and anti-nuclear movement, succeeded in the 1980s in closing nearly all bases in a regional military complex built up during World War II. In a very different struggle, the EPA forced the closure of Massachusetts Military Reservation on Cape Cod after citizen groups demonstrated that army training was contaminating drinking water aquifers. These successes are enormous achievements, both for the communities directly impacted and for the limitations they place on the military’s capacity to make war in any place at any time. The challenge for those concerned with war-making is the way bases are moved around. Marines leaving Okinawa and Korea are moved to Guam, already devastated by military contamination and colonialism. When the U.S. failed to renegotiate the Panama Canal treaties that required the closure of over a dozen bases on the isthmus in 1999, the troops and their drug war missions dispersed to Puerto Rico, Ecuador, El Salvador, Aruba, Curacao, and Florida. This coincided with the dramatic mass movement in Puerto Rico to close the naval bombing range in Vieques, which succeeded in 2003; the bombing moved to Florida. Now, the new president of Ecuador has vowed not to renew an agreement for the base there. But except for Puerto Rico, the new bases still operate. Sometimes one successful struggle can give rise to another. Panama’s nationalist government required the United States to move the Army School of the Americas from Panama to Fort Benning, Georgia in 1985. The school’s mission of training Latin America soldiers, many of whom then commit atrocities, continues to this day under a different name, but the movement to close the school has become a powerful gateway for nonviolent resistance to U.S. militarism in Latin America. Military bases exist locally, but are intricately networked with other military facilities and functions, and serve as enforcers for policies that keep U.S. companies profitable and the things we consume cheap. In that sense, the very personal and local anti-base struggles, connected as they are to war now and in the future, are critical to the effort to transform militarism itself. For those of us living in the heart of empire, it is both privilege and responsibility to join with these nonviolent struggles, and as civilian diplomats to transform our relations with the rest of the world. John Lindsay-Poland is co-coordinator of the Fellowship of Reconciliation Task Force on Latin America and the Caribbean. ©2007 Fellowship of Reconciliation |
