I attended the annual national Veterans for Peace (VFP) Convention in Boston from July 21-24 2004, both as coordinator for CCCO's GI Rights Program and as a VFP member. The Convention was timed to occur just before the Democratic National Convention. The Boston Social Forum (BSF) was also timed in this way, and so the BSF and the VFP Convention overlapped.
It was an unprecedented event - the longest, best-attended convention with the greatest number of workshops (last year's San Francisco convention that we organized had been these things until this year!). Powerful, well-known voices for peace and justice spoke - Amy Goodman, Howard Zinn, Daniel Ellsberg, and Fernando Suárez del Solar; powerful voices who are not well-known also spoke, such as the women veterans who told their stories.
Friday night's Veterans Address the Nation occurred at Fanueil Hall, historic meeting place for activists of the 1st and 2nd (abolition of slavery) U.S. revolutions. It ranks among the most moving events I have ever attended. The presence on stage of ten members of Military Families Speak Out (MFSO) holding pictures of the approximately 900 (at that time) dead U.S. soldiers, along with six members of the just-formed Iraqi Veterans Against the War (IVAW) brought me to tears. It gave the lie to the warmakers' propaganda that peace activists, GI's and military families somehow have different interests.
Representing CCCO, I led a workshop where I presented different viewpoints concerning a possible draft, and then moderated a discussion on the draft. Some anti-war people have advocated a draft, putting forth the notions that a draft would spread around the sacrifice and suffering, reduce isolation of the military from civilian influences and reduce the class and race hierarchies around who serves and who dies. These are important issues to grapple with, and we did; yet I also expressed CCCO's viewpoint that a draft is an extension of militarism to wage wars for empire, and that drafts such as that during the Vietnam war were full of class and racial inequities. Also, even if entrance into the military were somehow magically stripped of its race and class biases, these hierarchies would still reproduce themselves in the structures within the military - what people become officers, what people go to the front lines? This point is missing from the current discussion on the draft.
I was on a workshop panel called "Supporting GI Resistance". I focused on the work of the GI Rights Hotline, while the other panelists spoke particularly about the case of Camilo Mejía, a CO who's serving a one-year sentence at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, for refusing to be part of the structure of torture at places like Abu Ghraib. The other panelists were Louis Font, lawyer for Camilo, and Todd Ensign, director of Citizen Soldier.
I also co-led, with Boston GI Rights Hotline volunteer Alison Gottlieb, a workshop on the GI Rights Hotline at the Boston Social Forum.
400 people attended this VFP Convention in Boston. While the growth of VFP's paid membership - from 600 three years ago to 4200 - is striking, equally important are other types of growth. At the Boston Convention, women's issues were addressed more than ever before, and a woman's caucus was formed; young veterans, including Iraqi veterans, have taken a more prominent place in VFP and in the anti-war veterans' movement. The first-ever resolution against sexual abuse in the military was passed, and the issue was addressed to the public at the Fanueil Hall event by Dorothy Mackey of STAAAMP. A workshop around gay and lesbian GI and veteran issues was held for the second consecutive year. Racial diversity in VFP and being allies to communities of color: these issues were raised at the Convention, but here I feel like the work is just beginning.
CCCO had a literature table up throughout the Convention, and I got a chance to talk with many people in this context. In meeting a few CO's and many anti-war veterans, I didn't sense any great separation between the veterans and the CO's and realized that it hadn't always been this way.
CCCO is part of the Bring Them Home Now Coalition that includes VFP, MFSO, and IVAW and the Military Law Task Force (MLTF) of the National Lawyers' Guild. The connection and solidarity among these groups and among the many individuals and chapters of VFP were evident throughout the Convention.
For more photos and information go to the VFP report.