Today as I was reading in 'The Ecologist' about the beautiful Kalahari Bushmen being wiped out, tears began pouring out of me. I couldn't bear to think of these people torn from their desert home, tho' it looks to me like the most inhospitable place on Earth. And I read of an indigenous tribe in Canada who when 'resettled' began to commit collective suicide through drugs and alcohol. Before, I used to feel indignation and rage at the injustice being done to defenceless groups like this. Now my heart breaks. How many peoples on the planet have still a sense of home, family and tribe like these folk have? I think of the Palestinians, craving their homeland. The parents of my Palestinian friend here in Colombia still have the keys of their house, which is now inside Occupied Jerusalem. It's 40 years since they had to leave.
I look around my little group of friends and family, our commune called Atlantis, and feel complete gratitude that I have them. I would feel lost in the world without them. Life would have no meaning. We've lost our land twice in the civil war here in Colombia but we are all part gypsies so that didn't hurt too much. We've the confidence that comes from being white, European and over-educated, so being torn out of the soil we'd so carefully built up with compost and hard, hard slog on our lovely farms in Tolima and Caqueta, didn't destroy our sense of ourselves, like it does to so many campesinos. Yet it still did us irreparable damage. A year after the second time we were made refugees 2 of our young men went back to our old area and were brutally murdered by a psychotic group opf FARC militia. With the hindsight of nearly 2 years since they were killed I can see now how the stress and instability of being made rootless made me and them disregard the dangers that led to their deaths. How many more people suffer disasters and tragedies like ours because of the confusion that being forced from your home by violence brings? We spent our time of war refugee-ship in relative luxury as our fame as organic gardeners meant we always had a choice of farms to live and work on.
Why are we becoming a planet of homeless people? Is there some kind of cosmic plan to uproot us all and shake us all up? If there is, why?, what for? Or is it just that the rich side of the world has lost its sense of at-home-ness and wants to force the same feeling of alienation on the 'undeveloped' nations because we can't bear to see that they still have the sense of sharing, family and caring that we have sold for a shiny new car, a TV in every room and the priviledge of buying our food in small expensive packets from a hypermarket.
Of all the hundreds of articles I've read about the Israeli occupation of Palestine one stays stuck in my mind. It was an interview with Ariel Sharon, where he admitted his envy of how the Palestinians share each last crumb with each other without giving it a second thought. The Jews, the world's eternal wanderers are trying to feel at home by stealing not just the land of the Palestinians, they want their sense of home too. Their desperate, insatiable greed for Palestinian land is only a symbol of their deeper thirst for home and community. But you can't steal love or force people to hand it over at gunpoint.
Why are people who defend their land and homes and families now called terrorists? Let's all of us who would do the same if we had to, call ourselves terrorists too. Let us accept that the mass media have changed the meaning of the word 'terrorist' and let's make sure that the new meaning gets widely known as soon as possible.
Terrorist = a person who is willing to fight and even die to protect his/her family, home and country.
Under that new definition, is there anyone who isnīt a terrorist?
Anne Barr, Atlantis Ecological Community Ireland and Colombia.