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A Mission of Peace and Peril

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Times Staff Writer

Michele Naar-Obed knows she will not stop the war in Iraq by walking the streets of Baghdad, unarmed and unguarded, calling for an end to the violence, but she considers it her duty to try.

She is 49 years old, a mother, a wife, a pacifist who can’t stand to be passive. Soldiers put their lives on the line for their country; she will risk hers too, in pursuit of peace.

Four of her colleagues in the pacifist movement were kidnapped in Baghdad late last month. The men -- fellow members of Christian Peacemaker Teams -- have been threatened with execution. Their captors have released videos showing them shackled and handcuffed.

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Undaunted, Naar-Obed plans to head out this week on her fourth trip to Baghdad in three years.

She may scour morgues for men gone missing in the chaos of war, or help Iraqi families seek compensation for belongings damaged in military raids. Her role, above all, will be to bear witness: to observe how ordinary Iraqis struggle through the violence and to share their stories with the world.

“What we stand for, how we’d like to see our world behave -- there have to be people who work to pass these values on to the next generation,” Naar-Obed said. “Maybe one day the spark will ignite a flame.”

Since 1988, Christian Peacemaker Teams have deployed to areas of conflict around the globe, including the West Bank, Colombia, Haiti and the U.S.-Mexican border.

In some regions, the activists confront war-makers head-on, throwing their bodies in front of tanks and bulldozers. In Iraq, they have chosen instead to record and publicize the war’s effect on civilians.

They were among the first to document allegations of torture at U.S.-run prisons, including Abu Ghraib outside Baghdad. They were among the first to take testimony from Iraqis who accused American troops of using the chemical agent white phosphorus during the 2004 offensive against insurgents in Fallouja.

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Shunning armed guards, the activists live in a Baghdad apartment outside the U.S.-controlled Green Zone. They have stayed on even though most other foreign aid workers are gone. Despite the kidnapping, several of the activists remain in Iraq.

Critics call them reckless and naive. “I don’t feel the slightest bit sorry for a bunch of hand-wringing liberals wandering into a war zone,” reads a typical posting on the conservative blog Freerepublic.com. Others say their calls for unity are ineffectual.

“This is not the kind of thing that causes the president to change his policy,” said Roger Dingman, a USC military historian.

But pacifists can still have an effect, Dingman said, especially over the long term. “They wake up the general population to issues of war and peace,” he said. “They make the rest of us ask ourselves: Are we doing the right thing?”

*

Michele Naar-Obed’s journey to Baghdad began over a bowl of macaroni and cheese in a Baltimore diner.

It was January 1991 and she was 34 years old, with a modest apartment and car, and a job as a hospital pathologist’s assistant. She had paid off her car and was earning enough to treat herself to a steak dinner now and then.

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That night at the diner, she noticed a newspaper ad for a nightly vigil to protest the first Bush administration’s buildup to the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Naar-Obed said she felt as if 20 years of anger burst from a locked box deep inside her.

As a girl, she had watched her father struggle with nightmares from his service in the Korean War. As a teen, she had recoiled from the images of carnage in Vietnam. Her college friends had traveled to war-torn Central America and returned with stories that disturbed her.

“I didn’t have to wait to hear if we’d win a military victory in the Gulf to know that there would be a lot of dead people, a lot of suffering,” she said. “I had to do everything I could to stop it.”

She attended the vigil that night, and the next. When the air war began, Naar-Obed said she climbed to the roof of a Baltimore armory with several of her newfound friends. As antiwar protesters circled below, she said they threw blood, sand and oil off the building.

The theatrics exhilarated her: “I felt that this was the most honest, the most free moment of my life.”

Within the next year, Naar-Obed gave up her job, her car and her privacy to become a professional pacifist.

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She moved into Jonah House, a religious community founded in 1973 by Philip Berrigan, the legendary -- and inflammatory -- leader of many Vietnam War protests. His followers ate what they could salvage from grocery-store castoffs, shared what little they had with neighbors and studied the Bible intensely.

“I began to learn how to live as a Christian,” Naar-Obed said.

She also began to break the law: trespassing, sabotage, property damage, contempt of court. She has lost track of her arrests.

She poured her blood on a nuclear submarine, spray-painted “No” across the entrance to a National Guard base, scattered flower seeds at a Navy communications site. Naar-Obed believed these illegal tactics were justified because they were aimed at stopping what she saw as far greater crimes of the U.S. military.

“If your neighbor’s house were on fire, would you kick in the door and run to the rescue, or would you stop and think, ‘I better not trespass?’ You wouldn’t think twice about it. We felt the same way,” Naar-Obed said.

She and fellow activist Greg Boertje-Obed celebrated their wedding in the spring of 1993 by donning overalls and hard hats and walking into the shipyard at Newport News, Va. They climbed a docked submarine and hammered at the missile launch tubes in a symbolic protest.

“This was our commitment to each other and the world that our marriage would be about this kind of life,” Naar-Obed said.

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A few months later, in a North Carolina county jail after yet another protest, Naar-Obed learned she was pregnant. To tell her husband in the adjacent cell, she had to stand on the toilet and shout through the air vent.

Naar-Obed’s father, himself a pacifist, does not fully understand the path she’s chosen.

“I don’t really know if she’s accomplishing anything. I don’t quite know how she justifies all her separations from her husband and daughter,” David Naar said. “I’m very proud of her. But I would prefer she had a different vocation.”

There are times when Naar-Obed wishes she could shake her calling.

She has spent about three years of her life behind bars, including 18 months in a federal prison for damaging another submarine when her daughter, Rachel, was a toddler. Yet her actions do little to stir the nation.

“It does shake my faith,” Naar-Obed said, “but not enough to say I’m going to quit. I can’t.

“You feel it in your heart, this surge that says this is the right way to live.”

In that spirit, Naar-Obed refuses to call the insurgents who captured her friends “kidnappers,” “terrorists” or even “captors.”

“That dehumanizes them. We don’t condone their actions, but we can’t condemn them as people,” she said. “God is in all of us.”

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That idealism alienates some of her neighbors in this northern Minnesota college town. One letter to the editor in the local paper referred to pacifists as “cowards.” Another letter writer, the wife of a National Guard soldier, stood up for war as the only way to “defend our nation’s and our children’s freedom.”

But Naar-Obed has enough local support that she has raised $3,000 for her upcoming trip.

“She’s living out Jesus’ call to love thy neighbor, no matter who that neighbor is,” said Kathryn Nelson, pastor of Peace United Church of Christ, which contributed $500.

The peace activists “are awfully brave people,” said Air Force Col. Jay Butcher, 44, who recently returned home to Duluth after two months in Iraq. “They’re doing what they think is right. Good for them.”

For the last three years, Naar-Obed and her family have belonged to a Catholic Worker community dedicated to charity.

Nine adults communally own three turn-of-the-century houses, a Honda Civic and a minivan. They pool whatever money they earn from odd jobs but it doesn’t amount to much; the furniture is all thrift-store battered and the pantry is stocked mostly with dried beans. They share a single TV among the three homes and rely on supporters to bring them meals several times a week.

Naar-Obed, Boertje-Obed and daughter Rachel live in two small, low-ceilinged rooms on the third floor of one house.

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The other community members also confine themselves to cramped quarters so they can open most of their rooms to the homeless.

In all her years of activism, Naar-Obed never considered going overseas until a second war in the Persian Gulf looked imminent. She told her husband she belonged in Baghdad and he agreed to stay home with Rachel.

“She feels very strongly that this is what God is leading her to do,” said Boertje-Obed, 50.

Christian Peacemakers, a nonprofit with offices in Chicago and Toronto, covers travel and living costs for 50 full-time activists worldwide. Naar-Obed is among 150 “reservists” who volunteer for shorter missions, at their own expense.

She spent five weeks in Iraq just before the war began; at one point, she stood by the Tigris River reading aloud the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s calls for nonviolent resistance. She returned in January 2004 and again this February to work with Iraqi families.

After one of her trips, Naar-Obed noticed that Rachel, now 11, no longer wanted to snuggle up and read with her at night. After another trip, Naar-Obed discovered Rachel experimenting with makeup. She regrets missing so much of her daughter’s childhood. And yet she feels compelled to return.

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Rachel says she understands. But she thinks about the four kidnapped peace workers. “Sometimes, I don’t want her to go,” she said. “I feel not so sure she’ll be safe.”

Naar-Obed maintains that the cause is more important than her personal safety. She will fly this week to Jordan and plans to go to Baghdad as soon as she gets a visa. But she’s not sure how she will react if her friends are killed.

Could she keep waging peace, without anger, without hate?

“I hope so,” she said. “I don’t know.”

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