Women Hear of Horrors in Third World : Methodist Group Urged to ‘Take Sides’ Against Oppression

The first speaker decried repression in South Africa, the second denounced atrocities in Central America, but the third speaker brought the day’s topic, “A World in Search of Justice,” back home to the United States.

One of 11 defendants in the federal trial of the church sanctuary movement’s efforts to provide safe haven for Central American refugees, Peggy Hutchison wrapped up the Saturday morning session of the United Methodist Women’s Assembly by urging an Anaheim Convention Center audience of about 8,400 to become educated and “impassioned” about human suffering in South Africa and Central America and to work individually and through their congregations across the United States to bring about change.

Primed by the earlier speakers’ first-hand accounts of life in the Third World, the Methodists, who had come from across the United States and abroad, responded to Hutchison’s appeal with fervent applause.

The United Methodist Women, an organization of about 1 million members, “exists to fulfill the mission of Christ and the church, to serve as an advocate for women and children and to foster growth in the Christian faith,” said a spokesman for the group.

Raises $30 Million a Year

The organization raises about $30 million annually to support schools, hospitals, community centers and missionary work in this country and overseas and to fund ecumenical projects that primarily benefit women and children.

At the four-day assembly, which ended Sunday, conference-goers explored the theme “Into the Future by Faith” by browsing through technology exhibits, playing with IBM computers and attending workshops on such topics as health and education.

Before the Saturday morning talks, the group studied Bible verses and sang Methodist hymns dating back centuries. The talks, however, plunged the audience right into the 20th Century.

Saturday’s first speaker, Dr. Mamphela Ramphele, told the group she experienced the force of South Africa’s apartheid system of institutionalized racial segregation after she raised questions about the suspicious death of Mapetla Mohapi, a black activist who was being held by the police.

Detained and Banished

(Ramphele’s oldest child, named Hlumelo or “sprout from a dead tree,” is the son of the celebrated black nationalist leader Steve Biko, who died while imprisoned in 1977.)

After Ramphele spoke up about Mohapi’s death, the white minority government detained her for five months without charges, then banished her to a township 1,000 miles from her home.

She lived there for 16 years, during which she founded a hospital, a library, a day-care center, a school, a scholarship program and a brick-making operation.

Ramphele now lives in Capetown, where she is a senior research officer at the University of Capetown, working with migrant workers and their families.

“I’m here to share with you the anguish of being a member of a society in the throes of birth pains . . . the birth pains of a new era,” Ramphele said. The people of South Africa, she continued, are now asking themselves the questions that all expectant mothers ask: “Is it going to be a normal child? . . . (Or) is it going to be stillborn?

“Oh lord, let it not be,” she said.

Unfortunately, whatever comes of South Africa’s current unrest, the children and youth of the country--those who have not been killed--have already been “disabled” psychologically by the “vicious spiral of violence” in their country, Ramphele said.

As she described it, the younger generations of South Africans have grown up in a climate of such fear and brutality that they themselves have become brutal and reckless toward the government that has oppressed them.

Family Disintegration

And as a result of the government’s segregation policies, which force many black men and women to commute hours from their homes each day to earn a living while keeping them in poverty, the black family has disintegrated, she said.

“The child we see on the streets today doesn’t know love and thus can’t love. He doesn’t know security, and he doesn’t mature. He doesn’t know tolerance, and he is not tolerant. . . . This child doesn’t know about democracy and therefore can’t fight for democracy. This child doesn’t know justice and therefore can’t seek justice.”

What they do know, Ramphele said, is that “violence does pay because that’s what (South African) society is about.”

Meanwhile, black parents live in constant terror that their children will be killed in the latest battle with security forces, she said.

Ramphele made it clear that she and other black South Africans hold their white minority government responsible for its policies, but she also urged the group to protest the policies of the U.S. government and multinational corporations, which she accused of “propping up apartheid.”

The next speaker, Elsa Tamez, picked up Ramphele’s narrative thread.

“Today I am going to tell you some sad and painful things about the women in Central America, things that consciously or unconsciously, we don’t want to see or hear about, although they are right in front of our eyes,” said Tamez, a Mexican who teaches at the Latin American Biblical Seminary in San Jose, Costa Rica.

Tamez spoke of rapes and torture of women and children at the hands of El Salvadoran and Guatemalan security forces, which she said she had witnessed during her missionary work.

Double Oppression

Citing statistics from various human rights organizations, she said that the “disappearances” in those countries continue. Although men, especially the poor, “suffer terribly under oppression in Central America, women suffer doubly under male chauvinist ideology,” which keeps them subservient even to those being repressed by the government, she said.

Equating the situation in Central America to the biblical story in Judges 19, the rape of the concubine, Tamez urged the audience to heed the final verse of that story: “Consider, take counsel, speak.”

“Don’t close your eyes to the horrors of Central America so that you will have a good night’s sleep,” she said. The women and children of the Third World “evangelize us by showing us the face of suffering.”

Currently the lay director of the United Methodist Church’s Border Ministry in Tucson, Hutchison is one of 11 lay and clerical Catholic, Presbyterian, Quaker, Unitarian and Methodist church workers on trial on federal charges of smuggling illegal aliens into this country.

Government Infiltration

Members of the sanctuary movement, which reportedly is embraced by about 300 churches and synagogues nationwide, Hutchison and her co-defendants say that by providing safe haven for Central American refugees, who may face torture or death if returned to their war-torn homelands, they were following biblical decrees and international treaties.

The U.S. government, which built its case by infiltrating the movement, sending informants wearing hidden microphones into church services at which the refugees told of their experiences in Central America, is arguing that the church workers are simply smugglers who took the law into their own hands. The jury in the Tucson trial is still deliberating its verdict.

Hutchison, whom Good Housekeeping magazine named “an outstanding young woman of America” in 1985, told the group that she first became involved in the sanctuary movement after meeting a couple named “Francisco and Sandra” at a “safe house” in Mexico while she was working with a Methodist ministry.

The couple, Hutchison said, told her that they had been targeted by the government of El Salvador as subversives because of their work with refugees within their country.

‘The Little Airplane’

Soon thereafter, the couple told her, government troops took them and their children into custody.

Francisco was subjected to a form of torture called “the little airplane” in which guards would string him from the ceiling by his arms and legs, and then sit on his back, Hutchison said.

When a guard brought Francisco’s 9-month-old son into the room and threatened to plunge him into a tank of cold water, Francisco signed a confession stating that he was a Communist and subversive.

“My question this morning for all of us here is do we as individuals . . . as a church, a community of faith, have a responsibility to respond to the Franciscos and Sandras and the thousands and thousands of others like them from Central America, living in South Africa?”

Learning About Reality

Hutchison told the gathering that “sanctuary is a mutual ministry . . . it is not a ministry of charity” because the refugees pay for their safekeeping by educating congregations “about the reality of life in Central America.”

She and her co-defendants, Hutchison said, are convinced that it is precisely this “educational” aspect of the sanctuary movement that prompted the Reagan Administration to prosecute them.

“Had we been silent about this ministry, had we not allowed the refugees to share their stories, we probably would not be sitting in that courtroom today” because what the refugees told American churchgoers “is very different from President Reagan’s reality of Central America,” Hutchison charged.

Quoting a German theologian who said that the United States suffers from “an intellectual apartheid of information,” Hutchison urged the Methodists to educate themselves.

Call to Action

“Let us seek opportunities to hear, to get to know, Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees, invite them to your churches, to your UMW meetings. . . . Look for opportunities to learn about the situation in South Africa, to hear what that struggle is all about.

“When I think about the injustice and the persecution and the oppression of refugees within the courtroom, of refugees within the United States of America, of refugees around this world, I am angry and I’m impassioned, and I hope I don’t lose that passion.”

Hutchison urged the assembly to overcome complacency and “become electrified” about “injustice and oppression.”

It is time “to take sides,” she said. “It is very clear to us that on this point, there is no possible neutrality.”