From war, vision for peace
Decorated Army officer to speak at Kateri Tekakwitha event
Retired U.S. Army Col. Ann Wright, 71, was a diplomat in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, when rebelling soldiers overthrew the president, shot civilians and used machetes to chop people’s limbs off in the streets. The embassy closed down while the American staff fled through screaming crowds to a downtown hotel. Wright organized the evacuation of hundreds of Americans and local employees — who would have been slaughtered by the troops — in about four days using three helicopters.
“I was on a huge ship offshore where the helicopters would carry 50 evacuees per flight and we had hundreds of Americans left to evacuate,” Wright remembered.
Then the mutineers set the hotel on fire.
What happened next won Wright the U.S. State Department Award for Heroism in 1997. It would also shape her vision as a future peace activist, which is why she was invited to speak at the 20th annual 2018 Kateri Tekakwitha Peace Conference in Fonda on Saturday from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Other guest speakers include former CIA analyst RayMc govern, sociologist environmentalist Gr et aZ arro, author Kathy Kelly, Truthout’s William Rivers Pitt and former University at Albany journalism professor Rosemary Armao.
The pilots thought they could land on a road strip near the beach, so the evacuees fled there and Wright went ashore to supervise. She found the crowd swelled by hundreds desperate to escape. On the first two days, evacuees could take one piece of luggage. The last day, they could take nothing.
“On the last day, I was the only State Department official left in Sierra Leone and I had to go through the crowd and pull the Americans out and onto helicopters,” she said. “We got them all. But there were also embassy staffers crying and pleading to go with us because they were sure they would be executed. I saved as many as I could but I couldn’t save all of them.”
Wright is not starry eyed about the chances of peace in the world today. A lawyer by training, she spent 13 years as active duty Army and was a U.S. Embassy deputy in Afghanistan. She was in the State Department researching on Iraq, when President George W. Bush made the 2003 decision to invade Iraq. She was one of the three State Department officials to resign in protest because her research indicated Bush’s claims Iraq had weapons of mass destruction were false.
“I disagree with the administration’s policies on Iraq, the Israeli-palestinian conflict, North Korea and curtailment of civil liberties in the U.S. itself,” she wrote to then-u.s. Secretary of State Colin Powell in 2003. “I believe the administration’s policies are making the world a more dangerous, not a safer, place.”
A lawyer by training, Wright is still passionately interested in Middle East politics particularly the Palestinians’ legal predicaments in Gaza. Just a few weeks ago, she was leading the Freedom Flotilla, the fourth and most recent effort to run boats with $30,000 worth of medical supplies past an Israeli-egyptian blockade. Wright was on a huge fishing trawler loaded with cotton gauze and sutures leading two sailboats and a smaller vessel, carrying the same cargo.
“Palestinian hospitals told us that there were so many wounded from Israeli shelling that they ran out of gauze and sutures,” Wright said. “All the passengers on my boat were female, 22 of us, so when the Israeli Navy stopped us 39 miles off the shore of Gaza, all female sailors boarded and handcuffed us. They told us to be quiet and not explain why we were doing this. They really didn’t want to have a conversation.”
She isn’t sure where the medical supplies will end up.
Yet she remains optimistic that the Palestinians and Israelis will one day have discussions that lead to a peace.
She points to the 2015 trip leaders of Black Lives Matter and Black Youth Project 100 took to Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank back in 2015 to talk with Palestinian and Jewish youths who shared an interest in peacefully defending human rights.
“That’s the new generation taking an interest and that gives me hope,” she said.