Aheli Moitra
Kazu Haga had an awakening at the age of 17 when he walked, with a Japanese Buddhist order dedicated to peace and justice, from Massachusetts to New Orleans. The walk was part of a longer one that later went down the west coast of Africa to South Africa, retracing the slave route. The walk would talk about the Middle Passage, the legacy of slavery and how it continues to impact the United States of America. How do the people of the country begin to heal and reconcile from that legacy of violence?
Kazu, of course, took a part of this walk years after slavery had been abolished, African-Americans acquired voting rights and racial segregation was outlawed.
Yet the violence these conditions had caused over generations continues to permeate the life of North America today. Born in Tokyo, Kazu later lived in the temples of India, Nepal and Sri Lanka, eventually finding base in the USA. The culture of domination and violence, omnipresent in all strata of North American society today, affected him too.
To transform the situation, Kazu learned the praxis of nonviolence rooted in the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He established what is known as the East Point Peace Academy—an antidote to the West Point War Academy—that trains activists, youth, the incarcerated and students in the practice of nonviolence and reconciliation. The journey is long but he is preparing a new generation of North Americans to take it.
The experience of violence is familiar to the Naga people. Only they, and their fellow colonized peoples, can understand the full implication of living for half a century under military rule. Anger, and hurt, is everywhere.
As an observer of unfurling media wars in Nagaland, one can pick up the anger underlying the language that most writers here deploy. At public events, this often comes pouring out in the form of abomination of individuals, tribes, communities or groups that only serve to hurt others rather than alleviate grievance.
As Kazu often says, hurt people hurt people.
Changing the culture of violence is not easy, particularly when the conditions that gave rise to it in the first place are still intact. The 1997 Indo-Naga ceasefire has created a space for carrying on normal day-to-day affairs but has been a recipe for ‘negative peace’—unjust situations continue with the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act still applying to the Naga areas, armed movements remain alive thus and psychological warfare has had a field day in the last 20 years. Corruption from the colonial state has seeped into the social realm.
On March 12, 1930, MK Gandhi embarked on the famous Salt March, calling for the abolition of the British salt tax. It took Gandhi 15 years to prepare the philosophy and leadership that would fire the movement and months of research, testimony collection and mobilization to spark, and then spread, the fire. He channeled the anger, and hurt, the colonized people felt to the conditions that brutalized them—several levels of organizing led to a successful Salt March.
The praxis of nonviolence is often just that—a long walk of recognition, action, healing and reconciliation—but it comes with determined practice and united effort. In the midst of violence, it is difficult to see beyond individuals at the unjust systems at large. But holding anger against individuals, as a saying goes, is like drinking poison expecting the other person to die.
Lasting and just solutions are created when we, as the practice of nonviolence says, cut the rope, not the person holding it. For this to happen, the different Naga movements-whether for sovereignty or against corruption-need not work separately, or against each other, but combine efforts towards a holistic nonviolent Naga movement. One that predetermines the future in its present; the ends in its means.
Comments are welcome at moitramail@yahoo.com
