Mennonite Weekly Review

On my desk is 118 Days: Christian Peacemaker Teams Held Hostage in Iraq, edited by Tricia Gates Brown, published by CPT, 2008, 227 pages, $17.99. An edition published by Cascadia will be available this month.

Melanie Zuercher is the writer and editor for institutional communications at Bethel College in North Newton, Kan.

Those who have been reading this newspaper for at least three years will be acquainted with many of the facts of the Nov. 26, 2005, kidnapping of three members of a Christian Peacemaker Teams delegation to Iraq (Briton Norman Kember, Canadian James Loney and New Zealand resident Harmeet Singh Sooden) and the delegation leader (American Tom Fox).

Fox was murdered sometime in early March 2006, his body found March 9 in Baghdad. The other three were rescued March 23 after 118 days in captivity. The full identity and ideological connections of the kidnappers remain unknown to this day.

Those facts are here in full, along with many others beyond the scope of reporting by outsiders. But the value of this book does not lie so much in the filling in of blanks that allow fuller pictures of the four men who were held hostage and to the events over those 118 days to emerge, as satisfying as that can be.

CPT co-coordinator Doug Pritchard describes the effect of this book perfectly in its foreword: “The kidnapping is like a rock thrown into a pond. This book describes the ripples set in motion by that rock.”

One of the most moving can be found in Chapter 10, “Taken Twice,” by Dan Hunt, Loney’s life partner. CPT self-published 118 Days because other publishers wanted to cut parts of Hunt’s story. Hunt and many members of Loney’s Christian community in Toronto made the agonizing choice to become all but invisible in order to protect Loney’s life because of Muslim fundamentalist attitudes about homosexuality.

We learn the implications and ramifications of a violent act that stole the freedom of four Westerners. How many who followed the story in these pages or on the Web sites of larger news organizations knew, for example, about the Palestinian refugees caught in U.N. camps on the border between Iraq and Syria who wept at the news of the kidnapping because Tom Fox had visited them there? Or about the ancient Palestinian village of At-Tuwani, near Hebron, whose residents organized a protest march to call for release of all prisoners in Iraq and Palestine? Or Hassan, one of Canada’s “secret-trial detainees,” who figured out how to speak from solitary confinement for the release of Loney, who had spoken out numerous times on his and other detainees’ behalf? Or about the often appallingly egregious ways U.S. and British media “wrote peace out of the script” when reporting on the kidnapping and rescue? I didn’t.

Those stories are here, along with a short article by Kember, an interview with Sooden, a profile of Fox and Loney’s tribute to Fox and the experience the four men shared over 118 days.

The book concludes with the “statement of forgiveness” that Kember, Sooden and Loney delivered at a press conference in London on Dec. 6, 2006, the one-year anniversary of the day the kidnappers issued an ultimatum threatening to kill them, and with an impressive list, in the Appendix, of the people and groups who issued support statements or appeals on the four men’s behalf.

To read this book is to hear “testimony to the pain, loss and elation it takes to do the work of peace,” to quote Stanley Hauerwas, and to be forced to ask yourself: “What would I do?”