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ACTIVISM
Camp Copley
BY CHRIS WRIGHT

Maslakh, the largest refugee camp in Afghanistan, is drenched in artificial light. Reporters scribble furiously as a group of refugees relate their plight. "I walked 125 miles to get here," says one woman, huddling on a grubby blanket with her children. "I lost my two sons and my husband. I have very little food." Another woman recalls the night her village became the target of American bombs. "There was fire and there was screaming," she says, "a terrible thunder. Our house collapsed."

A boy stands next to his father, a few feet from a field of yellow cluster bombs. "What did I ever do to deserve this?" the boy asks, holding up a bloody stump. The father whips out a sheet of paper and begins to read: "Oh little hand, oh busy hand.... Oh little hand, where are you now?"

Your average refugee, of course, is not generally given to reciting free verse for the benefit of the press. But this man is no ordinary refugee. In fact, he’s not a refugee at all. He is a volunteer for the local antiwar group United for Justice With Peace (UJWP), which is staging an elaborate piece of street theater in Copley Square.

Every Tuesday since September 11, the UJWP has held antiwar rallies in Copley Square. It hasn’t always been easy. "People say rude things to us," says UJWP member Susan MacLucas. "Most people avoid interacting with us at all." More troubling than the animosity, however, is the growing sense of apathy. "[The rallies were] bigger at the beginning," MacLucas says. Indeed, while a hundred or so protesters would show up in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, that number has since dwindled to about 20 — a far cry from the tens of thousands who take to the streets of London and San Francisco.

"We’re trying to be a peace movement," MacLucas says. "We’re always sitting around scratching our heads, thinking about how we can get people to care. We certainly intend to be cranking up the visibility."

Well, they’ve succeeded tonight, even though their theater often seems more comic than tragic. "Those are land mines; watch your step!" says a volunteer to a man who has stepped on a yellow sheet of paper with CLUSTER BOMB written on it. The man is blind.

"Tell them you’re cold and hungry," says an organizer to one of the younger "refugees," who rolls his eyes and replies, "Yeah, yeah." A woman, lamenting the lack of water at the camp, says that her burka "stands by itself," and that her thirst is "de-energizing." When a "reporter" asks a man wearing a false beard his name, the man says, "Rich McCambell."

"Hello," says one woman, "I’m a peasant."

The real Maslakh — which translates into "slaughterhouse," after the abattoir on which it was built — is no laughing matter. The camp is home to about 200,000 people. Dysentery, tuberculosis, starvation, and exposure take the lives of a hundred people a day. "We’re trying to show how these people are suffering," says MacLucas, "how cold and hungry and thirsty they are."

Yet you have to ask: can a middle-class Boston activist give us a true sense of such suffering? "All we can do is the best we can," MacLucas says. "We can’t claim to know what it’s like. All we can do is try to imagine it in our heads."

Actually, as the event enters its second hour, the "refugees" seem gripped by cold, hunger, and thirst that are all too authentic. By the time City Councilor Chuck Turner launches into a speech about the "terrorism" of American foreign policy, a sense of real misery pervades the Copley Maslakh.

But as the evening draws to a close, Susan MacLucas says she’s a little disappointed. "It’s not what I expected," she says, adding, "I would have liked more refugees."

Issue Date: February 21 - 28, 2002
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