Correctly believing that the murder was politically motivated, she began a one-woman crusade to prove her suspicion and to break the culture of impunity for political crimes that Guatemala’s various military regimes had fostered. After nearly a decade, hearings before no fewer than twelve different judges, and the assassination of the lead police investigator, the military commando who murdered Chang’s sister was finally convicted. During that period, Chang’s bulldog persistence in following the chain of evidence also led to the indictment of three high-ranking military officers who ordered the slaying.
During the course of her search for her sister’s murderer, Chang received many death threats and was even occasionally accused by other anti-government activists of being motivated by a desire for revenge. But Chang insisted that she sought justice rather than reprisal. “This is a fight for rationality in justice and for the common happiness that is the fruit of justice,” she said. Her sister’s murder was the catalyst for calling into question the arbitrariness of a justice system that prosecuted some crimes but ignored those committed in the interests of the repressive government. In essence, she said, pursuit of the governmental forces that murdered her sister was “putting on trial the existing policy of terror in Guatemala during the last thirty years.”
Chang’s efforts were honored with the 1993 Right Livelihood Award, a recognition often referred to as the alternative Nobel Peace Prize. Shortly afterwards she founded the Myrna Mack Foundation, a human rights advocacy organization, to continue her struggle for “rational”—nonarbitrary—justice in Guatemala.
20 January
Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan
1890—20 January 1988
Servant of God
In 1921, thirty-one-year-old Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was behind bars for defying British colonial law. His crime was working for educational reform in remote villages of present-day Pakistan. When the magistrate questioning him expressed doubt about Khan’s professed loyalty to nonviolence, Khan replied that he was a follower of Mohandas Gandhi. “And what if you’d never heard of Gandhi?” he was asked. The tall, muscular Khan startled the magistrate by effortlessly pulling the iron bars apart. He was sentenced to three years.
Khan was born into a wealthy and devout Muslim family in the Pathan village of Utmanzai. Despite the Pathan tradition of blood feuds and honor killings, which made the tribe one of the most violent in British India’s Northwest Frontier, Khan’s father struggled to live peacefully and to instill an aversion to violence in his son. He raised Khan to see Islam as a religion that advocated harmony and reconciliation.
The roots of Khan’s nonviolence thus lay explicitly in his religious faith. He was convinced not only that the basic message of Islam is peace, but that this message of peace was the key to reconciliation with all other faiths as well. As an adult, Khan’s openness to other religious perspectives made him a close friend and collaborator of Gandhi. Together the two worked to reconcile Hindus and Muslims in their common quest for independence from the British Raj.
One of the most dramatic expressions of Khan’s devotion to nonviolence was his 1924 founding of the Khudai Khidmatgars, or “Servants of God,” a nonviolent army of Pathans whose members took an oath to serve “humanity in the name of God, to refrain from violence and revenge, and to forgive those who oppressed them or treated them with cruelty.” The Servants of God, who eventually numbered approximately one hundred thousand, boasted all the trappings of a regular army. They wore uniforms, formed regiments, and trained and drilled. But their training was in nonviolent resistance and their weapons were patience and righteousness, which, according to Khan, “no power on earth can stand against.” The Servants of God were at hundreds of strikes and public demonstrations against the British rulers of India to protect participants from British soldiers. British repression of them was particularly severe, in part because of the Pathans’ legendary ferocity as warriors. In 1930, after one of Khan’s periodic arrests by the authorities, the British killed three hundred of them as they conducted a nonviolent protest. Their resilient dedication to nonviolence and their courage amazed even Gandhi.
After India’s independence in 1947 and subsequent separation from Pakistan, Khan worked with the new country to encourage the growth of democratic institutions. But he proved a thorn in the side of Pakistani leaders who wished to make the nation a military power. Repeatedly arrested and imprisoned—he once sadly noted that he had been treated more humanely in British prisons than in Pakistani ones—he became a worldwide symbol of the prisoner of conscience. Three years before his death, he was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
21 January
Hildegard Goss-Mayr
22 January 1930—
Marked for Peace
In 1942, twelve-year-old Hildegard Mayr witnessed the growing terror in Vienna as communists, pacifists, and Jews were arrested and taken away by Nazi thugs. Even her own parents, both Catholic pacifists, were under surveillance. But despite the danger facing her whole family, she refused to go along with the “Heil Hitler!” waves of jubilation that swept over her fellow students every time another Wehrmacht victory was announced. As she recalled, “I felt a huge force pressing on me . . . and I said to myself, ‘you have to resist . . . don’t raise your hand even if they lynch you.’” This will to resist the evil of violence, developed at so young an age, marked her for life. She knew even then that she had to choose between “the forces of death and the spirit of revenge, or the forces of life that are able to overcome evil at its root.” She chose life and nonviolence.
Hildegard and her family managed to survive the terrible Nazi years, and she went on to study philosophy in France and the United States, eventually earning a doctorate. She joined the International Fellowship of Reconciliation in 1953, a year before she married Jean Goss, a World War II combat veteran turned pacifist. The couple traveled around the world, teaching nonviolence and conflict resolution to laypeople, nuns, and priests in such countries as Brazil, Mexico, and the Philippines. Whether opposing the Cold War nuclear doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD) in the 1960s, working in Africa in the 1970s in the struggle against colonialism, or being arrested in Brazil in 1975 for teaching firmeza permanente, a tactic similar to Gandhi’s practice of meeting violence with persistent firmness, Goss-Mayr and her husband were at the forefront of peace work in the second half of the twentieth century.
A regular feature of Goss-Mayr’s approach to teaching peace was to remind her students that peace was as much an inner attitude as an external change in policy or economic and social structures. Without the cultivation of both, neither was possible in the long run. As she said in 1984 while helping Filipinos devise nonviolent strategies to end President Ferdinand Marcos’s repressive regime, “The seed of violence is in the structure, of course, and in the dictator. But isn’t it also in ourselves? It’s very easy to say that Marcos is the evil. But unless we each tear the dictator out of our own heart, nothing will change.”
Her husband and coworker, Jean, died in 1991. Goss-Mayr continues to train peaceworkers in nonviolence and to advocate for justice, proving herself, as fellow peace worker John Dear says, “the greatest living peacemaker.”
22 January
U Thant
22 January 1909—25 November 1974
Searching for Peaceful Coexistence
On a September night in 1961, Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary-General of the United Nations, died in a plane crash while on his way to negotiate a ceasefire between warring factions in what was then called Northern Rhodesia. Hammarskjöld had
