Building Bridges of Peace instead of Fear-Citizen Diplomacy with Russia

By Ann Wright

 

I just flew across 11 times zones--from Tokyo, Japan to Moscow, Russia.  

 

Russia is the largest country in the world, covering more than one-eighth of the Earth's inhabited land area, nearly twice as large as the United States and has extensive mineral and energy resources, the largest reserves in the world. Russia has the world's ninth largest population with over 146.6 million people. The population of the U.S. of 321,400,000 is more than twice as large as Russia's.  

 

I haven't been back to Russia since the early 1990s when the Soviet Union dissolved itself and allowed 14 new countries to be created from it.  At the time I was a U.S. diplomat and wanted to be a part of the historic opening of U.S. Embassies in one of the newly formed countries.  I asked to be sent to a new country in Central Asia and soon found myself in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. 

 

Since the new embassies were being logistically supported out of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, I was fortunate to make frequent trips to Moscow in the short three months I was in Uzbekistan until the permanent Embassy staff was assigned. Several years later  in 1994, I returned to Central Asia for a two year tour in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan and again made trips to Moscow.

 

Now almost twenty-five years later, after more than two decades of peaceful co-existence with a monumental shift from state operated institutions to privatized businesses and the Russian Federation joining the G20, the Council of Europe, the Asia-Paciic Economic Cooperation (APEC), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the World Trade Organization, the U.S./NATO and Russia are engaged in a 21st century cold war complete with large military "exercises" in which a small mis-step could bring war.

 

On June 16 I will join a group of 19 US citizens and one from Singapore in Moscow, Russia.  We are going to Russia to do what we can to continue bridges of peace with the Russian people, bridges that our governments seem be having difficulty maintaining. 

 

With international tensions high, members of our delegation believe its time for the citizens of all nations to loudly declare that military confrontation and hot rhetoric are not the way to resolve international problems.

 

Our group is composed of several retired U.S. government officials and persons representing peace organizations.  As a retired US Army Reserve Colonel and former US diplomat, I join retired CIA officer Ray McGovern and retired Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East and CIA analyst Elizabeth Murray.  Ray and I are members of Veterans for Peace and Elizabeth is the member-in-residence of Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action.  The three of us are also members of the Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.