Can We Let This Anniversary Pass in Silence?

Perhaps the most honest commemorations are punctuated by deliberate silence. In moments marked by the bitterness of loss as much as an incapacity to move on, we respond to pain that is experienced as inexpressible. There was much to recommend such a response to the five-year anniversary of the occupation of Iraq. Images of bodies tortured and swelling numbers of the dead and displaced must, it seems, only render us silent. To put into words the grief over the unnecessary deaths of thousands, or even more, and the disruption of millions of lives, may seem grotesque, if not insincere.

But the anniversary passed last March under a very different kind of silence, one without outrage or any sense of mourning or palpable loss. It was the silence of fatigue and defeat, unmoved by the violence emanating from the infrastructures we keep in play. And while it seemed that we on Columbia’s campus were virtually unmoved by this omission, our silence spoke volumes to the world: “We have moved on.”

Unfortunately, however, “moving on” is a luxury reserved exclusively for those effectively quarantined from the real effects of the politics our silence underwrites.
Yet at the same time, Columbia University has been anything but silent. Our institution has not only exhibited extraordinary complacency toward this war but has in fact actively contributed to both the intellectual and financial underpinnings of what the vast majority of us condemn. As of summer 2006, Columbia had invested over $4 million in General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin—two of which are brazen enough to report in filings to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that their continued profits depend on the ongoing occupation of Iraq. If the institutional rejection of last fall’s divestment proposal is any indication, we can only imagine where this portfolio stands now.

While it should come as no surprise that companies producing defense technology have profit margins dependent upon the continued demands of wartime, the entanglement of the University with these interests must give us pause. Through the investments of our own tuition dollars—the dividends of which contribute to every Columbia paycheck—we are drawn into the economy of war, both individually and as a community.

Many of us still hold firm to the belief that the University is ideally a space of deliberation and dispute, principles to which this occupation is antithetical. Can we, as an academic community charged with the interrogation of the world around us, allow this space to be compromised by building the most questionable of profit structures into the very foundation of our institutional existence?

On April 21 to 25, a broad coalition of students has set aside a week for us to call into question our own complicity and to commemorate the passing of five years of occupation in Iraq. Regardless of how we respond, it seems to us that none of us can allow this call to go unheeded. As a community intimately tied to the financial and intellectual institutions of this occupation, we must refuse to let another anniversary pass unmarked.

Measures of the numbers of the dead in Iraq range from the thousands to over a million—numbers of which we cannot even conceive. A challenge has been extended to the Columbia community: to take the Iraq Body Count, a list most agree represents only a tiny fraction of the total war-related deaths in Iraq over the last five years, and read every name in chronological order by date of death. The reading of the names will take place all throughout the week at the sundial on College Walk.

As of this writing, this will cover over 94,000 names.

Secondly, this group has asked that for just four hours, starting at noon on Thursday, April 24, we halt our day-to-day lives in order to come together as a community to mark this anniversary in one of the many ways we see fit—whether this is a statement against occupation, against Columbia’s participation in this war, or simply to recognize our inescapable responsibility to mourn.

The question before us is whether we can continue to abide by the protocols of our own fatigue, to indulge in the untenable luxury of moving on, and to let this anniversary pass in silence. Unmarked anniversaries, like unmarked graves, surrender our past and the memory of the dead to the mundane temporality of daily headlines. In doing so, we leave the present at risk of the kind of revisionism we so abhor in other historical contexts and yet of which we are startlingly uncritical in our own. Perhaps worse, we concede the ground upon which our futures may be built.

The authors are students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences studying anthropology.