Gary Cozette's Acceptance Remarks
2008 Presbyterian Peace Fellowship Peaceseeker Award
We move forward together today as a community of hope.
With this award, I thank Grace Gyori*, who with her spouse Tom, served for two decades as Presbyterian fraternal workers in Guatemala. Grace organized Chicago Presbytery to support for my presence in El Salvador where I sent urgent action alerts on behalf of human rights defenders. Grace is the primary reason I stand here today.
I thank Chess and Gary Campbell, longtime Presbyterian fraternal workers in Mexico and Nicaragua, who in their screening interview with me, offered effusive support and solidarity saying - well, this was quite a few years ago - "we need more young people like you in the church doing this work of solidarity with the people of our hemisphere."
I remember today the witness for justice of Maria Cristina Gomez, a lay leader in Emanuel Baptist Church in San Salvador, who was abducted in 1988 in front of her students at the John F. Kennedy elementary school where she was a teacher. She was abducted by death squads lined to the U.S. funded Salvadoran military. Her tortured body was found dead the next day dumped in a ravine.
I honor two refugee women, who in El Salvador, who, after taking me to meet with dozens of displaced families who had flooded the Archdiocese Seminary soccer field fleeing the scorched earth violence of the U.S. funded-and-trained Salvadoran military, thanked me for my visit, and then said to me: "Please go back and tell your President not to send the bombs that are destroying our homes, and the bullets that are killing our families."
I also honor the courageous public witness of the Presbyterian Church of Colombia for speaking out against state-sponsored violence and human rights atrocities. I thank Rev. Milton Mejia, its past General Secretary, for his courageous advocacy for the displaced people of Colombia - now numbering 4 million - and his prophetic voice among us here in the United States. **
I thank the More Light Congregations, who are bearing witness to a vital human rights struggle of our time. I thank the amazing artisans who created these scarves we wear here, dazzling, beautiful symbols of this human rights struggle within the church and society.
Finally, I thank all of you committed to building the "beloved community" envisioned by Martin Luther King, and the Kingdom of God to which we are called by Jesus.
General Antonio Taguba, who 4 years ago the U.S. military charged with investigating claims of torture and abuse at Abu Graihb, assert last week that our nation's top leaders are responsible for war crimes. We must work together to end the egregious practice of torture by our government.
Thank you.
