Wings of peace

Light as childhood dreams, they are prayers in paper form. The Japanese call them “senbazuru,” the gift of a thousand origami paper cranes traditionally given with the belief that a person who folds a thousand cranes will be magically granted a wish.

It’s a beautiful belief that gained worldwide prominence because of the unique example of Sadako Sasaki, who was only two years old when her native Hiroshima was zapped with a nuclear bomb on Aug. 6, 1945. She lived the life of a normal child for a decade and then became ill of leukemia for which she had to be taken to hospital. It was then, in 1955, that she heard the legend of the magical paper cranes. She began folding the birds and hanging them from the ceiling of her hospital room. “I will write peace on your wings, and you will fly all over the world,” she wrote. Sadly, she died within a year, at the tender age of 12.

Sadako’s story of celebrating life amid darkness has inspired countless people in countless places. A monument to her was put up in Hiroshima and the story of the thousand paper cranes turned into a global revelation, with the delicate birds becoming a worldwide symbol for peace.

That same sterling inspiration is what led to a new campaign in the Philippines launched by human rights activists last July 2 at the University of the Philippines in Diliman and July 18 in Los Baños. The “Piso for Peace (Peso for Peace): 1 Million Peace Cranes” initiative employs the idea of the paper cranes as a way to persuade the military to pull out from Quezon province. The initiative is led by the Save Bondoc Peninsula Movement (SBPM), which includes nongovernment rights groups such as Karapatan and the Children’s Rehabilitation Center.

The SBPM led a weeklong caravan in Lucena City and the towns of San Andres and Lopez in Quezon, where human rights advocates visited schools and taught students how to fold used notebook pages and old newspapers into origami cranes. To the question of what they thought the cranes symbolized, the mother of a student was reported as saying that “like a bird that flies freely away, [we], too, want to live freely.”

Aside from denouncing what it described as an overly large concentration of military forces in the Southern Tagalog region, Karapatan had earlier accused the soldiers in Quezon of human rights violations, saying it had received 129 complaints of abduction, torture and illegal searches. The Southern Luzon Command has vehemently denied that its soldiers were involved in such violations.

The children are often the worst affected in areas of conflict although they seldom let it show. Last December, a number of child rights groups got together with the support of the European Union and held a “Peace Camp” at the Bantayog ng mga Bayani in Quezon City for human rights victims aged 7 to 17. Those sent to the Peace Camp for counseling were children of parents who had been killed or had disappeared, or whose families had been displaced by military operations in their hometowns. At the camp, the children recounted how they had struggled with hunger and violent deaths all around them. “Healing will take time,” said Rep. Emmi de Jesus of the party-list group Gabriela, who read to the children. “But it will be relatively easier [for them] to process their experience if they’re empowered. You don’t just cure the pain and the trauma. You must also equip them with an empowering attitude.”

The kids at the Peace Camp are but a tiny representation of the countless children caught in the middle of conflict as the Philippine military continues to battle long-running insurgencies in the north and south. Everywhere they are, children pay a price that is invisible and insidious. Steps have to be taken to protect them from the violence that descends whenever armed conflict arises among them. This is a prayer that is sent on the wings of the children’s folded birds to the leaders of the military and the forces they battle. This is the hope of the “Piso for Peace” project, that their million paper cranes will help end the battlefield around us.

This is a dream set in perfect flight by the inscription at the foot of the monument to Sadako Sasaki in Hiroshima, that of a young girl holding a paper crane up to the infinite sky. The inscription reads: “This is our cry. This is our prayer. Peace in the world.”