Power to the peaceful

ISRAEL, June 15, 2004: “I saw great acts of human kindness, endurance and beauty, and I saw the worst forms of violence, oppression and ugliness. I have learned that all of us have the power within ourselves to achieve both.”

It’s not your average tour diary entry, but then Michael Franti isn’t your average musician.
This summer, Franti led a Peace Delegation to the Middle East. The group spent two weeks travelling through Jordon, Israel and Iraq, meeting with local families, visiting hospitals and speaking with local media. Never one to separate his artistic role from that of activist, poet and humanitarian, he also packed a guitar.
We’re speaking to Michael from his San Francisco home, where he’s just returned from a Canadian tour, and before that, the European festival circuit. Ask what inspired him to make the Middle East trip in the first place and he says, “I got tired of listening to what was happening in the Middle East through the eyes of George Bush and his cronies, so I said ‘I’m gonna go see it for myself’. I went there as a tourist. So when I got off the plane I asked for a tourist visa and they had to go and see if they even had such a thing. [laughs] And they didn’t!”
Michael also asked some friends to come along. The Peace Delegation consisted of himself, his manager, two human rights attorneys (“One of whom had been an officer in the US army before becoming an attorney”), five filmmakers, and an American aid worker who had been working in the Palestinian refugee camps for the last 20 years. When they reached Baghdad, they also enlisted the help of some local handlers.
“Handlers act as professional guides in Iraq and they take journalists and businessmen around,” Franti explains. “So when you’ve gotta go meet with somebody you don’t just show up – you have to have someone call in advance for you, set up a time and a meeting place that’s safe, and then have them drive you.”
“Just getting around Baghdad is crazy,” he continues. “Because the city has been blown up a lot, there’s lots of roads that have been damaged beyond driveability. And with the roads that aren’t shut down, there’s many that the occupation forces have taken for their own purposes and don’t allow anyone else to drive on.”
“On top of that there’s guns everywhere. There’s lots of shootings and no one ever knows when there’s gonna be a bombing, so everyone drives like a crazy person.”
Like out of a constant state of panic?
“Yeah, and not wanting to be on the road any longer than they have to be…” Michael pauses before continuing. “Very few people have water, the electricity goes on and off, there’s widespread unemployment and everyone has a gun – you put that all together and you have a very dangerous cocktail of a society.”
And you know you’re in a war zone when the streets are deserted at 4 o’clock in the afternoon. “There’s just no safety on the streets, so everyone will retreat home before it gets dark,” Franti says. “No one knows when they’re going to be attacked and robbed, there’s rape that occurs and you also never know when you’re going to be confronted by soldiers. And the soldiers are so paranoid that they shoot first and ask questions later.”
Speaking of paranoia, it seems tourist photography was a particular sore point with the occupation forces.
“We were asked as we were driving around to never take any pictures of soldiers or military things happening. There are even signs outside the Central Command that say ‘No photography. Lethal force is authorized’. And the handlers said that if you’re leaning out of the car with a camera they will shoot at the car.”
The threat of lethal force aside, the US soldiers were not perturbed by the presence of a Peace Delegation. If anything, says Michael, they just wanted a chat.
“We were never harassed because all the kids that are in the military are 21 or 22 years old and they’re just lonely and sick of being there. So as soon as they heard that I spoke English, they just wanted to know where I was from and what I was doing there.”
Did anyone try to discourage him from visiting Iraq before he left the US?
“I had a lot of e-mails to that effect, and obviously I had to have a lot of conversations with my family about it,” he says. “I also got a call a few days before I left from Woody Harrelson, who’s a buddy of mine. He said, ‘Man, I’m calling to try to talk you out of going. Don’t go man!’ And when I got back I called him and left a message saying, ‘Woody! I’ve been kidnapped. Send me 50 bucks or else they’re not gonna let me go. Call all your Hollywood friends!’”
If ever there was an appropriate time for inappropriate gags then this was it.
“Two weeks before we left was when all the kidnapping and beheading occurred,” explains Michael. “And apart from that, all the images from Abu Ghraib had just come out. And of course the last thing I wanted was to be somewhere with a bag over my head, with whoever in charge of it. I was afraid from both sides – I didn’t know if there was the potential to be kidnapped and used as a hostage for Iraqi political gains, or taken by the CIA or whatever because they didn’t want me sniffing around there.”
Despite arriving in Iraq at a time when anti-American sentiment was at a peak, Franti says that he didn’t feel any ill feeling directed towards him.
“I know that people didn’t see me as a soldier,” says the perpetually barefooted, six-foot-six singer. “People saw me as a musician and everywhere I went I carried a guitar. The most that happened to me was that people were curious about my dreads. They wanted to know about my hair and they would just come up and grab me. Also being a black American, I felt like there was some unspoken affinity between myself and Iraqi people, and them understanding that the history of black people in America has not been a good one.”
Physical appearance aside, it was the guitar which marked Franti as a rare breed on the streets of Baghdad.
“You don’t hear music at all,” states Franti. “You don’t even hear it coming out of stores like you do in Palestine. People in Baghdad are really starved and wanting music. We interviewed a heavy metal band in Baghdad called The Black Scorpions and they had to rehearse using a diesel generator in their basement because there’s no electricity. And they run that generator in the room with them, so they not only have to contend with the fumes but they have to play over the top of that roar of the generator in order to hear their instruments. It’s crazy.”
So what was it like to feed the music-starved masses of Baghdad?
“Well, I would take my guitar out of my case and people would just gather around me. And I’d play until it felt uncomfortable – sometimes people feel uncomfortable when there’s crowds because there’s so many people with guns and they don’t know what’s happening. So then we’d move onto a hospital and play for people in the lobby of the hospital who are waiting for hours or days – literally – to get into the hospital. And then I’d go in and play for children who’d had their limbs blown off.”
For those unfamiliar with Franti’s oeuvre, his songs are not your average exercises in artistic self-indulgence. From his early years with The Beatnigs (c.1988), to The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy (c. 1992) and longtime band Spearhead, Franti’s music has always penetrated the big social, political and cultural issues of the day. Lyrics like the post 9/11 song ‘Bomb The World’ (“You can bomb the world to pieces/But you can’t bomb it into peace”) have become the rallying cry for peace activists the world over. Ironic, then, that his songs of hope were largely incomprehensible to his Arabic audiences.
“I wrote a song called ‘Habibi’, which means sweetheart in Arabic. And I sang it all around the Middle East and crowds would clap and sing as soon as I started to play,” he enthuses. “So the film that we’re making is about the adventures of ‘Habibi’; the adventures of this song as it travels throughout the Middle East; what it sees and what it observes and what the song gives back to the people.”
Also amongst the crowds that would gather to hear Franti play were the American soldiers. “I was invited by US soldiers into the bar where they go when they’re off-duty,” he recounts. “And then after every time I’d play I’d sit down with the video camera and I’d ask people what their impressions were of the war.
“Two or three of them said, ‘I believe in the war, I believe in what we’re doing and I’m going to stay here and keep going’. About half of the soldiers I met said that they wish we’d gotten UN support before going in; that they believed in the war in the beginning but now they feel like it’s something they can’t win. And then the rest of them said, ‘Fuck this fucking war I’d wish we’d never come here in the first place. Fuck George Bush. This war for me is about protecting my own arse. I’m just trying to get through it and get the fuck out of here.’”
“The soldiers just feel really desperate,” he continues. “They’re tired that they’re there and they believe that they’re being asked to fight a war that can’t be won because now the war is to try to bring stability to the country and win over the hearts and the minds of Iraqi people. And you can’t do it with a gun in your hand, and so they feel like they’re sitting ducks. They’re just waiting to get shot.”
Having described his Middle East trip as “a fact-finding mission”, Franti asserts that the most important issue he learned was that “it takes a lot more than the US or England or any other group of nations coming together to bomb somebody to create a change that is stable. What it takes is abundance and it takes economic assistance and it takes love and compassion – and I don’t mean that in a flowery way. I mean it in a way that’s showing the people there that we are concerned about the longevity of their nation. And we haven’t shown that at all in Iraq.
“We’ve only shown them that we are greedy and we want their oil. And that’s why the Iraqis continue to have this resistance against the occupation. That’s why peace in the Middle East will never come through Baghdad, it will only come when we resolve the situation in Palestine and in Isreal. Because that’s what the whole Arab world is up in arms against – this racist apartheid state that the Isrealis are imposing through the oppression of Palestinians.
“It’s really hard when you go there and see the devastation of the West Bank, not to see it as a situation similar to South Africa,” he expands. “You know, one group of people with guns and the military, another group of people who are civilians. One group of people whose homes are being destroyed and are being moved into homeland style refugee camps, and other people who are able to build beautiful homes and swimming pools on the same land that those people have been moved off. One group of people who are required to carry ID cards and whose access to travel is so restricted that they have to spend two to three hours waiting in line to go to school in the morning, just to get through the wall that’s been built through their neighborhood. And another group of people who are free to go to discotheques and shopping malls. It’s very hard not to see one group of people as being oppressed. And the suicide bombings have put fear into the lives of Israelis for sure. They live in fear and Palestinians live in daily oppression. It’s a very difficult situation.”
Franti says he’s hoping to return to Israel in October.
“I was there to relate my personal experience,” he says. “When we were there we tried to interview settlers and soldiers and we tried to get into Israeli hospitals but it was really impossible for us to do it. So from America we’re going to try to make more contacts and set up things in advance so that when we get there we can have access to their voice.”
On the topic of documentaries, Michael admits that he went to see Fahrenheit 9/11 the very day that he got back.
“I thought it was great,” he says. “It’s a great sense of relief for me, in America, to begin to see people openly discussing the effects of September 11. And openly discussing the fact that the Bush administration has trampled our civil rights and has really preyed on our emotions to go forward with their own geo-political agenda. It’s really been unchallenged by the Democratic Party, unchallenged by the media and now, finally, people in their homes are beginning to discuss it as a result of this film.”
And part of this, says Franti, are the criticisms directed at Michael Moore himself.
“I think it’s great that people challenge Michael Moore and they should. He definitely is someone who manipulates the images in a way that any filmmaker does to bring out the highest emotional reaction. That’s what filmmakers do. But what he’s talking about, at the end of the day, the Bush administration hasn’t really tried to attack him because there’s nothing to attack.”
Franti adds that like Michael Moore, he has also been tagged ‘un-American’ because of his dissident views.
“Martin Luther King said that Patriotism is when you say, ‘I love my country and I feel like my country may be doing some things good and I support this. But I also feel that my country might be doing some things bad and I’m going to speak out strongly against them because I love my country’.
“He said Nationalism is when you say, ‘The president is the president and we’re going to follow him whether he’s ethically right or wrong’. After September 11, I saw a lot of Nationalism. And I contnue to see it.”
“I feel like my responsibility is not just to the United States but the planet,” continues Franti. “And because the US President has so much power – he’s essentially the CEO of the planet - I feel the responsibility to all the people who are effected by the President’s policies and who can’t vote.
“At the end of the day it’s almost like being part of a monarchy. So if people call me un-American for that then I’ll continue to raise my voice and say, ‘Hey, I’m speaking out beyond your narrow vision of what might be right for America. It might not be right for the whole planet.’ And I believe at the end of the day that history will be on our side.”

For more information on the music and politics of Michael Franti, check out www.stayhuman.org.