Peter Kilburn

By Arthur H. Whitman

Peter Kilburn was a man of well-considered convictions and with a sense of values. Like so many of his colleagues at the American University of Beirut (AUB), he daily risked his life for those values. I came to know Peter well at the AUB. He was Acquisition Librarian, a massive job in a library used by scholars from all over the world and by the University's 4,500 students and faculty members. This was a research institution continually working on the cutting edge of new ideas.

The main building, the Jaffet Memorial Library, was situated at the center of the beautiful AUB campus on a hillside sweeping down to the Mediterranean. It was a donation from an alumnus in Brazil, and it housed the major part of a collection of 334,000 volumes and 4,850 periodicals. Peter was convinced, as am I and many others, that the American University of Beirut is a powerful tool for peace, made even more valuable each year by the human tragedy of death and destruction that occurs just outside its walls. The University's educational program, the result of 120 years of service by Americans, Arabs, and scholars of many other nationalities was, in Peter's view, well worth the risks.

He was that kind of man: quiet, unassuming, and young in spirit even though his health was failing. Although increasingly frail physically, he remained strong in his convictions and forceful in his daily battle for truth and knowledge. These, in his mind, were the most powerful tools for peace in our world.

Peter's immediate professional concern was books: The acquisition of books and periodicals, the cataloging of books by title, author and subject, the circulation of books to those who needed them, and the protection of rare books. Peter believed that thinking people and the ideas that writers and editors had recorded, when brought together, are a force more powerful than the kind of "smart" bombs the U.S. dropped on Libyan cities just before his death, or all of the American-made shells rained down upon his beloved Beirut in 1982 when Israeli forces laid seige to that once cosmopolitan and breathtakingly beautiful Middle Eastern "market place of ideas."

As foreign-armed and foreign-funded "militias" increasingly assumed control of Beirut's streets, Peter was kidnapped on December 3, 1984. In April, aged 61, he was murdered by his captors. He paid the price of continuing to believe in ideals that his government seems to have abandoned. Peter Kilburn paid that price so that the U.S., even now, might still find the way back to the path of charity, reconciliation and enlightenment once followed so selflessly by earlier generations of Americans in the Middle East. As those earlier Americans sought out the poor and disinherited and brought them education and medical care, a new generation of Americans must again seek out and address the grievances of the Palestinians and the Lebanese who have seen their lands seized and their families destroyed by American-armed invaders.

You will not see or hear interviews with Peter Kilburn's family on television or radio. Like Peter himself, they strongly oppose our country's increasingly bellicose policy in the Middle East. They recognize it for what it is: the negation of the traditional democratic ideals we have nurtured in America.

The current leaders of our government seem unable to comprehend, despite 40 years of increasingly bitter experience with a flawed Middle East policy, that we cannot continue to ignore American values and Middle East realities if we want to maintain a viable presence in the region. They don't seem to know that until we recognize and address the underlying grievances of the disinherited, whether dispossessed Palestinians or desperate Shiites, that out of hopelessness they will continue to resort to violence and outrage to call the world's attention to their plight.

Peter Kilburn was murdered by political or religious extremists in his adopted land, and by political opportunists in the U.S. The extremists thrive because the opportunists ignore the most blatant violations of our own laws by our Israeli "allies"—as when they repeatedly dropped U.S.-supplied cluster bombs upon populated areas in Lebanon. If the Administration and Congress ignore their duty to stop the violation of U.S. laws stipulating that these bombs can be used for defensive purposes only, then the victims will resort to atrocities of their own to call attention to the atrocities being committed against their people with our acquiescence.

There is only one appropriate memorial to Peter Kilburn. That is for each one of us who understands, and cares, to stand up, at whatever personal cost, and speak the truth. We must reexamine our own thinking as to who are the oppressed and who are the oppressors. We must make our own regional policy, rather than let others make it for us. And we must, at last, strike out on the path from which Peter Kilburn never strayed: The road of reconciliation with those whom we now are so steadily and surely making into enemies.

Arthur H. Whitman was Director of the Office of Development at the American University of Beirut from 1966-1976. This article is based on a eulogy he delivered at the Universalist Church in Auburn, Maine.