People Power

Unarmed Resistance and Global Solidarity

Howard Clark, Howard Clark

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781783715558
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Plaidoyer politique

Across the world, nonviolent movements are at the forefront of resistance against repression, imperial aggression and corporateabuse. However, it is often difficult for activists in other countries to know how best to assist such movements. The contributors to People Power place nonviolent struggles in an internationalcontext where solidarity can play a crucial role. Yet they also warn that good intentions are not enough, solidarity has to listen to local movements. Examining movements from Zimbabwe to Burma and Palestine, the contributors assess various forms ofsolidarity, arguing that a central role of solidarity is to strengthen the counter-power of those resisting domination and oppression.

Section II

Nonviolent Citizens’ Intervention Across Borders

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION

The second half of the twentieth century saw various ‘experiments’ with transnational nonviolent intervention – cross-border action by citizens. Building on the excellent compilations of Moser-Puangsuwan and Weber (2000) and Schweitzer et al. (2001), this section discusses the work of Peace Brigades International (PBI), the recently formed Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP), the Balkan Peace Team, international projects in Palestine – specifically, the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI) and the International Women’s Peace Service (IWPS) – and the sanctions-busting Voices in the Wilderness. The backcloth to these projects is numerous other efforts to make transnational connections between movement groups, conceptually part of a transnational ‘chain of nonviolence’ (see Afterword). These include:

•	short-term delegations and study tours organised by peace, solidarity, human rights and sectoral groups;
•	placements of long-term international volunteers in peace projects;
•	‘twinning’ – not just town to town but peace group to peace group;
•	training workshops on themes or in skills;
•	involvement of peace groups from conflict zones in global peace networks, including international speaking tours;
•	marketing of ‘fair trade’ or solidarity products produced by peace initiatives.

Projects of nonviolent intervention draw on three main streams of activity. The most obvious is a tradition of protest and solidarity projects, trying to bring a situation closer to home and often carried out in concert with domestic peace campaigns. As well as the attempted incursions into nuclear test zones – at sea (the Golden Rule, Everyman and later Greenpeace boats) and on land (the Sahara Protest Team: see Carter 1977, and later Greenpeace actions in Nevada) – several projects have tried to enter war zones or run military blockades. These include Nonviolent Action in Vietnam (Arrowsmith 1972), Operation Omega to Bangladesh (Hare and Blumberg 1977; Prasad 2005), Witness for Peace in Nicaragua (Griffin-Nolan 1991), the Gulf Peace Team (Burrowes 2000; Bhatia, Drèze and Kelly 2001) and various actions during the war in Bosnia (Schweitzer 2000). Such actions have generally begun with ad hoc groups, although both Greenpeace and Witness for Peace grew into organisations.¹

A second, more institutionalised stream is that of international voluntary work for peace and reconciliation, a concept pioneered by Service Civil International after the First World War, mainly organising workcamps, and developed further by Eirene in the 1950s, organising long-term placements. There now exist many national schemes of ‘volunteers for cooperation and development’, often government-funded. The UN Volunteers (UNV) declare a special interest in peace projects, but this has increasingly taken the form of engaging in combined civil– military peace-keeping missions.² Since the 1990s various nonviolent groups have tried to establish national schemes building on this second stream but linking with a third stream of activity – that of seeking to develop nonviolent alternatives to armed intervention.

The principal inspiration for this third stream has been Gandhi’s vision of a ‘peace army’, the Shanti Sena (Weber 1996). This envisaged community-based nonviolent activists coming together to mount nonviolent projects in response to conflict, either in their own locality or elsewhere. At the heart of this project lay Gandhian values (nonviolence, the search for truth, the stand for justice), both as a source of credibility for outsiders entering a situation and in shaping the strategies they would pursue. There have been three attempts to ‘internationalise’ the idea: the World Peace Brigade (WPB – 1961–64), Peace Brigades International (PBI – 1981 onwards) and the Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP – 2002 onwards).

The sheer ambition of the WPB can be seen from its flagship project: a Freedom March from Dar es Salaam into Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) to coincide with a general strike inside the country. This strategy, devised with Zambia’s future President Kenneth Kaunda, relied for its credibility not on the WPB having a solid organisational base – that was exactly what it lacked – but on the moral authority of those around the world who had used nonviolent direct action in the cause of colonial freedom, civil rights and nuclear disarmament. Political progress towards Zambian independence made the march unnecessary and in May 1962, after months of costly preparations, it was called off. The WPB mounted three smaller projects but petered out over the next three years.³

WPB emphasised nonviolent confrontation of injustice, in particular encouraging the involvement of public figures in civil disobedience. In contrast PBI and NP present their role as ‘opening space’ for local actors. They describe themselves as ‘non-partisan’ – a term open to interpretation but as a minimum indicating not being aligned with any particular group or organisation.⁴ PBI long ago abandoned any aspiration to offer a direct alternative on a large scale: its Colombia project – its largest and longest-running project – has around 50 volunteers working in four teams. While NP still retains the vision of being an alternative to military intervention and seeks to deploy hundreds not just tens of field staff, its proposals to develop a ‘rapid deployment capacity’ have receded. Both PBI and NP have been more concerned to develop a solid system of organisation, collective decision-making, professional standards of work, and repertoires of activity transferable to other conflicts.

PBI specialises in ‘protective accompaniment’, that is, travelling with local activists or organisations who have been threatened. In contrast, NP insists that ‘protective accompaniment’ can effectively be combined with other roles – including facilitating dialogue and remonstrating with non-state armed groups to release people they have kidnapped.⁵ NP also offers its ‘staff’ (eschewing the term ‘volunteers’) a higher stipend, theoretically in order to enable a wider range of people to join its work, although it should also be noted that this now offers people from most countries in the world an economic incentive to do this work. War Resisters’ International (WRI), having initially welcomed NP as an ‘experiment’, in 2007 decided despite reservations to become a ‘supporting organisation’, recognising that NP is in its early days and its evolution is not decided.⁶

As international organisations deploying ‘non-partisan’ teams of selected and trained people committed to at least a year as team members, PBI and NP represent one end of the spectrum in international nonviolent intervention. The other end is the International Solidarity Movement. Motivated by outrage at the Israeli occupation, self-selected activists join protests initiated by Palestinians. Somewhere in between on the spectrum are the Christian Peacemaker Teams, whose predominantly North American teams are willing to engage in nonviolent confrontation and combine organising short-term delegations with maintaining a long-term presence. Founded in 1984, CPT has engaged in projects around the world, including Colombia, Palestine and North America itself. It has around 30 long-term volunteers doing one-year terms, and 150 self-financed ‘reservists’ who commit themselves for three years, devoting between two weeks and three months a year to participation in CPT projects. Present in the West Bank since 1995, CPT ‘works alongside’ local activists, sometimes in the background as accompaniers, but often taking the lead, as for instance in launching the Campaign for Secure Dwellings (against house demolitions). It has also been willing to take action against Palestinian bombings (for instance, offering to ride an Israeli bus route). Unfortunately, CPT’s fine work in Hebron has received far less publicity than the episode in Iraq in 2005 when four CPT associates were taken hostage, one killed and the others freed after several months by a special military anti-kidnapping unit (Kember 2007).

Participation in projects of nonviolent intervention often leads to further involvement. For some projects, this is essential to their functioning – participants go home and say what they have seen. EAPPI’s contract even stipulates that, on returning home, accompaniers should speak to at least 15 meetings. Sometimes new commitments arise in response to the changing situation: activists involved in the Gulf Peace Team (1990–91) founded Voices in the Wilderness. Collectively and personally, nonviolent intervention proves to be a learning experience, which makes continuing evaluation and reflection essential.

Notes

1.	In 2008 Witness for Peace recently celebrated its 25th anniversary, still organising US delegations to Latin America although now mainly centred on issues of social justice versus ‘Free Trade’.
2.	Currently about 40 per cent of UN Volunteers are in this role – some 2,100 people in 19 missions (www.unv.org). The idealism of UNV’s website is rather belied in Kosovo, where UNV still has around 250 volunteers, often playing bureaucratic roles connected with local government. The ‘stretching’ of the concept of volunteer should also be noted: many volunteer schemes now offer a stipend, in the case of UNV more than many volunteers were earning at home.
3.	Fuller accounts of the WPB can be found in Moser-Puangsuwan and Weber (2000), Prasad (2005) and Yates and Chester (2006).
4.	‘Non-partisanship’, it should be noted, is an operational not a political principle: the overall context of the work of ‘non-partisan’ peace teams is solidarity with the promotion of nonviolence and human rights.
5.	PBI does not arrange meetings with guerrilla groups, partly because it lacks leverage on them and partly because a hostile government could wilfully misrepresent this.
6.	The reservations were: that ‘non-partisanship’ and ‘professionalism’ will lead to NP becoming just one more international NGO working on conflict rather than a radical alternative response; that NP’s orientation will be shaped by its need for state funding; and that NP’s public reporting is primarily self-promotional (in contrast to PBI’s publicising the perspectives of those groups it works with). See http://wri-irg.org/node/3253.

6

MAKING ACCOMPANIMENT EFFECTIVE

Brian Martin*

Why is accompaniment – sending international teams to support resisters who are under threat – effective? And what can be done to make it more effective?

Liam Mahony and Luis Enrique Eguren (1997), in their study of international accompaniment, say that it works through deterrence: aggressors decide that the negative consequences of bad publicity and international pressure outweigh the advantages of attacking activists. Accompaniment can expand the political space available to activists and limit the actions aggressors can take with what they consider ‘acceptable’ costs. Other studies of nonviolent intervention (Moser-Puangsuwan and Weber 2000; Müller 2006) include examples of accompaniment with rich detail about actions and their consequences, but give less attention to how it works.

There is, however, another framework for understanding why accompaniment can often be effective, which I call ‘backfire’ (Martin 2005, 2007). This builds on the insights that can be obtained by exploring the process called political jiu-jitsu. Nonviolence researcher Gene Sharp (1973) studied hundreds of actions and campaigns. He found that when violent attacks were made against peaceful protesters, this could be counterproductive for the attacker, encouraging more people to become activists, generating more support for the protesters from third parties and weakening commitment from some members of the attacker group. This occurred in 1905 in Russia as a result of killings of protesters, in 1930 in India as a result of beatings of protesters, in 1960 in South Africa as a result of a shooting of protesters by police. More recently the jiu-jitsu effect occurred in 1991 in East Timor as a result of a massacre of protesters by Indonesian troops. In each case, police or troops had overwhelming superiority in force. But by exercising it against nonviolent protesters, they actually strengthened their opponents. Like the sport of jiu-jitsu, in which the energy of the opponent is used against them, political jiu-jitsu turns the attacker’s violent energy into support for the protesters.

But these famous examples are exceptions to the rule. In most cases, violent attacks on protesters do not produce a jiu-jitsu effect. Why not? Looking at these and other examples shows that attackers predictably use a variety of methods to inhibit outrage from their actions. These methods can conveniently be grouped into five categories discussed below: cover up the action; devalue the target; reinterpret the action; use official channels to give an appearance of justice; and intimidate or bribe people involved. For example, prior to the 1991 Dili massacre, there were other equally serious massacres in East Timor, but these received little...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of photographs, figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Section I: Resisting Repression, Civil War and Exploitation, 2000–2008: Analyses of Unarmed Struggle
• Section II: Nonviolent Citizens’ Intervention across Borders
• Section III: Bases of Solidarity: Shared Identities, Interests and Beliefs
• Section IV: Controversies in Transnational Action
• Afterword: The chain of nonviolence
• Works cited
• Notes on contributors
• Index