Next Monday, Jørgen Johansen, who is a lecturer and faculty member at Syracuse University in Strasbourg, France, will be leading a free webinar, hosted by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), entitled “Civil Resistance from Gandhi to Present Time.” According to the announcement, Johansen will:

….present a short history of what civil resistance have achieved the last 90 years. This is the history of societal conflicts handled with peaceful means. How can unarmed movements succeed against states with their police and armies? What are the building blocks of a successful nonviolent strategy?

It will include a discussion on the recent development in Northern Africa and Middle East. What can be expected in the time to come and what are the main obstacles when a movement moves from ‘opposition’ to ‘position?’

The webinar will run from 12-1pm EST. To reserve your place, click here. And if that time doesn’t work for you, ICNC will post the video of the presentation on their website afterward.

Over at Movement.org, Susannah Vila has a timely new post about the need for activists using Facebook to take the necessary precautions – like mastering the site’s always evolving privacy settings – to protect themselves and their organizing online. She gives a few examples of the what can happen if you’re not careful:

…leaders of the Pink Chaddi Campaign in India used Facebook as a tool to tell people about thier movement and organize an offline campaign for women in India to send in pink “chaddis” or underware as a form of protest against conservative groups. While Facebook served as an important tool for activism, it soon became a liability when their page was hacked. Because of the hateful speech that the hackers wrote on the page, Facebook mistakenly suspended the account of Nisha Susan, the groups legitimate creator.  Luckily, Susan was able to quickly get her account reactivated, but this just highlights the importance of protecting your privacy settings on Facebook – especially when you’re posting controversial content.

Most recently, there have been reports of authorities in Syria arresting activists and forcing them to hand over their login information. The same occurred in Iran, and the hacking of Tunisian authorities during the uprising there was well documented.

Vila then points to a very thorough guide to help activists organize more safely on Facebook.

And there is an interesting exchange on Tangled Web about whether Facebook should allow the use of pseudonyms, and how helpful that would be for folks operating in more repressive environments.

I was taken aback to find the Emergency Surgical Centre for War Victims an unexpected place to find some peace and healing in Kabul – a desolate urban landscape battling pollution, abandonment, and entrenched human suffering. Inside the walls of the hospital, some of the few in Afghanistan that are not laced with barbed wire or maintained by armed guards, budding trees and green grass offer a glimpse of what Afghan life must have been like before thirty years of war.  Unfortunately – and this is the way things seem to be in Afghanistan -  to enjoy this peace of mind and serene oasis you must be a victim of war.

Kathy Kelly and Joshua Brollier, following their June 2010 visit to Afghanistan and stay with Emergency, wrote an excellent piece on the Italian NGO’s work and the people they met.  In “Unarmed and Courageous,” Kelly and Brollier write:

Emergency is treating war victims as patients, and won’t allow police or military to enter the hospital, carrying weapons. Circumstances that occasion an injury or a wound never determine whether or not the patient will be admitted. While neutral as regards offering medical treatment, Emergency has been clearly partisan in it’s rejection of all wars. Their literature and outreach clarifies that the most important preventive measure to safeguard against war related wounds and injuries is the abolition of weapons.

This was my first exposure to Emergency and its inspiring work that seems deeply-rooted in the philosophy of nonviolence.  Consider Emergency’s mission statement:

EMERGENCY is an independent and neutral Italian organisation.

EMERGENCY provides free, high quality medical and surgical treatment to the civilian victims of war, landmines, and poverty.

EMERGENCY promotes a culture of peace, solidarity, and respect for human rights.

Emergency’s philosophy and, more importantly, consistent commitment to provide medical care to victims of war and poverty without distinction provide both an urgent, life-saving resource in the immediacy and a moral compass orientating us toward a future without war.  Emergency, at least in its 12 years in Afghanistan, has been able to treat Afghans from all sides of the multi-faceted conflict and its untold numbers of innocent bystanders – 90% of the victims of conflict are civilians – without being the target of any attack or kidnapping.  This speaks volumes of the power of nonviolence and the commitment to recognize the humanity of all people.  For Emergency, its best protection to continue their work for themselves and their patients is found in its universal commitment to care for the human person and community.

Gandhi’s contention that “all men (sic) are brothers” is the kind of framework that undergirds his nonviolence.  It is also the foundation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that Emergency quotes on the back of its activity report:

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”
The acknowledgment of this principle
“is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world.”

If only all the organizations in Afghanistan – non-governmental and governmental – shared a similar philosophy and commitment for care and peace, the endeavors for a world without war would make much more progress.

As always, Stephen Zunes’ writings on US policy toward the Middle East and nonviolent action are some of the most thorough and informative out there, and his articles on the situation in Libya are no exception. At the end of February, he wrote this in-depth piece on the history of US-Libyan relations, which I found very helpful, and more recently he had a great critique of the concepts of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and humanitarian intervention.

On Monday, he wrote an wonderful piece about the Western military intervention and nonviolent alternatives in Libya that reiterates many of the points I’ve been making on this site since the war began.

First, he argues that the Libyan movement’s turn to violence, and the subsequent outside military intervention, will make it much less likely that any kind of democratic government will emerge in the wake of this conflict.

…the chances of a successful transition to democracy following the ouster of an authoritarian regime are much higher if the overthrow results from a massive nonviolent movement, which requires the establishment of broad alliances of civil society organizations and the cooperation and consensus to make that possible. This contrasts with an overthrow resulting from a violent struggle – led by an elite vanguard, dominated by martial values and seeking power through force of arms rather than popular participation – which, more often than not, has simply resulted in a new dictatorship.

[...]

When massive nonviolent resistance liberated a number of key Libyan cities back in February, popular democratic committees were set up to serve as interim local governments. For example, Benghazi – a city of over a million people – established a municipal government run by an improvised organizing committee of judges, lawyers, academics, and other professionals. Since the resistance to Qaddafi turned primarily violent, however, the leadership of the movement appears to now have significant representation from top cabinet officials and military officers, who for years had been allied with the tyrant, defected only in recent weeks and whose support for democracy is rather dubious.

Writing at Foreign Policy, conservative Harvard University professor Stephen Walt recently cited a whole series of academic studies that support this argument:

A 2006 study by Jeffrey Pickering and Mark Peceny found that military intervention by liberal states (i.e., states like Britain, France and the United States) “has only very rarely played a role in democratization since 1945.” Similarly, George Downs, and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita of New York University found that U.S. interventions since World War II led to stable democracies within ten years less than 3 percent of the time, and a separate study by their NYU colleague William Easterly and several associates found that both U.S and Soviet interventions during the Cold War generally led to “significant declines in democracy.” Finally, a 2010 article by Goran Piec and Daniel Reiter examines forty-two “foreign imposed regime changes” since 1920 and finds that when interventions “damage state infrastructural power” they also increase the risk of subsequent civil war.

Other studies, like “How Freedom is Won,” which was published in 2005 by Freedom House, or Maria Stephen and Erica Chenoweth’s exhaustive “Why Civil Resistance Works,” demonstrate with extensive evidence that nonviolent movements are far more likely to lead to democratic governments after they are victorious than armed struggles.

Read the rest of this article »

• An estimated 10,000 demonstrators in Yemen on Tuesday attempted to march to the presidential palace, as President Ali Abdullah Saleh has refused to step down.

• Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, has accepted the resignation of the country’s government, following two weeks of anti-government protests that have gripped Syria.

• Around a hundred protesters gathered in Egypt at the Press Syndicate on Sunday to march onto the Cabinet in opposition to the recently decreed anti-protest law introduced by the interim government of Prime Minister Essam Sharaf.

• On Tuesday, substitute school teachers in Algeria protested outside the presidential administration to demand that their status be changed so they can have the same salary and benefits as full-time teachers.

• Hundreds of students from the state System of Higher Education gathered in Pennsylvania Monday to protest a proposed 50 percent cut in state funding they say would cause their tuition to skyrocket and force many of them from the classroom.

• Kyrgyz officials say about 10,000 inmates in prisons across the country are on hunger strike demanding better conditions in jails.

• On Monday, Honduran police using tear gas and water cannons dispersed a group of protesters who blocked a main avenue in the capital to demand the return of ousted former President Manuel Zelaya from exile.

• Managers at Bolivia’s San Cristobal mine said on Tuesday they have yet to start talks with workers to resolve a six-day-old strike that has paralyzed the Andean nation’s largest silver mine.

• Members of the Philippine Airlines Employees Assoc. joined a nationwide demonstration Monday by the workers’ union against management’s plan to remove regular employees and hire contractual workers.

• Exasperated religious leaders in Washington, D.C. started a hunger strike on Monday in protest of proposed GOP budget cuts to anti-hunger organizations.

• Last Friday, over 41,000 Colombian judicial workers demonstrated at the Paloquemao Judicial Complex in downtown Bogotá to protest the murders of judicial officers.

Coming up on April 12th is a Global Day of Action on Military Spending, organized by the International Peace Bureau and the Institute for Policy Studies. Their “invitation” goes thusly:

In 2009, global military spending surged to an all-time high of US $1.53 trillion. Given the numerous crises facing the planet—economic, environmental, health, diplomatic—it is imperative that we create a global movement to shift this money to human needs. We know that there are thousands of organizations and millions of individuals who support this point of view—what is needed is to begin a serious mobilizing effort to make it visible.

We are organizing a Global Day of Action on Military Spending on April 12, 2011 to coincide with the release of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s (SIPRI) new annual figures on world military expenditures. On this day, people on all continents will join together in joint actions to focus public, political, and media attention on the costs of military spending and the need for new priorities. Such events will help us to build the international network around this issue.

They’ve got lots of good information about global military spending on their website, and there are actions planned around the world. Find the one nearest you on the events page.

Last week, in a great interview with Irradwaddy, a newspaper started in 1993 by Burmese journalists living in exile, Gene Sharp offers his thoughts on the military intervention in Libya and why nonviolent resistance has not yet succeeded in Burma:

Q:Since Tunisia and Egypt, the protests in the region have changed. Libya’s uprising has become an armed revolt. Do you feel that—even with UN Security Council and Arab League support—it is right to intervene in Libya at this juncture?

A: It is not the course of action I would have chosen. I think the Libyan democrats did not do their homework in advance like the Egyptians did—in Egypt, they appeared to have a plan and studied quite some time in advance to develop a program of non-violence without fear, which brought them victory quite quickly. In Libya, this appears not to have been the case. The Libyans have gotten in over their heads, and should have expected the type of repression that Gaddafi is capable of.

People who are realistic about the power of political defiance know that if it is a threat, the regime will see it that way and will fight back. The regime will jail and beat and kill, and that is a sign that what you are doing is threatening the regime.

Dictators can beat you with violence, if you fight on those terms, and of course the rebels cannot defeat the Gaddafi regime on the level of armed force. So they are left to call in help from outside, which cannot give them the empowerment or victory they seek.

Q:Do you think that when legitimate peaceful protest—such as in Burma—is met with state violence, the protesters then have the right to self-defense? To fight back? To seek alliances with sympathizers in the country’s police and army? To appeal for international military support, as the Libyan rebels have done?

A: I think it is an unfortunate choice that people make. It is predictable that your opponent will have the means of violence, the means of oppression. If you get someone else to come and help you, they will come with their interests, and potentially turn your country into a battlefield. Even if they help defeat the oppressor, it will not result in empowerment. People will not be ready to fight the next oppressor who tries to take over the country. In contrast, if the Egyptian military tries again to take control, the people know how to counter this, they have the sense of empowerment, of their own power.

Ultimately, in any non-violent resistance, you have to plan, you have to study. You have to know what the hell you are doing.

 

I couldn’t agree more and am thrilled that Sharp hasn’t backed this war like so many others in the progressive world. This is exactly the kind of stance that those of us who believe that nonviolence is the most effective way to stop dictators and end repression should be taking.

And here is Sharp’s take on the situation in Burma:

Read the rest of this article »

The five Disarm Now Plowshares activists who infiltrated Kitsap-Bangor Naval Base in Washington to symbolically disarm the nuclear weapons stored there received sentences yesterday ranging from six to 15 months confinement. With the action having taken place in November 2009, this decision has been a long time coming. Over the past year we’ve covered many of the major developments, from a hilarious video produced by the Seattle Times that satirized the military’s decision to prosecute 80-year-old peace activists to the more serious trial itself. But now the judge has rendered his final ruling.

According to a press release sent out yesterday:

About two hundred fifty people gathered at the courthouse to support the Plowshares activists with their presence, song, and prayer.  After the trial, they sang peace songs and processed out as a group, celebrating the beacon of hope the five activists have been for their community.Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, and others testified on behalf of the defendants.  Bishop Gumbleton, retired bishop of Detroit and founding president of the peace group Pax Christi, testified that the Catholic Church has spoken out very strongly against nuclear weapons, saying that no use of nuclear weapons can be justified morally.  “We must abolish these weapons before the earth is destroyed.” Ramsey Clark, U.S. Attorney General under President Lyndon B. Johnson, testified that never in his life has he encountered such unselfish people as those who participate in the Plowshares tradition of direct action against nuclear weapons.  Regarding their decision to live a life of civil resistance, he said, “Their consciences tell them they have to do it.  God will bless them for it and the courts of the United States should too.”

Speaking as part of the Disarm Now Plowshares legal team, Anabel Dwyer and Bill Quigley laid out the broader legal picture of the case. “The problem is that nuclear weapons and the rule of law can’t exist side by side,” Dwyer said.  “The other problem is, we cannot disarm nuclear weapons unless through the rule of law.  We are in a conundrum here.” Quigley submitted that lawyers are obligated to “understand difference between law and justice and to narrow that gap.”  He encouraged the judge to look back one hundred years and consider how many of the laws of that time were “legal but manifestly unjust.”  Dwyer is a Michigan attorney and Board Member of The Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy (LCNP), and an expert in humanitarian law and nuclear weapons.  Quigley is the Legal Director for the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York and Professor at Loyola New Orleans.

Each of the five co-defendants, Bill “Bix” Bichsel, SJ, Susan Crane, Lynne Greenwald, Steve Kelly, SJ, and Anne Montgomery, RSCJ, read statements in court.  They focused on the personal responsibility they feel to disarm nuclear weapons, and their desire to prevent pain, suffering, and death for “those deprived by our wars and military budget of a human way of life.”

Character witnesses spoke to the defendants’ solidarity with Native people, children, working people, and the wider Tacoma community.  Rosella Apel, age 11, said in her character witness for Steve Kelly, “I have a clear image that when I grow up I’m going to do the exact same thing that these five have.”

While this may be the end of the legal road for the Disarm Now Plowshares, it is only the beginning, as this last statement testifies, of the lasting impact their action will have on future generations and the anti-nuclear movement as a whole.

I’ve got a new film review at Religion Dispatches about a category of nonviolent resistance that’s getting a new lease on life:

The idea of martyrdom hasn’t been in very good shape lately. One common usage of it—“I’ll not be made a martyr!”—refers to the prospect of somewhat tragic but mostly useless suffering, perhaps in the service of a delusional cause, religious or otherwise. Another appears regularly in the news with reference to Islamist terrorists, especially suicide bombers. Still, despite these entrenched negative associations, the idea may be on the mend.

One obvious reason for this is the dramatic reversal, happening now around the Arab world, in how political resistance is done. When plainclothes agents provacateurs instigated by a corrupt government kill an unarmed protester, and the word “martyr” is used, it takes on a wholly different meaning than it would in reference to somebody blowing him or herself up on a bus. It even starts getting closer to the word’s original meaning in Greek: “witness.”

Another thing that bodes well is the US release of Of Gods and Men, an award-winning French film which might be, despite a so-so title, good enough to make you change your vocabulary.

Of Gods and Men tells the story of seven French monks who were killed during the Algerian civil war in 1996. Read the review if you like, but see the movie if at all you can.

On Saturday, rallies against genetically modified food were held in cities across the United States. The Millions Against Monsanto campaign, which is organized by Organic Consumers Association, is now planning on taking their effort to the next level. On World Food Day, October 16, they are calling for a million people to come out in a nationwide day of action.

While mobilizing a million people sounds like a daunting task, they have broken it down in a unique way. They are forming 435 local chapters, one for each congressional district, and are seeking to attract 2,300 supporters in each location. If they can reach this goal, they will have a million people in the streets.

I like this approach in that it reminds me of the way that military contractors influence legislators. Boeing for example manufactures the F-22 in 44 different states, which had made it next to impossible to muster the votes to cut its funding.

The Millions Against Monsanto campaign is not calling to make these genetically engineered foods illegal, but simply to make GMO labeling mandatory by law. They believe that if people knew which foods were genetically modified they would buy less of them and instead go organic. This is apparently what has happened in Europe, where there are almost no genetically modified foods in grocery stories because labeling is required.

The above video lays out the group’s strategy and also gives some advice on how to start a chapter in your area. To sign their petition click here and join a local chapter if one already exists.