In a Paris metro station, United4Iran and Move4Iran organized a silent flash mob (video above) on June 9, to commemorate the second anniversary of the elections in Iran and raise awareness about the continuing human rights abuses in the country.
And in New York, Where Is My Vote – NY held a candlelight vigil (video below) at Union Square to show solidarity for those in Iran who are continuing the struggle for self-determination.
More and more, activists expecting to confront armed state actors – including intelligence officers, the military, and police – should be mindful of the skepticism and propaganda against them that is put forth by the national security apparatus. This is especially true for activists and humanitarian workers engaging in nonviolent action in the Middle East, namely, Israel.
As the Freedom Flotilla 2 nears Gaza with hopes to break the four-year Israeli siege and blockade of the Palestinian Strip, a hushed anxiety is building while the Free Gaza Movement (and others) waits to see what will happen when the ships meet the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) off the Gazan coast. Last year, the Freedom Flotilla was intercepted by Israeli special forces who boarded the Mavi Marmara flying the Turkish flag. Nine activists were killed in a struggle to prevent the boarding of their ship by the IDF. Although there are competing claims to the circumstances of Flotilla activists’ deaths, the killings were unequivocally condemned by the UN Human Rights Convention:
The conduct of the Israeli military and other personnel towards the flotilla passengers was not only disproportionate to the occasion but demonstrated levels of totally unnecessary and incredible violence. It betrayed an unacceptable level of brutality. Such conduct cannot be justified or condoned on security or any other grounds. It constituted grave violations of human rights law and international humanitarian law.
What remains clear is that the risk of Israeli intervention and violence toward humanitarian and human rights activists continues to remain high. As Kathy Kelly reported previously on Waging Nonviolence regarding her participation on the U.S. ship The Audacity of Hope, a public and principled commitment to nonviolence is not a guarantee that all will be well;
There is some risk involved in this flotilla. The Israeli government threatens to board each ship in the flotilla with snipers and attack dogs. A year ago the Israeli Navy fired on the Turkish ship, the Mavi Marmara, from the air, then documented its passengers’ panicked response as their justification for executing nine activists, including one young U.S. citizen, Furkhan Dogan, shot several times in the back and head at close range. It then refused to cooperate with an international investigation.
Of particular concern for the Flotilla should be the conflation of nonviolent resistance with terrorism. A recent report from The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC) suggests that IDF be prepared to defend itself against nonviolent activists. It is somewhat disconcerting to read ITIC’s interpretation of nonviolence and nonviolent tactics to be just a savvy public relations move by activists to embarrass the IDF and coax them into violent struggle: “The use of nonviolent tactics is planned for the upcoming flotilla to the Gaza Strip. In effect, it is liable to be translated into hard violence directed against the IDF.”
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Last week, I wrote about how political street art is popping up all over Egypt since the fall of Mubarak. Now there is a great new site that is plotting the location of graffiti around Cairo on Google Maps, in case you’re visiting and would like to see it for yourself. The above video shows how to use the map and how you can contribute to the project, if you’re aware of art that isn’t already included on the site.
Last week, Reuters global editor at large Chrystia Freeland wrote in the New York Times about a gathering of scholars and activists at the Central European University in Budapest to celebrate its 20th anniversary. At the event, one of the hot topics was what lessons could be learned from the revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989 for the countries in the Arab world today. The first lesson, she writes:
…is that selling democracy has become harder now than it was 20 years ago. That’s because, as Aryeh Neier, the human rights activist and head of the Open Society Foundations, explained, the equation of prosperity and democracy, which was universally acknowledged in 1989 and the period that followed, has broken down today.
“In 1989, the U.S. had succeeded in conveying the view that economic prosperity and political freedom go hand in hand,” Mr. Neier said. “That is by no means so certain today. The rise of China and the difficulty the West continues to have in recovering from the financial crisis have broken the link between prosperity and freedom.”
While the link between economic prosperity and democracy has undoubtedly broken down since 1989, Mr. Neier’s explanation for why this is the case misses a very important point. As Joeseph Massad, an associate professor for Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University, wrote recently for Al Jazeera:
The people of the Eastern bloc wanted to maintain all the economic gains of the Communist period while calling for democratisation. The US, however, sold them the illusion of “Western democracy” as a cover for their massive US-imposed impoverishment and the dismantling of the entire structure of social welfare of which they had been beneficiaries for decades. Thus in a few short years, and through what Naomi Klein has dubbed the “Shock Doctrine”, Russia went from a country which had less than 2 million people living under the international poverty level to one with 74 million people languishing in poverty. Poland and Bulgaria followed suit.
This explosion of poverty and inequality in Eastern Europe after the embrace of neoliberal capitalism, as Anna Mudeva wrote in a special report for Reuters, has “given way to fond memories of the times when the jobless rate was zero, food was cheap and social safety was high.”
Freeland also notes one other lesson, offered by George Soros, from the meeting at Central European University that is well worth remembering now:
“Revolutions are rarely successful. They often end in tragedy. But they change the behavior of that country afterwards. The 1956 Hungarian Revolution was repressed. But it carried with it the seeds of the successful revolution in 1989.”
At a time when many of us in the West — and on the Arab street — are looking for instant results from the Jasmine Revolution, Mr. Soros’s conclusion is both heartening and frightening. Sometimes, as with Hungary’s 1956 uprising, a successful rebellion can take 33 years to work.
That long view may be one of the greatest gifts Central Europe has to offer Egypt, Tunisia and their neighbors. Pretty soon, we will start to write the obituaries of the Arab Spring. We will begin to talk about how the promise of Tahrir Square has been squandered by the chaotic and corrupt governments the brave people on the street propelled into office. But, as with 1956 in Hungary, 1968 in Prague and 1980 in Gdansk, revolutions can be successful even if it takes decades for their promise to flower.
My last post on climate activist Tim DeChristopher was about the growing support he’s received in the lead up to his scheduled June 23 sentencing for the crime of disrupting a fraudulent federal oil and gas auction. Apparently that support, which was formulating around a day of nationwide protest, became significant enough for the court to delay sentencing. The new date has not yet been released, but organizers with DeChristopher’s direct action group Peaceful Uprising say “the revolution will not be delayed.”
Such delay tactics did not work before. Tim’s trial was rescheduled nine times over a period of two years–without explanation. They can do the same with the sentencing hearing, but those fighting for a just and healthy world know that we cannot wait.
Staging large rallies without a sentence being handed down doesn’t make sense. So we have created a modified plan. Peaceful Uprising has prepared a simple action that anyone can take on June 23rd. All it takes is an email, a camera, and a quick trip to your local federal courthouse. Click here to take action in solidarity with Tim DeChristopher.
In this short video put together by students and professors at the 2011 Narco News School of Authentic Journalism, Ivan Marovic, who was one of the leaders of Otpor, the nonviolent student-led movement that helped topple Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, explains what a “dilemma action” is and how they used this tactic to great effect in their struggle.
To learn more about not only the creativity and humor that went into the young Serbs’ nonviolent actions, but the brilliant strategic planning that led to the movement’s eventual success, I’d recommend checking out Tina Rosenberg’s new book Join the Club.
Happy World Teaser (english) from Happy World on Vimeo.
What’s life like inside a closed authoritarian country like Burma? A few years ago, it may have been hard to answer that question. Then Burma VJ, the 2010 Oscar-nominated documentary, gave us a glimpse—but mainly from the perspective of dissidents trying to depose the ruling military junta. Now, a brilliant new French documentary called Happy World shows what life is like for the ordinary every-day Burmese citizen. The film’s subtitle says it all: “the dictatorship of the absurd.”
Rather than highlight the brutality already documented in Burma VJ, the filmmakers behind Happy World seem to have set out to make the point that every regime, no matter how seemingly evil, has weaknesses—many of which reside in the arbitrary and oftentimes laughable measures it takes to uphold a thin veil of power. For the Burmese junta it’s basing traffic patterns on horoscope readings, printing currency that’s divisible by the regime’s lucky number nine, and superstitiously forcing people to grow a shrub because its name (kyet-suu) is the inverse of democracy leader Suu Kyi.
All of these ridiculous actions could easily become the target of savvy activists, who by poking fun at the junta, weaken its credibility and grow a movement of resistance. It wouldn’t be surprising if campaigns like this were already underway. As John Jackson and Steve Crawshaw noted in their book Small Acts of Resistance, a clever currency designer working for the government in 1990 subtly and subversively planted an image of Aung Sang Suu Kyi onto new banknotes, as well as several other references to the pro-democracy uprising of 1988. Such acts of defiance and inspiring mischief have seemingly grown less and less isolated.
For their own part, the filmmakers managed to pull one over on the junta, no doubt embarrassing them in the process. By posing as dopey tourists—the only kind of foreigners allowed to visit the country—they captured amazing never-before-seen footage and broadcast it to the world for free.
The full 30-minute documentary, as well as a short making-of video, can be viewed here.
Just a few months ago, Spain was like much of the Western world: quietly struggling with the economic crisis and the social cuts government took to deal with it. But then something changed. The citizenry lost their confidence in labor unions and political parties and decided to take matters into their own hands.
The first steps toward the massive uprising of May 15 were taken in February, when a bunch of activists and bloggers created a Facebook group to coordinate the various elements of society.
“When we were just a few, the idea of a massive mobilization was proposed, which would bring together the many disparate groups and people,” said Klaudia Álvarez, one of the Facebook group’s original participants. “Everybody liked the idea and so we started working on that as the first collective action.” She is now a communications coordinator for the national grassroots campaign Democracia Real Ya (DRY).
There is no single organization behind the campaign, but rather, as Álvarez noted, “angry individuals who felt the need to do something about the current situation and who found each other on the Internet and decided to start working together.” They were bloggers and activists, like Violeta, administrator of the blog We Have the Right to Work; members of the National Association of Unemployed People; members of the Campaign for People Affected by Their Mortgage; or people from the hacktivist group Anonymous. They were from all around Spain and communicated through social networks without having much previous knowledge of nonviolent social movements.
“Almost all of us were beginners in these matters and the little training we had came from different manuals about peaceful resistance and the rights of demonstrators that we looked up on the Internet,” Álvarez explained. She cited a publication called Civil Defense Manual by Grupo 17 de Marzo—an activist lawyer collective—as particularly influential.
A month after launching the Facebook group, the campaign pinpointed May 15 as the date of the first demonstration and adopted the slogan that became its name: “Real Democracy Now.” Next came the website democraciarealya.es, followed a few days later by the first news coverage of the campaign by Kaos en la Red, an alternative Spanish media site. From that day forward, the campaign became an online presence, inviting all interested people to participate, and, each day, new organizations and individuals lent their support. The only ones excluded were labor unions and political parties, which, until then, hadn’t paid any attention to what was brewing.
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