• On Saturday, more than 100,000 turned out in the pale winter sunshine for a march in downtown Moscow against election fraud and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s plan to return to the presidency next month.

• Over 10,000 Bahrainis gathered on Sunday to begin a week-long sit-in protest in Meqsha, north of Bahrain, ahead of the one year anniversary of the revolution.

• Hundreds of flights in France were cancelled today, including 40 percent out of Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport, as unions ratcheted up pressure on day two of a strike over labor rights.

• Antiwar groups held rallies on Saturday in about 80 cities across the United States protesting a possible strike on Iran.

• In Singapore, two hundred foreign workers staged a sit-in on Monday morning in protest over unpaid wages.

• At least one activist died, and another 39 were injured on Sunday after police tried to break up a protest by indigenous groups—who have blockaded the Pan-American Highway for days—against the recent approval of mines and reservoirs in their region.

• In Canada, close to a thousand people marched through Prince Rupert’s streets on Saturday as part of a rally hosted by local first nations against Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline and the oil tanker traffic it would generate on British Columbia’s northern coast.

• At least 11 Occupy D.C. protesters were arrested Saturday just blocks from the White House as the U.S. Park Police evicted activists who had been sleeping in McPherson Square since October 1. On Sunday, police also cleared a second encampment at Freedom Plaza.

• In one of more than a hundred protests planned across Europe on Saturday, about 2,000 people marched in the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

• Some 20 residents of Khirbat al-Tawil village, south of Nablus in the occupied West Bank, went on a 24-hour hunger strike on Friday to protest against Israel’s occupation of their lands.

• About 20 people gathered on Thursday outside the Ritz-Carlton in New York City—where the Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh was said to be staying—to protest his trip to the United States for medical treatment and a deal he received that granted him immunity from prosecution for  crimes against protesters during uprisings last year.

• Thousands of Bahrainis held a peaceful anti-government protest in a suburb of the capital on Friday, demanding the release of political prisoners and political reforms in the troubled Gulf Arab state.

• Protesters defied a heavy security presence across Syria on Friday to commemorate the 30th anniversary of a deadly crackdown on Islamist opposition in the city of Hama, but were effectively prevented from turning out in the capital, Damascus.

• Several thousand people rallied in Bratislava and seven other Slovakian cities Friday to demand that early elections planned in March be postponed to allow a thorough investigation.

• Poland’s prime minister says he is suspending the ratification process for an international copyright treaty after widespread protests and attacks on government websites.

• Members of an Indian tribe in Panama are blocking roads in two provinces on the border with Costa Rica in a dispute over mineral exploitation on their lands.

• Cambodian police violently dispersed a group of around 150 women protesting forced evictions in the capital Phnom Penh on Thursday.

• Around 300 people gathered outside Budapest’s New Theater on Wednesday to protest its new director, an actor with links to far-right parties.

• Hackers associated with the activist group Anonymous posted a protest against Greece’s EU and IMF-inspired austerity policies on the website of the country’s justice ministry Friday

• Just after the National Park Service’s noon deadline Monday, by which protesters in Washington’s two Occupy D.C. camps were required to decamp, protesters fought back by stringing up a giant blue tarp in the middle of McPherson Square, which they called the “tent of dreams.”

• Belgium’s first general strike in almost two decades brought parts of the country to a halt on Monday in an anti-austerity protest aimed at the new government and at EU leaders meeting in Brussels.

• Hundreds of Romanians protested on Saturday against a plan to set up Europe’s biggest open-cast gold mine in a small Carpathian town, joining a wave of anti-government rallies.

• Three topless Ukrainian protesters were detained Saturday while trying to break into an invitation-only gathering of international CEOs and political leaders to call attention to the needs of the world’s poor.

• Thousands of cars flying white ribbons or balloons circled central Moscow on Sunday in a show of protest against Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

• Argentina’s powerful truck drivers’ union blocked postal distribution centers in several cities on Monday to protest the firing of 200 workers.

• About 200 Indonesian Christians held a prayer vigil in Jakarta on Sunday urging President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to re-open their church and stop intimidation by Muslim hardliners.

• Last Sunday, dozens of Detroit’s undertakers drove a motorcade of hearses through the city’s most violent neighborhoods to protest the high murder rate.

• Egyptian activist groups on Thursday launched an open-ended strike in Cairo to pressure the country’s military rulers  to expedite the transfer of power to an elected civilian  administration, a day after 100,000 Egyptians came out to Tahrir Square to mark the anniversary of the first massive protest that led to the overthrow of dictator Hosni Mubarak.

• Activists linked to the global ‘Occupy’ movement used giant red weather balloons to stage a flying protest over the venue of the World Economic Forum on Wednesday.

• Nearly 7,000 prisoners were on a hunger strike Wednesday in Kyrgyzstan with more  than 1,000 sewing shut their lips with staples and thread to protest jail  conditions

• On Tuesday, demonstrators with ACTA stickers on their mouths protested against Poland’s government plans to sign international copyright agreement ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), in front of the European Union office in Warsaw.

• Dozens of teachers turned out at six events across Seattle on Tuesday to protest and rally against budget cuts that are hurting education.

• Nepalese students chanted anti government slogans during a torch rally to protest against Nepal Oil Corporation’s decision to hike prices on major petroleum products, including petrol, diesel, kerosene and LPG in Kathmandu on Tuesday.

• On Tuesday, Cambodian victims held a demonstration to mark the third anniversary of a forced eviction in the Dey Krahorm community.

• Hundreds of Tibetans carried out day-long protests and candle light vigils in Ngaba on Monday calling for the return of His Holiness the Dalai Lama from exile and demanding freedom in Tibet.

• Thousands of Yemenis protested on Sunday against an immunity law protecting  outgoing President Ali Abdullah Saleh from prosecution and demanded he be put on  trial for offences they say he committed during his 33-year rule.

• More than 50 students from Tuscon High School walked out of class on Monday and marched toward Santa Rita Park in protest of the recent ban on Mexican American studies at TUSD schools.

• In Egypt, dozens of employees at the state-run Nile News TV Channel started an open-ended strike Sunday at the Maspero building, as they protested policies still in place since Mubarak’s rule.

• Malawi lawyers across the country Monday protested in their court regalia to pressure the governement to act on the ongoing judiciary strike.

• Truck drivers across Italy went on strike on Monday against increased fuel prices, while taxis also held a national protest over government reforms to increase competition, causing disruptions nationwide.

• Scores of protests were held across the country on Friday to protest the second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, which ruled corporations have a right to spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns. A dozen demonstrators were arrested on the U.S. Supreme Court steps.

• In Lebanon, severe electricity cuts fueled several protests Friday as residents and  lawmakers staged a sit-in in the mountain town of Aley and small groups of protesters blocked roads in the south of the country.

• Several women and children staged a sit-in outside the Karachi Press Club (KPC) on Friday to protest against the kidnapping of Baloch youths and the dumping of their bodies in different parts of the province.

• Protests in two West Bank universities have shut down classes in recent days, as students call for easing of tuition fees amid financial crisis in Palestine.

• Beginning last Tuesday, about 100,000 teachers from 24,000 non-government primary schools in Bangladesh held a three-day strike to demand that they be brought onto the government’s payroll.

• Thousands of Zimbabwean civil servants conducted a one-day strike Thursday to protest low wages.

• Some 40,000 people were out on the streets on Thursday in various provinces across Turkey to commemorate Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink, who was shot dead outside his newspaper’s office in Şişli on Jan. 19, 2007.

• Air traffic controllers in Cyprus walked off the job for four hours on Wednesday to protest a two-year government worker wage freeze and other deficit-reduction measures.

• Inmates in 13 Kyrgyz jails started a mass hunger strike on Wednesday to support inmates in detention center No. 1 in Bishkek, where security troops violently quelled a prisoner riot on January 16.

• On Tuesday, about 6,000 workers began an indefinite strike for higher wages at a $5.25 billion project to widen the Panama Canal to accommodate larger ships.

• Dozens of orphans in Jordan on Tuesday staged a sit-in in front of the Royal Court in downtown Amman demanding better services.

• A new anti-austerity 24-hour strike and protest hit Athens on Tuesday, as auditors of international creditors returned to Greece for talks on the release of a second aid package.

• Women employees at the Palestinian Women’s Affairs Ministry began a “hunger strike till death” on Tuesday to protest against corruption and harassment.

• The teaching fraternity in Ranchi, India carried out a sit-in rally on Tuesday, to protest Maoist atrocities against them.

A workshop led by the author's Organization for Social, Cultural, Awareness, and Rehabilitation.

A recent report by the Asia Foundation cites corruption—next to security and poverty—as one of the three issues Afghans are most concerned about. A recent example of corruption can be found in the transportation of timber in Kunar. According to a member of the Lower House of Afghanistan’s parliament, who did not want his name to be disclosed, the Afghan Ministry of Finance has estimated that the revenue generated from the transportation of the timber from Kunar to be over 2,000 million Afghanis ($50 million USD), but after the timber was taken away the Kunar provincial government says that they collected just 480 million Afghanis from it. The problem in the Kunar timber industry is just one of the many examples of widespread corruption in the country.

Most Afghans see the direct impact of corruption in their daily lives. We have to pay bribes to the government officials for minor services, such as getting a national identity card. Provincial officials use their political influence to obtain shares in the development projects that are implemented in their province. Nepotism and political corruption has increased to drastic levels. The central Afghan government is not only callous to this, but its complicity is apparent. Meanwhile, provincial officials are becoming increasingly despotic as they compete with one another for more of the spoils. They act is if they are not accountable to the people, the Constitution or a system of law. Unfortunately, they are right.

There is no manner for the population to hold the government to account. In cases of extreme pressure, the central government sends a delegation to evaluate an issue in a province. The delegation goes to the province, spends its time with the corrupt official, and returns with gifts and pockets full of cash. Thousands of such commissions and delegations were made by the Afghan government in the last decade, but they have not shown any positive results.

I have often been asked what are we Afghans doing to change this situation. My answer is always the same: We are not doing anything. Ordinary Afghans feel helpless. We feel stuck with this government, and we feel that international intervention is necessary to make it any different. We are so tired of these paradoxes of conflict that we can only think about our lives at this moment, today. Tomorrow is too far, as if beyond the next mountain. This ethos of survival has made our people passive, and even numb, towards these abuses.

Meanwhile, the Afghan government has done little to win the hearts and minds of its people. It seems that politicians either do not want to act against corrupt officials, because they benefit from the graft, or they are incapable of acting against them, because they are politically so weak. The level of foreign assistance and the careless involvement of the international community generally exacerbates this problem. If the international community intends to achieve the goal of stability by representative democracy, then it needs to start helping Afghan civil society mobilize itself against corruption. Civil society should be encouraged to exercise nonviolent civic mobilization on the local level against corrupt officials.

Some of the tactics of nonviolent civic mobilization, such as protests and boycotts, have already been used in Afghanistan against the government and other entities. Even the Afghan Mujahideen, while fighting against the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan, created a parallel government in Peshawar as a tactic of nonviolent civic mobilization. Further, Afghan culture has some institutions—like the Jirga, a consensus-based tribal assembly—that can be used for mobilizing against corruption.

However, our civil society is not yet well-organized in a way that cuts across ethnic and linguistic boundaries. It lacks the knowledge and experience to launch strong civic mobilization campaigns. A low level of organization in such campaigns can make them easy to hijack by politicians or insurgents.

Nonviolent civic mobilization campaigns are necessary for bringing Afghans from passivity to activity. If people are empowered, then they can affect change in their society. Changing people’s mentality to think that this is even possible, however, is the first and most important step in empowerment. It is a long process and should not be expected to take place overnight.

People must be first educated, disciplined in thought and then mobilized for change. Citizens of Afghanistan must be taught nonviolent conflict as a means of struggle, especially through its roots in Islamic tradition. Afghan civil society throughout the country must convey the message that people have a right to employ nonviolent struggle for making a difference in their lives.

A workshop led by the author's Organization for Social, Cultural, Awareness, and Rehabilitation.

Part of the problem, too, is that Afghan security forces, particularly the police, lack a culture of tolerance. They do not recognize that ordinary citizens have a right to participate in peaceful demonstrations and protests. The Afghan security forces need to be educated in nonviolent civic mobilization and other related legal issues so they do not continue to needlessly suppress peaceful protestors and violate the basic civil rights of others.

Youth across Afghanistan, particularly in big metropolitan centers, have realized the need for nonviolent mobilization. They are mobilizing. Almost every week, we read that youth and university students are taking action for bringing change to their country. Volunteer non-political associations have been established, Facebook groups have been created, and youth are organizing against the status quo of conflict and corruption.

The Arab Spring has shown the world that Muslims can ably employ methods of nonviolence and democracy. Many Afghan youth would like to follow suit, but they lack guidance and direction for implementing such campaigns. They lack expertise in organizing across ethnic groups and mobilizing the whole population. They do not know where to begin or how to begin. They need experience and leadership.

Once Afghans understand that they are empowered, they will find their own ways to eradicate corruption and struggle nonviolently against ineffective officials in their localities. This will help strengthen governance, bringing Afghans closer to a more legitimate democratic government than the international community ever could.

• Cairo and Alexandria witnessed a fresh wave of strikes and protests on Sunday, blocking roads and causing disruption to the work of the Ministry of Transport.

• On Monday, a week-long nationwide strike in Nigeria ended, after Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan announced in a televised address that fuel will be reduced in price.

• Kuwaiti riot police on Saturday used tear gas and batons to disperse hundreds of stateless demonstrators for the second day in a row and arrested dozens.

• About 4,000 Chinese workers protested over compensation and job security at a Sanyo plant in southern Shenzhen over the weekend in the latest outbreak of labor unrest in China’s manufacturing hub.

• In Oman, thousands of expatriate laborers working for one of the Muscat International Airport projects who have been on strike since Thursday protested in front of their company premises in Azaiba on Sunday. The government’s decision to ban the export of Omani fish to the UAE was “revoked” after over 400 fishermen held a sit-in at Khasab demanding the reversal of the decision on Saturday.

• Activists from a local peace group blocked entry to the main gate at the Navy’s West coast Trident nuclear submarine base Saturday for nearly a half hour in an act of civil resistance to nuclear weapons.

• Police detained a liberal opposition-party leader and another activist Saturday at a rally protesting alleged vote fraud in Russia’s parliamentary election.

• In Pennsylvania, nearly 300 students from two Chester high schools walked out of classes Friday, demanding an end to the financial crisis jeopardizing their school year.

• After five days of a sit-in protest, workers at a lingerie store in Ireland have won their battle for back pay.

• A flash mob of youngsters performed at the crowded Model Town market on Friday afternoon in Delhi as a way of celebrating Lohri with a message against corruption.

Martin Luther King, Jr. beside a picture of Gandhi. © Bob Fitch, all rights reserved.

How does one learn nonviolent resistance? The same way that Martin Luther King Jr. did—by study, reading and interrogating seasoned tutors. King would eventually become the person most responsible for advancing and popularizing Gandhi’s ideas in the United States, by persuading black Americans to adapt the strategies used against British imperialism in India to their own struggles. Yet he was not the first to bring this knowledge from the subcontinent.

By the 1930s and 1940s, via ocean voyages and propeller airplanes, a constant flow of prominent black leaders were traveling to India. College presidents, professors, pastors and journalists journeyed to India to meet Gandhi and study how to forge mass struggle with nonviolent means. Returning to the United States, they wrote articles, preached, lectured and passed key documents from hand to hand for study by other black leaders. Historian Sudarshan Kapur has shown that the ideas of Gandhi were moving vigorously from India to the United States at that time, and the African American news media reported on the Indian independence struggle. Leaders in the black community talked about a “black Gandhi” for the United States. One woman called it “raising up a prophet,” which Kapur used as the title of his book.

While a student at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, King was intrigued by reading Thoreau and Gandhi, yet had not actually studied Gandhi in depth. A friend, J. Pius Barbour, remembered the young seminarian arguing on behalf of Gandhian methods with a reckoning based on arithmetic—that any minority would be outnumbered if it turned to a policy of violence—rather than on principle.

The more that King read Gandhi, though, the less he doubted the validity of a philosophy based on “Love,” which in turn was central to his preparation for the Christian ministry. “As I delved deeper into the philosophy of Gandhi,” he later wrote, “my skepticism concerning the power of Love gradually diminished, and I came to see for the first time its potency in the area of social reform.” His serious contemplation of Gandhi’s fundamental approaches for organizing a movement began in Montgomery, soon after becoming pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in April of 1954.

When Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to yield her seat on a public bus to a white man on December 1, 1955, JoAnn Robinson, a leader in the Women’s Political Council, worked through the night to organize an action of mass economic noncooperation. King was unanimously elected to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association, which would sustain the boycott of city buses.

With the start of the Montgomery boycott, a number of activists, pacifists, reformers, radical Christians and socialists arrived in town. Elated by King, they believed that he could take the fight for justice to a new order of magnitude unlike anything the United States had seen since the abolition of slavery. Among them was 44-year-old Bayard Rustin, 17 years King’s senior, who went on to help King build the Montgomery boycott into a mature campaign. The War Resisters League let Rustin work for King full-time for this assignment.

The black community in Montgomery, as elsewhere in the South, was armed, and there was concern that it could turn to violence in the struggle. Rustin was worried that King himself might falter without deeper foundations. Plying him with books at night, he helped him to analyze Gandhi, and was the first tutor to teach King the essentials of nonviolent struggle systematically.

The boycott’s success—recognized when the Supreme Court ruled on November 13, 1956, that local laws obliging segregation on buses were unconstitutional—raised hopes for comparable abolition of other discriminatory practices in the South. That the U.S. civil rights movement of the 1960s would be based on Gandhian strategic nonviolent action partly resulted from the success of the Alabama city’s exquisitely unified black community. “While the Montgomery boycott was going on,” King said, “India’s Gandhi was the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change.”

In February 1957, at Oberlin College in Ohio, King met a black Methodist minister named James M. Lawson, Jr. Lawson had served 13 months in U.S. federal prison for refusing to cooperate with conscription during the Korean War. While locked up, the Board of Missions of the Methodist Church successfully petitioned the court for Lawson to be handed over to them. They assigned him to teach at Hislop College in Nagpur, India. Arriving there four years after Gandhi’s death, he spent the next three years teaching. He also met numerous individuals who had worked with Gandhi and learned of the Indian campaigns firsthand from participants. King was impressed by Lawson’s background and experience, especially considering they were both just 28 years old. He asked Lawson not to wait to finish his studies to come South: “Come now! You’re badly needed. We don’t have anyone like you!” As I have documented elsewhere, Lawson became a human bridge, connecting knowledge from India to the fledgling U.S. civil rights movement and contemporary struggles.

James Lawson and Martin Luther King during the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike. Photo by Jack E. Cantrell.

After Lawson met King in 1957, he contacted A. J. Muste, a foremost Christian pacifist then still at the helm of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Muste offered Lawson the position of southern field secretary of FOR, and by January 1958, Lawson was settled in Nashville. Upon arrival, he discovered that the Reverend Glenn Smiley, another of King’s tutors and national field director of FOR, had arranged for Lawson to conduct a full schedule of workshops—including one arranged for early that year at the first annual meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Columbia, South Carolina. There, King enthusiastically introduced Lawson. “Be back promptly at 2:00 p.m.,” he declared, “for Brother Lawson’s workshop on nonviolence!” Before the agreed time, King seated himself in the first pew, waiting attentively for the three-hour session to start. Lawson once recalled in an interview with me:

Martin did that at every SCLC meeting as long as he lived. He would ask me to conduct an afternoon workshop, usually two or three hours, and he would arrange for it to be “at-large” so that everyone could attend, with nothing else to compete. He put it on the schedule himself.  A few minutes early, he would show up and sit alone, as an example, in the front row.

In Nashville, throughout the autumn of 1959, Lawson led weekly Monday-evening meetings in which he and interested students analyzed the theories and techniques that he had encountered in India. His workshops scrutinized the Bible, and writings of Gandhi, King and Thoreau. They practiced test-cases, including small sit-ins. Lawson’s workshops lasted for several months before news broke on February 1, 1960, of the Greensboro sit-ins. Hearing of the Greensboro actions, seventy-five Nashville students followed suit, creating the largest, most disciplined and influential of the 1960 sit-in campaigns. In working with Lawson—who was always calm and self-effacing—the Nashville students were not only being trained by one of King’s own instructors, but they were benefitting from direct acquaintance with Gandhi’s experiments. The sit-ins would give the overall movement its regional reach, and the Nashville students would become a cornerstone of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, of which I was a part.

In commemorating Dr. King’s birthday, it is worth remembering that everyone can learn nonviolent action as he did. King may not have invented the nonviolent strategies that he advanced, but he was an apt student, and his understanding of them would in the decades to come encourage other movements on the world stage. He became one of history’s most influential agents for propagating knowledge of the potential for constructive social change without resorting to violence. How he himself learned the theory and practice of civil resistance is a reminder to each of us that these methods are neither intuitive nor spontaneous; they’re a system of logic, skills and techniques that must be learned.

• Dozens of cars manned by Palestinians from the West Bank tried to leave Jericho on Tuesday morning in a non-violent protest action to protest and challenge the system of Israeli-only roads throughout the West Bank, but were stopped by Israeli forces, who blocked the four lanes entering and exiting the Palestinian city.

• On Monday, survivors of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Tragedy staged a protest at a park as part of the international campaign to demand that the Organizing Committee of the London Games set to begin from July 27, cancel the sponsorship by Dow Chemicals.

• Workers at consumer goods giant Unilever staged a noisy protest outside the firm’s London offices in a dispute over pensions which is set to escalate into a series of strikes starting next Tuesday.

• More than 9,000 lawyers boycotted court proceedings in Pakistan’s major cities on Tuesday in protest of a senior attorney’s slaying outside his home in Lahore.

• Workers at a Freeport McMoran mine in Indonesia on Tuesday halted their gradual return to work one day after gunmen shot two contractors dead on the road to the Grasberg mine.

• As many as 231 Air India flight attendants refused to work on Tuesday, which delayed four international flights, to protest non-payment of salaries and sustenance allowance since August.

Members of the Afghan Youth for Peace Volunteers in the greenhouse

We were lucky enough to receive an invitation in December to visit a self-run community called Chelsitun on the edge of Kabul in Wasalabad; it’s a mixed Tajik and Pashtun community split into 8 sections, consisting of 2,000 households each having its own representative which implements government initiatives and also manages security in the area.

We were told that the community practices religious and ethnic tolerance and has one of the only Mosques which welcomes joint worship by both Sunnis and Shias with the two Muslim groups sharing funerals and ceremonies. When we arrived in Chelsitun the pathway were unusually set with concrete; an independent initiative by the community (paid for by the people within the area) as a move towards installing proper infrastructure.

Our group was directed into a compound and then into the office of the community elders. It was like stepping back in time into what I imagined pre-war Afghanistan to be like; exquisite prayer mats hung on the war, the traditional ornate Afghan rugs; a greenhouse conservatory made of improvised plastic sheeting with the lushest greenery I have seen since leaving the UK.

We were warmly greeted by an assembly of community elders clad in the traditional Afghan turbans, long white beards; many were wrapped in the classic camel colored Afghan blanket. Once the greetings had been administered the elders took their seats cross legged on the floor. I was amused to see pinned up on the wall a very familiar poster which every co-op in the UK has displayed somewhere—the image of two donkeys tied with a rope heading in different directions trying to reach separate piles of hay, then a picture of the donkeys going towards the same pile of hay and both getting a share. The message: co-operation is better than conflict.

Once we sat down in the nicest of Afghan hospitality the secretary of the group “Tea for Peace” outlined the ethos of their work: “We want to control corruption in the area and the abuse of power especially among the marginalized of the community.” It was interesting to observe that a group of traditional Afghans had taken on ideas and practices you wouldn’t necessarily associate with such a culture. He continued to consult his written notes and explain the group further: “If there is a conflict in the community they bring the two parties together, have tea and aim towards bringing those parties together.”

It quickly struck me that this community was practicing strong elements of anarchism. The middle-aged secretary with round Gandhi-style glasses went to explain that their aim is to bring national unity, to get rid of discrimination whether religious of ethnic, that everyone is free and that no one should be discriminated against. He also emphasized that when interacting with one another they make sure there is no discrimination and that democracy and human rights are practiced within the community. They even have a letter of praise from the Human Rights Commission. They are all working in a voluntary way, and they do not take funds from the government.

One of the other elders chipped in to explain some of the result of their community focus: a concrete pathway, schools and piping for the whole area. This was all brought about as people want control of their area and in affect they’re freed from difficulties with the authorities and the massive current corruption problem of land grabbing.

Another elder with a long white beard and intense eyes stated with passion: “The people want peace so much, they take their lessons from the Quran which says that peace comes from a place of well being. They have no problems with any human being—all people deserve respect.” He went on to explain: “Peace can begin to be built in this country if interference in the region stops and also interference by foreign forces. There has been a betrayal by international communities, especially when the killing of Afghans is silent.” He went onto to explain that the people are under so much pressure with 44 NATO countries who are supporting the land grabbing and government. There are no honest people who work for the government. If the people rise they will face guns. The U.S. is behaving like a dictator and that’s not what the people want.

I learned that for their work within “Tea for Peace” they very much believe in empowering people, they feel it’s important for the people to get together and form a group, to work from the foundations addressing the root problem. To bring reconciliation where there is conflict they also use their faith.

Their words made be remember a teaching in the Quran which AYPV Roz Mohammed had shared with us only the day before. It roughly translates that God made lots of tribes on the earth so people can get to know one other (apparently it is written in the prayer room at Kabul Airport).

There was strong consensus in the group of elders that involvement of international forces has been extremely unhelpful and detrimental on various levels ranging from the bombing of civilians on the one hand by international forces against the people. It would be better for both sides to sit down together, with no party left out of resolution process. Internationals need to support the people, otherwise they won’t solve the problem

I was interested to hear about how they would deal with the Taliban, especially as international forces use the Taliban as one of the main justifications for being in Afghanistan. The elder with the big white turban addressed the question: “The Taliban themselves have been nurtured by foreign elements. The mujahudeen had been armed by the U.S., while the people of Afghanistan are trapped in a game which is hard to get out of. If there was no foreign interference then the Taliban could sit down with other Afghans and deal with their own problems, but with foreign interference there is always a condition which they will find impossible to accept. Afghans themselves can sit down together, however, it is impossible with foreign interference.”

Kathy Kelly asked a question relating to the planned Silk Road Path running through the country which will allow the transportation of raw materials mined within Afghanistan and will also act as a central trading route for the countries surrounding Afghanistan. A cross legged elder immediately jumped in: “It is very clear to Afghans that any minerals taken away from the country will not benefit the people. If in an ideal situation the pipeline and minerals went to helping the people of Afghanistan then that is acceptable, Afghans will not accept these initiatives. They can not accept them if this mining is being owned by foreigners. Foreign businesses must realize that they will not be able to exploit these natural resources unless the conflict is resolved.”

Another elder then chipped in: “The people that the U.S./ NATO have placed in power are thieves and murderers. They need to be taken out of power and placed somewhere else. If they could fill the parliament with 100 members of the people then peace would come to the country.”

The meeting ended with the message that unity is the key to uniting the people of Afghanistan. With the elite in power they do not understand how the common people live. Foreign money to the government disappears before it gets to them. If we want change then you can’t expect the current people in Parliament to bring it. We need representatives from the people.

It was very exciting for me to hear these viewpoints, I got the impression that their opinions hadn’t been formed by reading political books but from their first hand experience, wisdom and intelligence.

We were then shown around the lush greenhouse warmed by the traditional Afghan wood stove. I got to duck into the living quarters of an elder (to use the restroom) whereby I was fortunate enough to meet children playing in the yard and some of the women. It was explained to me that an extended family of around 45 people lived in the homes surrounding the yard and there was a communal water well where those in the area without running water come for supplies. I was very impressed by the organization of the community and radical ethos of the “Tea for Peace” group, which was definitely not what I or most Westerners would necessarily expect.

• A national strike paralyzed much of Nigeria on Monday, with more than 10,000 demonstrators swarming its commercial capital to protest soaring fuel prices and decades of government corruption in the oil-rich country.

• Tensions flared at the American Licorice factory Monday as protesters associated with the Occupy Oakland movement joined the month-old factory workers’ strike, blocking entrances and turning away delivery trucks.

• Over five hundred people in the French city of Clermont-Ferrand attended the silent march on Saturday, to show their support for Wissam El-Yamini, a thirty years old man who went into coma following his violent arrest on New Year’s Eve.

• Tens of thousands demonstrating in Yemen’s capital Sanaa on Friday chanted “freedom to the detainees,” a slogan chosen by protest organizers for demonstrations in 18 cities across the impoverished nation.

• Around ten thousand people blocked railways and the Aswan-Cairo highway in the Upper Egyptian City of Nagaa-Hammadi, Qena, late on Friday, to protest the results of the ongoing parliamentary elections in their constituency.

• More than 20 Omanis continue their prison hunger strike, which began in mid-December, in protest at what they say are unfair sentences for taking part in demonstrations last year.

• In Turkey, police dispersed scores of anti-NATO activists in the southern city of Adana on Friday as they were setting up tents to stage a three-day hunger strike to show their opposition to the NATO missile system that will be established in the eastern province of Malatya.

• On Friday, thousands of shopkeepers in the Indian portion of Kashmir went on a daylong general strike to protest the killing of a student and frequent power cuts.

• A group of parents whose children attend Chicago Public Schools slated for “turnarounds,” closures or other adjustments protested the plan with a sit-in at City Hall Thursday, where they vowed to stay until Mayor Rahm Emanuel granted them a meeting to discuss alternatives.

• Dozens of street dance enthusiasts in Hangzhou, the capital of east China’s Zhejiang Province, participated in a flash mob activity advocating environmental protection last Tuesday.

In September of last year, one of tens of thousands of annual “mass incidents” in China took place in a fishing village named Wukan. Several hundred local citizens marched to the county government seat, protesting what is now a disappointingly familiar story in towns and cities all across the country: illegal land seizures by local officials, who evict residents and sell the land to developers or corporations, pocketing a percentage. However, with greater awareness of their property rights, Chinese citizens have grown increasingly active in the past decade, fighting back against local corruption—with mixed results. Wukan was another example of this ongoing stratification of rich and poor in China, but, in December, what started as a local protest mushroomed into an international event.

After a village negotiating team was kidnapped and one of the village heads died suspiciously while under police custody, thousands of citizens gathered and took to the streets. Police in riot gear were sent in to quell the protest, beating dozens, but they retreated after citizens refused to back down. Local party officials fled the village as well, and police cordoned off the newly autonomous town, laying “siege.” After a tense standoff and days of exhilarating foreign press coverage, provincial-level officials stepped in and capitulated to village demands. In the year of the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, Wukan represented another victory for people-powered protest.

As enticing as it is to group them together, however, the events in Wukan are no extension of OWS or the Arab Spring—but that doesn’t make it any less inspiring. According to surveys in the past decade, 9 out of 10 Chinese citizens are satisfied with the efforts of their national government while 92 percent expressed a  “great deal of confidence” or “quite a lot of confidence” in their leaders in Beijing (figures that leave Chinese netizens incredulous, but which have been consistently verified). On the contrary, local officials fare worse, receiving much lower scores. Wukan was not a repudiation of the national government and its general policies and it was not the harbinger of “some nationwide rebellion that will see the national government overthrown,” but instead, anger was directed and focused on local actors and their actions. In fact, Wukan citizens begged Beijing to intervene: “Please tell the government in Beijing to help us before they kill us all,” one woman implored a Western reporter.

It would be foolish to think that all Wukan citizens were so naïve as to not recognize that their plight was caused in part by national policies—the well-meaning repeal of agricultural taxes that starved local governments and a lack of checks and balances to prevent corruption to name but two—but the consistent declarations of how their grudge was with local officials and not national ones was likely a conscious decision meant to persuade higher officials of their good intentions. By chanting “Long live the Communist Party,” they were strategically providing Beijing a way to save face by playing the savior. The provincial party secretary Wang Yang, a strong candidate for election to the national Politburo, was happy to do so.

Savvy Wukan citizens—not your typical country bumpkins, being in Guangdong province, which is not far from Hong Kong—actively courted and supported foreign media in publicizing their plight, while making sure that Beijing was aware this would not become another Tiananmen situation. They have also distanced themselves from the language of the Occupy movement, despite being associated with it by observers abroad. (Chinese media have mixed feelings about Occupy, on the one hand gleefully commenting on America’s economic and political woes while simultaneously banning mentions of “occupy” on Weibo.)

Photo by Tom Lassetter.

Expanding the protest outside the village was not a priority and, for the most part, Wukan did not become a national cause célèbre during the protest. During the height of the siege, a few neighboring villages smuggled food supplies into Wukan, but there weren’t exactly pizzas being ordered to the village. In fact, spreading Wukan’s cause to the rest of China would have in the end done more harm than good in Wukan itself. As Ian Johnson writes, “It’s okay to say that local officials are corrupt or that the real estate deal in question was wrong. But it is not acceptable to have protesters link up with each other in a national network.” Thus, it’s perhaps fortunate that a planned march to a neighboring village did not take place, as such an effort would be seen by the national government as much more provocative and perhaps worthy of harsher responses, not unlike how China responded by jailing dozens of activists after inklings of a supposed Jasmine Revolution were in the works. Then again, the proposed march may have served as an effective threat, as a resolution came shortly after announcements of the inter-village march.

In China, the differing motives of local governments (whose primary task is maintaining social stability) and the central government (generally more concerned with maintaining legitimacy) means that each responds to different pressures. Political scientist Yongshun Cai writes:

Given the political hierarchy, it has been commonly accepted that intervention from the central government is a crucial way of achieving successful resistance in China. … [The] ability to achieve successful resistance thus depends on whether they can effectively exploit the constraints faced by the two levels of government.

In Wukan, utilizing foreign media applied the pressure, ensuring that the protest could not simply be crushed without severe repercussions—a variation on the slogan “the whole world is watching.” But the protesters’ discrete and transparently non-revolutionary goals were meant to exploit the local-national structure, skillfully setting up the central government to have to intervene. Wukan is not unique with regards to using these tactics, but the outstanding execution is certainly noteworthy, with most of their immediate aims achieved and organizers guaranteed amnesty. So long as officials don’t renege on their promises, it’s another successful model for other Chinese villages and towns to look to when faced with similar injustice. It may not be an Arab Spring, but, then again, it’s hard to plan one when 9 out of 10 people approve of the national government—or at least say they do for now. With the central government so concerned with maintaining this legitimacy, citizens have practical paths for forcing the central government to reduce income inequality, corruption, and other contentious issues. As the effect of Wukan reverberate within government and among similarly wronged citizens, protests in China may gradually become less of a conflict and more of a negotiation between two parties who want the same thing: a better future.

But is that what a tree hugger really is? Just some dazed hippie who goes around giving hugs to trees as way to connect with nature. You might be shocked to learn the real origin of the term.

The first tree huggers were 294 men and 69 women belonging to the Bishnois branch of Hinduism, who, in 1730, died while trying to protect the trees in their village from being turned into the raw material for building a palace. They literally clung to the trees, while being slaughtered by the foresters. But their action led to a royal decree prohibiting the cutting of trees in any Bishnoi village. And now those villages are virtual wooded oases amidst an otherwise desert landscape. Not only that, the Bishnois inspired the Chipko movement (which means “to cling”) that started in the 1970s, when a group of peasant women in Northeast India threw their arms around trees designated to be cut down. Within a few years, this tactic, also known as tree satyagraha, had spread across India, ultimately forcing reforms in forestry and a moratorium on tree felling in Himalayan regions.

Despite this powerful history of nonviolent resistance, we still consider tree hugger a derogatory term. Meanwhile, a current example of forest protection in Brazil, where the country’s environmental agency has a special ops team that hunts down illegal loggers, gets all kinds of glory. Not that it shouldn’t, considering Brazil has cut deforestation by nearly 80 percent since 2004. But do environmental heroes need to, as the BBC recently described Brazil’s forest agents, “wear military fatigues, with heavy black pistols slung casually on their thighs” in order to get any respect?

In Africa, there are several conservation organizations that have a shoot-to-kill policy when they see a suspected poacher. Private security firms in Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Malawi provide military-style protection for the iconic animals that Western tourists flock to see. While some have argued in support of these desperate measures–pointing to the dramatic rise in poaching in recent years–the “shoot first and ask questions later” approach has led to the deaths of locals, who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. These incidents of course lead to resentment toward conservation, which has been shown to be most effective when local communities are involved in the process.

Not surprisingly, people want to protect the land they live on. And like the Bisnhois and people of the Chipko movement, they are often willing to lay down their lives for it–armed only with their own two arms.

• Several hundred anti-Wall Street protesters marched in a “human float” behind the 123rd Tournament of Roses parade on Monday, unfurling a 250-foot banner of the constitution and also displayed an approximately 70-foot octopus made of recycled plastic grocery bags.

• More than 950 relatives of inmates are refusing to leave a Venezuelan prison in a protest to demand faster trial for inmates.

• Troops in Indian-controlled Kashmir have opened fire on hundreds of villagers who were protesting against frequent power cuts, killing one person and injuring two others.

• Thousands of Indiana workers rallied outside, and inside, their state capitol on Wednesday to speak out against Governor Mitch Daniels‘ renewed effort to force through so-called “right to work” legislation designed to undermine labor unions and workers’ rights protected by collective bargaining.

• Skipping New Year Eve celebration parties, hundreds of people in Guy Fawkes masks gathered in downtown Kuala Lumpur last weekend in a peaceful protest to demand greater democratic freedom in Malaysia.

• Indonesians have dropped thousands of old flip-flops and other footwear at police stations and a child protection group to protest the heavy-handed treatment of a 15-year-old boy accused of stealing a policeman’s sandals in the northern state of Central Sulawesi.

• About 2,000 Peruvians marched in the northern city of Cajamarca on Monday, resuming protests that started in November against plans to develop a gold mine that would harm their water supplies.

• Thousands of people in Bangladesh’s northwest gathered over the new year period to demand government action to save a dying river which they said is vital to their livelihoods.

• A group of Nigerian protesters marched in the Niger Delta on Saturday calling on Royal Dutch Shell to do more to clean up last month’s massive oil spill.

• The mayor of a remote Armenian village joined on Thursday more than 100 environmental activists in a protest against a German-owned company’s plans to expand open-pit mining in the southeastern Syunik region.