Violence & nonviolence

Violence & nonviolence

Violence & nonviolence

1 March 2003Feature

Can people in the US build an effective nonviolent resistance movement? Or is a lifetime of consumerism and militarism obstructing the path once walked by Martin Luther King? Gordon Clark reflects.

The Iraq Pledge of Resistance is a US campaign of nationally coordinated nonviolent civil disobedience to oppose the war in Iraq. To my knowledge it is the only US campaign of coordinated nonviolent resistance in opposition to the war.

To this date the campaign has been sponsored by about a dozen of the country's major peace organisations. It is being actively organised in 53 cities, with new ones coming on every week; over 5000 people have physically signed the pledge, with another…

1 March 2003Feature

The Nonviolent Movement (Movimento Nonviolento or NM), founded in the sixties by Aldo Capitini, “father” of Italian nonviolence, works to remove individual and group violence from every aspect of social life at a local, national and international level, and to overcome the power structures which are fed by the spirit of violence. NM aims to create a worldwide community without classes, promoting the free development of everyone in harmony with others.

The NM fundamental guidelines…

1 December 2002Feature

Earlier this year Howard Clark interviewed former ELN guerrilla Pastor Jaramillo for Peace News. He talks about the challenges and frequently dire consequences of "reinsertion" into civilian life and suggest a prognosis for the future of peace talks.

As popular support waned in the 1980s, guerrilla groups made various attempts to switch to unarmed political struggle. The FARC itself, seeking to negotiate peace in the period 1984-87, set up a political party, the Patriotic Union. In the next five years, at least 2,000 of its leaders and activists were killed by paramilitaries, security forces and members of the drug cartels.

In the early 1990s there was a new wave of negotiations with the government involving guerrilla groups such…

1 December 2002Feature

How do communities respond to long-term violence? For 54 of them it has been to establish "peace communities" which involve literally thousands of people. However, communities that refuse to bear arms in the conflict are unpopular with every side and frequently experience direct violence as a result.

The term “Peace Community” perhaps evokes an image of utopian pacifist experiments. In Colombia, however, the peace communities have been formed by displaced people and face continued pressure from every armed side. Renouncing the use of arms and collaboration with any armed force, they try to establish demilitarised spaces, neutral to the armed conflict.

Members of each peace community make five commitments:

to participate in community work efforts; to say “No” to injustice and…

1 December 2002Review

Oxford, James Currey, 2000. ISBN 0 85255 273 4

The wild and warlike - and mostly illiterate - Muslim tribesmen known usually as Pathans, who straddled the barren mountains between Afghanistan and British India, were an unlikely source for a nonviolent movement. The story of the movement's intrepid leader, six-foot-three Badshah Khan (Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan) and his redshirted Khudai Khidmatgar (Servants of God) has been told a number of times.

Unlike previous writers Mukulika Banerjee, while recognising the…

1 December 2002Feature

In 1996, as a result of a government counter-insurgency campaign combined with paramilitary activity, thousands of people were displaced from the Cacarica river basin. In responsethey formed CAVIDA - the Community of Self-Determination, Life and Dignity - and began to fight for their land and fortheir return. Community member Jerónimo Pérez reflects on CAVIDA's guiding principles and their refusal to take up arms in, or support, the conflict.

The population of Chocó in the north of Colombia is 70 per cent Afro-Colombian, 20 per cent indígena. The zone has attracted the interest of multinationals (because of its reserves of petrol and coal) and of logging companies. And the price of land doubled in one year following president Samper's announcement in 1996 of a new plan for an inter-oceanic link, connecting the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

It was in 1996 that the Colombian government launched a counter-insurgency campaign.…

1 September 2002News

In the spirit of satyagraha, three survivors of the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster began a hunger strike outside the Indian parliament on 28 June.

In July around 100 survivors took to the streets of New Delhi for a nonviolent sit-down. The “indefinite” hunger strike has been taken up by sympathisers in what, according to organisers, is becoming “a mass action, taken up in relay by people all over the world”.

These actions are being taken in protest at the possible…

3 June 2002Comment

It seems the Tamil Tigers have begun to take small steps towards at least the possibility of a change, away from the violent tactics of their lengthy "liberation" struggle against the Sri Lankan government. Was it - as reported in some of the mainstream press the pressure being brought to bear by the "war on terror" that prompted them?

Unlikely perhaps, but not completely implausible, and that's certainly what the “war on terror's” promulgators…

1 June 2002Review

Pluto Press 2002. ISBN 0 7453 1835 5, 264pp, 15.99

Diana Francis' book appears at a time when it seems almost impossible to stop the war-machine. In the face of this reality, her book gives us some hope that people determined to achieve lasting peace can make a difference.

It is fascinating and instructive to see how she handles both uncertainties and certainties and how she extends the scope of conflict transformation by introducing nonviolence not only as a means but also as a philosophy and a way of life.

She…

3 March 2002Comment

It would be very easy to argue that the true “axis of evil” is actually rather short, and stretches from the White House across the river Potomac and down to the Pentagon. But perhaps we would begin to sound like “America bashers”.

The problem is, as many have noted, that in this reality there is one dominant force (in a hegemony that also includes Britain, most of the European Union and some of south Asia) and that is the United States.

Total war

The “war on terror”, or…

1 March 2002Review

War Resisters International, 2001. ISBN 0 903517 19 1

To my mind, Brian Martin is one of the most important theorists currently linking anarchism and nonviolence. His books, from Social Defense Social Change to Challenging Bureaucratic Elites, serve as manuals, histories and encouragement for activists concerned with developing effective, nonviolent movements for positive radical social change.

With the rise of the anti-globalisation movements and the current responses to a western-based revenge war, Nonviolence…

1 March 2002Review

JustUs Productions 2001. VHS/PAL format. Running time 25 mins. Available from London Quaker Bookshop, http://www.quaker.org.uk; tel +44 20 7663 1070; or email bevb@quaker.org.uk

This timely and well-produced video (with notes) is a useful resource for peace, social justice, economic and environmental activists.

Using commentaries to camera, it shows details and direct footage of a variety of recent nonviolent direct actions which have taken place in Britain, using the words and witness of the activists themselves. Footage of the essential pre-action planning and training activities serve as useful guides for others considering taking such action.

As a…

3 December 2001Comment

On 28 September 2001 the Palestinians commemorated the first anniversary of the second Intifada with more people killed and injured adding to the already hundreds of deaths and the thousands injured during this year.

The characteristic of this Intifada in contrast with previous Palestinian confrontations with the Israeli occupation is the extraordinarily high number of civilian casualties within both the Palestinian and Israeli societies. This was due to an excessive use of…

1 December 2001Feature

What are the positive aspects of prison? What can being imprisoned or working with people imprisoned offer nonviolent activists? Jyotibhai Desai offers three short tales of the use of prisons in creating a humane society.

A scholar of Gandhi and Tolstoy from the US asked the founder of the Vedchhi Ashram “How do you decide when to offer Satyagraha and when to continue with constructive (village development) work?”

"I never went to prison, the prison came to me!", he answered, and added “we do not seek issues nor do we seek confrontations. Ours is a way to life. So live; So live! that the perpetrator of injustice, be it the state or the landlord, may understand how to correct…

1 December 2001Feature

Gandhi practised two types of Satyagraha in his mass campaigns. The first was civil disobedience, which entailed breaking a law and courting arrest. When we today hear this term, our minds tend to stress the “disobedience” part of it. But for Gandhi, “civil” was just as important. He used “civil” here not just in its meaning of “relating to citizenship and government” but also in its meaning of “civilised” or “polite”. And that's exactly what Gandhi strove for.

We also tend to lay…