Hard Times
Opening talk by Howard Clark
I was asked to give this opening talk on nonviolent responses in crisis situations – Hard Times, as we have called them – on account of a book I am editing entitled Unarmed Resistance and Global Solidarity[1], based on a project at Coventry University’s Centre for Peace & Reconciliation Studies in 2006.
The first section of the book is on resistance and contains five case studies. One is on Zimbabwe, which does count as hard times, and another on Burma, but it does not take up the severest cases like the Congo and Darfur. There is a case study on the overthrow of Miloševic in Serbia with a commentary from Ivana Franovic from the Centre from Nonviolence about the limits of what people power achieved. Another contribution by Mauricio García Duran deals with Colombia, where the term civil resistance is used in a very broad sense. In the usage there, to live is to resist, to form a community is to resist, to show your determination to live without arms is to resist. Mauricio cites Michael Randle’s definition of civil resistance in his book of that title but says that the Colombian definition is much wider. The other case study in this section focuses on economic power in India and is entitled ‘Macro Development – Micro Resistance’ because you have small localized resistance movements against major operators.
The second section looks at contemporary examples of nonviolent intervention. The book edited by Yeshua Moser-Puangsuwan and Thomas Weber, Nonviolent Intervention Across Borders[2], was really excellent for that period. So this section deals with Peace Brigades International work in Colombia, and the Nonviolent Peaceforce in Sri Lanka and the Philippines, the International Solidarity Movement, and Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel, and the International Women’s Peace Service. Also with Voices in the Wilderness breaking the sanctions against Iraq.
The third section looks at the bases on which people form relations of solidarity. This section is by no means comprehensive, but there are pieces about diasporas, Women in Black, War Resisters International’s work with conscientious objectors, a short piece on the blockade of Chinese arms shipment to Zimbabwe to illustrate the power of workers, and the World Social Forum as an example of the anti-Globalisation/pro Global Justice movement. The piece on gay and lesbian regional organising in Africa is particularly interesting in showing an alternative to the north-south axis of solidarity.
The final section looks at problems and debates. One of the debates is on Western based democracy promotion, in particular in relation to the ‘colour revolutions’ in Serbia, Georgia and the Ukraine; another is on nonviolence training, with a piece from George Lakey about introducing training in Britain.
I’ll move on now to the work of CCTS. At the start, and under its initial name of the Coordinating Committee for Conflict Resolution Training in Europe, we were responding to the dark times as we saw them in former Yugoslavia – though they were to get darker – and more generally in Eastern Europe. We saw ourselves as contributing mainly either to conflict prevention, or subsequently to conflict resolution at the end of an armed conflict. Clearly in a long-running and persistent armed conflict you find things to do, but there are also panicky moments, such as when the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo was unleashed, which throw everything up in the air. When this committee started we were all thinking very much in terms of skills transfer – which was one of the first things we threw out of the window. The original aim was to multiply the number of conflict resolution trainers prepared to work on ethnic conflicts in East and Central Europe and Yugoslavia, and we allowed ourselves eighteen months in which to do this. But almost as soon as Adam Curle, the moving force behind the setting up of the committee, set foot in Osijek, Croatia, he concluded that this was not what was needed. So the focus shifted to accompanying civil society groups working in these areas.
There is a lot of scholarship around social movements at the moment, and some of the leading scholars, particularly a pair called Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, emphasize the role of information exchange in transnational movements. So you would look at Amnesty International and see how it mobilizes support. I regard both skills transfer and information exchange as important but for me the central thing has to be relationships. In the case of accompaniment, the prime actors are those who are living in the situation, and this affects very much what happens, especially in dark times.
I was involved in the Balkan Peace Teams, and when the bombing of Kosovo was about to start the question arose as to whether or not we were going to withdraw the team. The OSCE observers were all withdrawn to clear the way for the bombing. We had three people in the team, and only one of them was actually in the country so he came out as there was no point in his staying. But what would have been the role of the team if there was a proper team there? I remember Oxfam a few years earlier had a project in Rwanda on nonviolence and democratization, and the moment the genocide began they pulled out their people. I think it is particularly difficult to look at hard times from the accompaniment perspective because you are not the protagonist and you have more choice about the risks you take.
I will be talking more broadly, but let me say something about the book’s discussion of nonviolent intervention, or rather about the war situations which are covered in the book. There are two contributions on Colombia, Mauricio's one discussing the civil resistance of the peace communities, and one on the PBI approach to accompaniment. PBI’s approach is very strategic. They identify the chain of command of the authorities they need to reach. There are certain officers who are supposed to be monitoring human rights, either the equivalent of Ombudspeople or District Attorneys, and the PBI practice is to make regular visits to them to present accounts of what they are observing, very carefully working out what the risks are, how they can affect the risk and the perception of risk. The contributor on PBI to the book, Quique Eguren, co-author of a major study of the impact of PBI, interviewed generals in Guatemala who said that the presence of PBI actually made a difference to them because they didn’t know who was behind it. It wasn’t just the fact that there were international witnesses, but that they might be able to reach influential people in the US and so influence US policy to Guatemala. And, to return to Colombia, you have instances where the US Congress halted some military assistance to the Colombian military in response to atrocities against the peace communities.
One of the Ecumenical Accompaniment volunteers, Ann Wright, who had also been with PBI in Bogota, complained that it was a bit too much like being on an assembly line. I think this is particularly the case in big cities. By contrast in her small team with EAPPI in the village of Tulkarem in the West Bank, she was freer to follow her instincts. Anyway PBI has this system and it imposes strict limits. They never take the risk of going to see the ‘illegal’ armed groups, that is the guerrilla, because that could lead to them being misrepresented. Their approach has led to some debate between them and Nonviolent Peaceforce which is reflected to some extent in the book in the contribution of Christine Schweitzer. She rejects the proposition in the Eguren-Mahony book on PBI that nonviolent accompaniment works because it exercises a deterrent effect through invoking international human rights standards that the country has signed up to and working through channels that can bring pressure to bear on the human rights violators.
The Nonviolent Peaceforce approach is represented more intelligently by Christine than by a lot of Peaceforce spokespeople. Peaceforce do approach guerrilla fighters, and, for instance, go to the Tamil Tigers and ask them to free people they have kidnapped. They are operating in a very different context from PBI but they are saying that traditional peacemaking methods of trust-building do function in nonviolent accompaniment; it isn’t only deterrence. Their latest project in the Philippines is actually about monitoring the ceasefire at the invitation of the local Peace Council in Mindanao who wanted the monitoring to be carried out in a nonviolent way. These are nonviolent experiments in situations that are not particularly dark. Colombia is very dark at times but you feel people get used to it. One of the factors about the really dark times is that you lose your reference points. You think ‘My God what it happening? The shit is hitting the fan!’ – to put it metaphorically. So there is a strong pressure on you to do something abnormal.
This is where I fall back on John Paul Lederach – as demonstrated in his nested paradigm:
The large oval bubble represents the Desired Future, with positive Crisis Intervention represented by the smaller bubble inside it. This enclosed bubble is something that can contribute to making the long-term future possible. It’s certainly not what is represented by the third bubble on the left of the diagram which goes outside the desired future. In my experience it is existing relations with people in an area that provide the basis for intervention in situations of extreme crisis. The test for assessing local actors is: Are they social action groups or simply NGOs set up for convenience? It is the relationship with their own community which is crucial.
During the period of NATO’s bombing of Kosovo, the Committee commissioned me to write a paper about peace after the war for a seminar on that topic. People came from DFID’s Conflict Resolution Unit, and there were quite a few other people from outside our usual circle. We avoided any discussion of military intervention as such, though a lot of people were exercised by that issue. For me Kosovo highlights the fact that the crisis point is not the time to get into a debate about military intervention if that is not part of your model because you don’t have the information. The information that was coming out during the war in Kosovo gave severely exaggerated figures of the numbers being killed; the NATO figures were ten times higher than they actually proved to be. You had the DFID minister, Clare Short, lying through her teeth, saying ‘Yes, we are preparing the peace’. In one interview she claimed that they had identified people in the villages – total crap! Once the NATO troops arrived you realized they had no idea what they were doing.
If you have worked out a future based on nonviolence, you really need to stick with that approach and not switch at a moment of crisis. You also have to ask yourself if an army is suddenly going to change its colours. In Kosovo there were Serbian officers who made notes on the war crimes they witnessed which they later presented in evidence against other soldiers. There are so many unknown factors at a point of crisis that it is not the time to revise your model. Afterwards, however, you really do need to look at it.
However, this leaves you in a frankly marginal position. You are looking at small things that can be done – and most of them you should have thought of earlier. You are looking at protection. Are there places that can be opened up? Are there institutions, such as universities or churches, that can provide some measure of protection when there are large-scale population movements? What programmes can be quickly mounted for displaced persons and refugees at the next stage?
In terms of nonviolent resistance, which is clearly a major thing for me, it’s very hard to think of instant strong reactions. The archetype might be Operation Omega to Bangledesh during its war of independence. It was launched in June 1971 and its participants got there and did their actions in October and November, which was very quick. But the only reason they could act that quickly was that they were the same group of people who had prepared something similar for the Biafra war. They didn’t manage to get things organized in time for Biafra, but they had all their networks in place for moving on to the next crisis point in Bangladesh. And they did manage to do that – they ran the Pakistani blockade and confronted it with nonviolent action. Normally, however, nonviolent action takes a lot longer than that to organize. Narayan Desai and the Gandhian movement in India wanted to mount a freedom march into Bangladesh, but the Indian army invaded before that could be organized.
So large-scale nonviolent resistance tends to be slow-acting and takes time to organize. We have seen a lot of hastily organized projects like the interventions into Bosnia in the1990s which were confused in their methods (did they want UN military escorts?) and in their demands (“Something must be done” but what and who by?) The Quakers actually appointed someone to counsel people wishing to go on one such march, and it was considered something of a triumph that hardly any Quakers did so in the end because the objectives were very vague and had more to do with creating a climate for military intervention.
In contrast to this, the other issue which comes up is constructive engagement and how you speak truth to power in these situations. And as I’m in Friends House, I’ll come out with a little bit of my previous attitude! When I worked for Peace News, I was warned by a very good Quaker, Hugh Brock, who said: ‘Whenever you have a doubt about an issue and there are two pacifist lines, look what they are saying in Friends House and go the other way!’ He said they always prefer a quiet word in the ear of someone in power, rather than actually putting it out there and saying – ‘This has gone too far’. Someone else from that same period, Devi Prasad, who was secretary of WRI, once remarked – ‘Quakers, oh yes. They like speaking half-truths to half-power!’ I am not sure of the context in which he said that, but you could have said it of Alan Pleydell’s predecessor in QPS (as it was then) with respect to the relationship with the official Peace Committees of the Soviet bloc. From what I know of Quakers today and can see of QPSW's current work, I can see there have been changes, but there are other groups who take that old attitude.
Returning again to Lederach, he says that you need to keep open the links with the insiders in the camp of the opposition, and inside all parties – and of course you do. But there is also a point where you draw the line. Maintain contacts in their camp, but speak plainly about the regime. Constructive engagement is all very well, but when someone does the kind of things Mugabe was doing earlier this year, you have to say – ‘Look, we are willing to look for the best in you, we are willing to listen to what you say, but actually we’ve been lied to so many times, and your behaviour has gone so completely beyond the pale, that, unless things change, we don’t see any possibility of constructive engagement’.
Spark M. Matsunaga Institute for Peace, University of Hawai’i, Honolulu, Hawai’i, 2000. Back to text
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