Nonviolent Change Journal

DIALOGUING

LETTER FROM JACK DUVALL:
SUCCESSFUL NONVIOLENT CHANGE
AS A MODEL FOR THE MIDDLE EAST

Jack DuVall is Director of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict: khedge@nonviolent-conflict.org.

     Osama bin Laden has said that his political goal is to liberate Arab lands from regimes influenced by the U.S. and the West, and President Bush has expressed pride in the U.S. military liberation of Iraq. Whether or not these are worthy outcomes, there is a method of liberation other than terror or war that has been astonishingly successful in the past half-century, and has more often led to peace and democracy: civilian-based nonviolent resistance, aimed at seizing power from an oppressive ruler or system.

     Dictators in the Philippines and Chile were brought down with "people power"-style campaigns. One-party authoritarian states were replaced by genuine democracies in Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Mongolia, through strategic nonviolent action. Segregation was shattered in the U.S., and apartheid was dissolved in South Africa, mainly by using tactics such as boycotts, strikes and mass demonstrations. And in 2000, a student-sparked, unified nonviolent campaign removed Slobodan Milosevic from power in Serbia, without a shot being fired.

     How Milosevic was ousted is the story told by "Bringing Down a Dictator", which won the Peabody Award for Best Documentary in 2002. It was screened at the PJSA meeting at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington on Saturday, October 11.

     Many thanks.

EXCERPT OF GEORGE SOROS:
CRITIQUING BUSH FOREIGN POLICY

Here is an excerpt of George Soros speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, January 12, critiquing George Bush's foreign policy:

"...President Bush was elected in 2000 on a platform that promised a humble foreign policy. Yet, from the day he was inaugurated, he went out of his way to denounce international agreements and institutions. Then came the terrorist attack of September11th, which according to him changed everything. He used the war on terror as a pretext to pursue a dream of American supremacy that is neither attainable nor desirable. It endangers civil liberties at home and embroils us in military adventures abroad. There has been a dangerous discontinuity in the way we conduct our affairs: we engage in behavior that in normal times would have been considered unacceptable. Our new national security posture has been embodied in the Bush doctrine.

The Bush doctrine is built on two pillars. First, the United States will not tolerate any military rival, globally or in any region of the world.

Second, we have the right to engage in pre-emptive military action. Taken together, these two pillars support two levels of sovereignty: The sovereignty of the United States which is sacrosanct and exempt from any constraint imposed by international law, and the sovereignty of all other states which is subject to the pre-emptive actions of the United Sates. This is reminiscent of George Orwell's famous book Animal Farm in which all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others. Underlying the Bush doctrine is the belief that international relations are relations of power not law, and that international law merely serves to ratify what the use of power has wrought. This dogma can be very appealing especially when you are powerful, but it contradicts the values that have made America great. And the rest of the world cannot possibly accept it. This has been demonstrated in the case of Iraq. The invasion of Iraq was the first practical application of the Bush doctrine and the rest of the world had an allergic reaction to it. Nobody had a good word to say about Saddam Hussein yet the overwhelming majority of the people and governments of the world opposed the invasion because we did it unilaterally, indulging in pre-emptive military action. If we reelect Bush in 2004 we endorse the Bush doctrine and we will have to live with the consequences. We shall be regarded with widespread hostility and terrorists will be able to count on many sympathizers around the world. We are liable to be trapped in a vicious circle of violence, as we already are in Iraq...."

LETTER FROM STEVE SACHS:
THE NEED TO HEAL LARGE SCALE TRAUMA

     Charles David Tauber's article on the need to heal the trauma as well as the physical and economic damage from large scale conflict, is a very important one. Experience shows that time alone does not solve the psychological and social difficulties created by war and similar experiences. This is demonstrated by the experience of American Indian communities that continue to suffer psychological and social problems from physical and cultural genocide, most of which occurred several generations ago. Left unresolved is historical grief that has been inherited by those born into the culture, from contact with parents and other elders. This in itself has been a major contributor to social problems, such as abuse of family members and others, and alcohol and drug abuse, which compound feelings of inadequacy caused by unresolved historical grief. Both of these produce anger, which is self destructive when turned inward, and abusive to others when turned outward. All of this often results in behavior that is socially and economically damaging in a significant number of Indian people.

     In addition, two other pieces of past cultural disruption continue to have negative impacts on a large number of people in many native communities. The first, was the U.S. governments taking young people to attend boarding schools away from their home communities, where they were not aloud to speak their own languages or follow their own cultural ways, and where they were subjected to considerable abuse. At the same time, the boarding school education (combined with racism in outside communities) was not adequate to not allow students to integrate culturally or find adequate employment in the outside community. But on returning home, many Indians found that removal had made them at least partly alienated from their own culture (which they had been taught to think poorly of), and in many cases prevented them from learning adequate parenting skills, in addition to which, in numerous instances, the abuse learned at school became applied to children and other family members, and thus became passed on to future generations.

     The second additional piece of cultural disruption was the imposition of culturally inappropriate institutions, including forms of government, that magnified the above problems, while creating new difficulties. As people became used to these inappropriate institutional forms, they were often passed on to future generations, as too few tribal members realized that these institutions clashed with widely held traditional basic values.

    This complex of imposed and inherited problems has produced extreme difficulties in numerous Indian communities, far beyond the problems of economic under development that many of them face, which are considerably more difficult to deal with because of the unresolved trauma. U.S. Indian communities have been making progress in overcoming these problems as they are able to:

1) recognize and find ways to resolve historical grief, in many cases through becoming involved in traditional practices, including ceremonies (many of which focus on healing the mind and the spirit), and through the use of culturally appropriate services (as opposed to the culturally inappropriate imposed and leaned services that often exacerbate problems);

2) Adopting culturally appropriate institutions, including governments, but also schools and other education programs, so that tribal members, both young people and older persons who have been cut off from significant aspects of their traditional ways, can learn their own culture and feel good about it, and thus feel good about themselves;

3) Obtain the funding and other support or empowerment required to carry out these measures. (For a more detailed discussion of overcoming trauma and other problems by American Indian societies, see Stephen M. Sachs, LaDonna Harris, Barbara Morris and Deborah Escobel Hunt, "Recreating the Circle: Overcoming Colonialism and Returning to Harmony in American Indian Communities" Proceedings of the 1999 American Political Science Association Meetings (Washington, DC: American Political Science Association, 1999), also available from Steve Sachs.

Thus the American Indian experience supports what David Tauber reports that it is essential to take the necessary and culturally and otherwise appropriate steps to heal large scale trauma, if a community and its members are to find peace. Moreover, as Tauber implies, unless healing of trauma takes place after a conflict, the conflict is likely to return and be difficult to stop.

As Darling G. Villena-Mata shows is the case for Palestinians and Israelis in, "Traumatic Conflicts: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Conflict Resolution," in Nonviolent Change, Vol. XIV, No. 3, Spring 2000. Thus unless holistic healing and reconstruction projects like that of the Coalition for Work With Psychotrauma and Peace in Vukovar can be fully and appropriately implemented in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia, there remains a danger that violent conflict will return to the former Yugoslavia.

These articles and opinions of the authors do not constitute the endorsement of Nonviolent Change nor its publisher, Organization Development Institute, or any of its staff, nor of CirclePoint which is housing the Nonviolent Change Journal.

©2002.2003, 2004. All rights reserve. The Nonviolent Change Journal is published by the Research/Action Team on Nonviolent Large Systems Change - an interorganizational and international project of The Organization Development Institute.

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