Nonviolence Against Hypocrisy: Setting Agendas For Social Defence

In the Gulf, the agenda for the peace movement has been set by George Bush. 
That is something to worry about.  The Gulf crisis has posed difficult
questions for supporters of nonviolent action against aggression.  How could
nonviolent action have been used to stop Saddam Hussein?  After all, he has
been massacring his opponents for years.  The main focus in the Western peace
movement seems to have been to support the blockade and oppose the invasion of
Iraq.  The blockade never was really a nonviolent action since it was backed
by force.  There have been some important nonviolent actions against war in
the Gulf.  Perhaps the most courageous is the Gulf Peace Camp, set up by
nonviolent activists from a range of countries on the border between Iraq and
Saudi Arabia.  Yet, it must be said, simply opposing the invasion of Iraq
provides no answer to the question of how to use nonviolent action to
challenge the occupation of Kuwait.  There, as well as supporting such
nonviolent interventions, it is also important to look more broadly at the
Gulf situation and draw lessons for the future development of social defence. 
Could nonviolent action have been used to stop Saddam Hussein's invasion of
Kuwait?  Hardly.  Living in a vastly unequal and authoritarian society, the
people of Kuwait could not have been expected to provide united nonviolent
resistance against an invasion.  What then is the role for social defence? An
important clue comes from the massive hypocrisies involved in the United
States-led coalition against Iraq, in which Saddam Hussein has been portrayed
as the epitome of evil.

Western governments proclaim outrage at the invasion and occupation of Kuwait,
yet they did nothing about the invasions of Panama and Grenada by United
States forces.  Nor have they taken much action against the occupation of Gaza
and the West Bank by Israel or the invasion and occupation of East Timor by
Indonesia (with 100,000 or more deaths of East Timorese).  Western governments
were silent when Iraq used chemical weapons against Iranians and against Kurds
in Iraq.  They eagerly sold weapons to Iraq, in spite of Saddam Hussein's
horrible human rights record.  Most blatantly of all, they supported the Iraqi
invasion of Iran.  These hypocrisies have been pointed out often, but one
implication for the peace movement has been seldom noticed.  The key point is
that the agenda for the peace movement has been set by those governments -
especially the US government - which have suddenly decreed that Saddam Hussein
is the greatest danger in the world.  Most of the media have taken their cues
from their governments, and popular opinion has thereby been shaped.  The
result is that supporters of nonviolent action have been put in the situation
of having to provide solutions to a crisis created by government and military
priorities.  The crisis, by its origins and constitution, makes nonviolent
intervention extremely difficult.  In retrospect, the key time to intervene
nonviolently against Saddam Hussein was earlier in his rule, in the 1980s. 
The powerful 1980s peace movement, though, took little notice even of the
Iraq-Iran war, preoccupied as it was with nuclear weapons.  Another reason for
the neglect of the Iraqi regime's excesses was the support given to it by many
governments, including the United States.  This support took the form of
diplomatic recognition, exports of weapons and other equipment, and turning a
blind eye to brutality, the use of chemical weapons, attacks on US warships
and so forth.

The agenda in the 1980s for the dominant Western powers was to tolerate or
encourage Saddam Hussein.  The peace movement as a whole did not challenge
this agenda.  There were many things that could have been done in the 1980s to
support the nonviolent opposition within Iraq: publicity, boycotts, rallies,
communication networks, peace camps and peace brigades, etc.  But aside from
the regular efforts of groups such as Amnesty International, little was done
in this regard.  The implication of this analysis is that supporters of social
defence need to make much more effort to set the agenda for nonviolent
intervention. Rather than putting almost all effort into promoting social
defence in one's own country or into intervening elsewhere according to
government-dominated agendas, there should be much more energy devoted to
developing networks and ongoing campaigns to support nonviolent struggles in
other countries according to criteria and priorities set by nonviolent
activists.  Part of any challenge to repression and aggression in other
countries must involve a challenge to Western governments, especially their
diplomatic support of brutal regimes and their exports of arms and
technologies of repression.  This challenge can be called nonviolence against
hypocrisy.  Such efforts initially may not do a lot to challenge the dominant
agenda, but until promoters of social defence do more to set the agenda, they
will be continually asked to solve problems at the wrong time and the wrong
place.  How much better it would be to take the initiative and help to provide
solutions to problems that governments prefer to ignore.

Brian Martin