Paths to Peace
- Nonviolent action
Regime change without bloodshed
By CLAIRE
SCHAEFFER-DUFFY
Gene Sharp is a staunch proponent of people power. The
Boston-based sociologist is one of a handful of American researchers who say
you can topple a dictator nonviolently even in a country as beleaguered
and politically repressed as Iraq. The researchers’ strategies for regime
change stand in sharp contrast to the Bush administration’s bloody
scenarios -- everything from assassination to a blitzkrieg of Baghdad -- for
ousting Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
According to Sharp and his associates, neither sanctions-induced
poverty nor the brutality of Saddam’s dictatorship precludes the
possibility of popular resistance in Iraq. What is necessary there, as in any
country, is good planning based on understanding of the dynamics of power
between oppressor and oppressed.
“You have to have a broader picture,” Sharp said.
“You have to understand the nature of your opponent and the resources of
your people.”
The researchers’ confidence in the viability of political
defiance was bolstered by the recent small but remarkable protests outside the
Information Ministry in Baghdad. On Oct. 22, two days after Saddam released
thousands of prisoners, Iraqis, many of them elderly Shiite women, marched on
the government to demand to know the fate of still missing sons and brothers.
The New York Times called the protests the “most visible sign of a
new and potentially seismic trend,” one that indicated the willingness of
ordinary people to speak up. Sharp described the demonstrations as
“extremely interesting.”
“Whereas it has been widely maintained that nonviolent
struggle is impossible under the political conditions of Saddam Hussein’s
regime, these demonstrations that occurred show that this type is possible even
in Iraq.”
History is replete with examples of effective nonviolent action,
said Sharp, who called the First Continental Congress “a nonviolent
resistance organization committed to getting political change through
noncooperation.”
As America’s premier tactician of nonviolent struggle, Sharp
has been monitoring the habits of dictators and the people they govern for the
last four decades. A former Harvard researcher, he has a doctorate in political
theory from Oxford University and is currently the senior scholar at the Albert
Einstein Institution, which he founded in 1983.
In the early ’70s, he wrote The Politics of Nonviolent
Action. Considered by many to be the definitive study of nonviolent
struggle, the book catalogues almost 200 methods of nonviolent action. These
strategies are indexed in Sharp’s more recent work, From Dictatorship
to Democracy, a manual on how to bring down a dictator without
indulging in mutual mass slaughter.
Sharp preaches a muscular nonviolence, defining nonviolent
struggle as a political technique that can be understood and effectively
applied by ordinary people. It is not to be confused with an abstention from
violence based on ethical or religious beliefs.
Confusing principled nonviolence with “strategic nonviolent
action” is one reason many dismiss the possibility of a bloodless
overthrow of Saddam, said Peter Ackerman, chair of the board of overseers of
the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and Sharp’s
former student.
Ackerman and Jack Duvall, director of the International Center for
Nonviolent Conflict, recently co-authored “Weapons of the Will,” an
essay on the possibility of nonviolent regime change in Iraq that appeared in
the September/October issue of Sojourners magazine.
“The reality is that history-making nonviolent resistance is
not usually taken as an act of moral display,” the two men wrote. “It
does not typically begin by putting flowers in gun barrels and it does not end
when protesters disperse to go home. It involves the use of a panoply of
forceful sanctions -- strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience, disrupting the
functions of government, even nonviolent sabotage -- in accordance with a
strategy for undermining an oppressor’s pillars of support. It is not
about making a point; it’s about taking a power.”
Even the most repressive government is limited in its power to
oppress, according to Ackerman and Duvall. Because a regime depends on the
population for certain goods and services, its ability to compel compliance is
“not infinitely elastic.”
“Saddam recognizes that he can’t fight a battle to
repress a population on all fronts,” Ackerman said. “He has to
terrorize to get compliance. The more people he employs to terrorize the
population, statistically speaking, the more unreliable his security force.
There are elements of the Iraqi Republican Guard he is afraid to have in
Baghdad.”
In their essay, Ackerman and Duvall proposed a scenario on how
Iraqis could maximize Saddam’s vulnerabilities to their advantage. They
could launch a campaign of simultaneous civilian-based incidents of disruption,
dispersed around the country and difficult to target like “mosquitoes that
could not all be swatted.” Any crackdown would depend on the outermost,
least reliable members of Saddam’s security apparatus. If the resistance
made it clear to police and soldiers that they were not the enemy, the
realization that Saddam was being openly opposed would lessen people’s
fear of engaging in more systematic acts of resistance.
A month ago, Ackerman discussed these strategies for nonviolent
regime change with members of the Iraqi opposition. On Oct. 15, he appeared on
the BBC’s World Service Night cast. He said his views “provoked a
tremendous debate” among Iraqi oppositionists with some arguing that
Saddam is too powerful to oust nonviolently and others saying the Iraqi
dictator is losing control.
Ackerman is both cautious and optimistic in assessing the impact
of last week’s protests in Baghdad. “Whether that’s the last
straw on the camel’s back we will know in time. It’s going to put
pressure on Saddam Hussein’s regime and that’s got to be
helpful,” he said.
Claire Schaeffer-Duffy is a free-lance writer living in
Worcester, Mass.
Related Web site
Albert Einstein
Institution
www.aeinstein.org
National Catholic Reporter, November 15,
2002
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