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Modern tools bring power to the people
Jonathan Manthorpe, Vancouver Sun
November 04, 2002

Mao Zedong was wrong. Power does not come from the barrel of a gun.

At the dawn of the 21st century the power of liberation and the power to remove dictators comes out of cellphones, miniature video cameras and the Internet.

These tools of political organization, information and communication are more potent weapons of regime change than the guns and torture chambers of tyrants.

They are also more potent than the guns and bombs of liberation terrorists whose victories more often than not only lead to new dictatorships.

That is the belief of the Washington-based International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. There is a wealth of evidence to support the position.

The most convincing recent transitions from tyranny to democracy have come through non-violent, highly organized political campaigns.

Recent examples are the Philippines, South Korea, South Africa, Thailand, Indonesia, Poland, Chile, Salvador and Serbia.

So more important than the gadgets, whether they are bomb belts or palm pilots, says the centre, is the ability of repressed peoples to make themselves ungovernable.

"Tactics such as strikes, boycotts, civil disobedience, blockades, non-violent sabotage and other disruptive actions" have been far more successful in supplanting dictatorships with representative governments than have wars of liberation, said Jack DuVall, director of the centre.

"Dictators and their military and security forces are seen as monolithic [but] non-violent strategists have split them apart and decimated the loyalty of those who follow orders," he said.

Non-violent insurrection, DuVall emphasized, is not passive. It requires far greater organizational skill and usually much larger reserves of courage than armed struggle.

One of the strategy's great advantages is that it also requires the politicization -- in essence the understanding and acceptance of civil society values -- by a people to oust a dictator.

Thus much of the groundwork for reconstruction is in place the day the tyrant falls.

"Although they can cause destruction, terrorists have rarely succeeded historically in achieving their political goals."

There is weight to that view. The violent overthrow of dictators or colonial regimes in places like Vietnam, Angola, Rhodesia-Zimbabwe, China, Indonesia in the 1950s, Afghanistan under the Soviets and Cuba led only to new
dictatorships.

In Indonesia the job of liberation had to be done again in 1998 when dictator president Suharto's regime collapsed in the face of street protests and the unwillingness of the army to remain an agent of repression.

A similar and more difficult rectification is going on in Zimbabwe, where the 22-year dictatorship of Robert Mugabe is using all tools of repression to try to quell a non-violent mass popular uprising led by the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

Mugabe may be mad, but he is no fool. He has learned from the experience of neighbouring South Africa the dangers of organized popular political movements.

Despite the mythology within South Africa's African National Congress, now the governing party, it was not its armed wing, Umkonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), that made apartheid unsustainable. It was civil disobedience by a host of internal political organizations drawing on international support.

Mugabe has loosed all the classic instruments of state terrorism on the opposition movement. There are death squads, detentions and torture.

But he has realized that significant international support for the MDC could be the turning point.

Mugabe has therefore tried, with some success, to convince the world that Zimbabwe's problems are merely a backlash by a few supremacist white farmers. And to try to ensure his message dominates, almost all foreign journalists have been expelled and local reporters are severely circumscribed.

Information about what is happening in Zimbabwe still gets out, but it has slowed to a trickle.

"We have been looking at the concept of flooding countries in conflict like Zimbabwe with digicams," DuVall said. "Then the world could see Mugabe's thugs demanding to see ruling party membership cards before they give people food. They could see the riots and the beating up of political opponents."

jmanthorpe@pacpress.southam.ca

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