For you who wants to know more Nonviolence & Conflict Management

In Sweden

In 1931 several (5) demonstrators were shot during a demonstration for higher wages at Ådalen. The demonstrators used non-violence but met with deadly violence. The unions worked for greater justice in Sweden.

Earlier there were great differences between rich and poor. The situation improved with time but has now during the 1990s worsened again.

Since Ådalen 1931 the police have not shot any demonstrators, but in the summer of 1991 it happened again, however without deadly result. The demonstration was not about wages but tens of thousands were protesting for global justice during the EU meeting in Gothenburg. Demonstrators wished to show that they did not that

accept the fact that 50 million people died each year as a result of injustice while we in the West live a live of luxury. There were a number of demonstrators who resorted to violence and the media gave them nearly all the attention.
Worldwide Nonviolence
Each day on every continent of our planet there is a nonviolence struggle. It is bigger and wider than ever before and even if it is the military actions the get the biggest headlines it is the nonviolence actions that reap the greatest victories in both big and small. In the following chapter some are described. This is what a usual day on the planet looks like:

At dawn, a couple of hundred families enter an area of land which lies deserted and make it their land. They cultivate the land, build schools and small hospitals. Even if the occupants are not legally owners to the land, The Landless Workers Movement who organise hundreds of thousands of workers in Brazil, consider that they have a greater moral right to the land than the big landowners. The poor need the land to survive.

• 
  Bus drivers in Paris organise a reversed strike. Instead of refusing to work they drive the buses without passengers paying. The Union pays for the fuel. The passengers are happy, they travel free and the bus company has no income.
  
• 
  Flora, a Christian woman in the Sudan, participates in a workshop arranged by a Sudanese non-violence organisation together with the Christian Peace Movement. Christians and Muslims meet there. “ I used to hate the Muslims, them from the north “ she said. “From childhood we learned to hate them, but at the workshop I met so many good people from the north that I could no longer hate them.”
  
• 
  In a poor quarter of one of Colombia’s towns with over a million inhabitants , the members of a youth network, Red Juveniles, are giving a theatre piece on the street. They are dressed in uniforms and carry plastic guns. The idea with the street theatre is to portray civil people being murdered by gangs, a part of everyday life in Colombia.
  
• 
  At the world Trade Organisations meeting in Seattle at the end of 1999 ten thousand activists – union members, advocates of Global justice, environmentalists dressed up as porpoises – blocked the doors to the building where the meeting was to take place. The Battle of Seattle became a symbol for those against the force of the globalisation movement. Ordinary citizens can, if they organise themselves give the worlds most powerful decision makers a tough match.
  
• 
  In India, poor families attempted in The Movement Against Large Dams to prevent a large dam from being built which threatened to obliterate their village.
  
• 
  In Australia people belonging to the organisation Animal Liberation break into large egg production buildings where chickens sit in extremely crowded pens. They carefully remove the chickens and drive them out into the country where friends look after them and supply veterinary care. Having done this they then come forward and in front of TV cameras and law courts explain why they save the chickens.
  
• 
  During the war in Chechnya in the 1990´s Russian mother organised as Soldiers Mothers Committee travelled to Chechnya to personally take home their sons. Their opinion was that the war was a catastrophe both for Russians and Chechnyans.
  

The Future belongs to Nonviolence

In the first part some examples of Large Scale Nonviolence are given. Nonviolence which has brought down regimes.

The second part gives some examples of Small Scale nonviolence: actions in town, at home, against military manoeuvres. They do not bring down governments, but are even so, deeply meaningful. Here nonviolence as a life style, a way of living is mentioned.

The third part, nonviolence across national borders, gives two examples of nonviolence work in Latin America where Swedes and local activists cooperate.

This chapter is only a short introduction to the struggle for nonviolence carried on all over the world. Should you wish to deepen your knowledge in this subject you are offered an appendix: Resources, which refer to web sites, books and films.
Large Scale nonviolence
We live in the age of bloodless revolutions. Peace researcher Jörgen Johansen has observed that since the beginning of the 1980´s until the present time the number of social movements that through nonviolence have achieved a change of regime has increased dramatically. These movements have not consisted mainly of pacifists: they are people who have used nonviolence methods for strategic reasons. The instigators have judged that a peaceful struggle - in just their society at a given point in time – has been more effective than an armed struggle. In his research, Johansen has shown that countries where nonviolent revolutions have been successful:

Poland 1980, Bolivia 1982, Uruguay 1985, Madagascar 2002, to name but e few examples. From his article “Waves of Nonviolence”, (unpublished manuscript) here is a brief description of the peoples revolution in the Philippines 1986, the Fall of The Berlin Wall 1989, and the revolution in Serbia, Autumn 2000, and peace researcher Stellan Vinthagens analysis.

The Peoples Revolution forced Dictator Marcos to flee the country.

The mass exodus of citizens was accompanied by demonstrations organised by East German oppositional who organised large demonstrations. A hundred thousand or more people defied the police and military by having peace marches in the large towns such as Leipzig, Dresden and East Berlin. They shouted a mass declamation: “Peace”, “We are the people!” – which was an illusion to the regimes claim to the fact that they represented the people “in the workers and farmers state”. Great importance was placed on there being no violence and cause for police brutality. “No violence” was repeatedly heard. Due to the moral pressure arising from the action, the communist leaders gave up. On the evening of 9^th November 1989 a representative for the regime stated, on TV those DDR citizens could travel in and out of the DDR at will. An hour later masses of people assembled at the border crossings. Thousands went into West Berlin. Germans on both sides of the border attacked the Berlin Wall with pickaxes and hammers. This was the beginning of the end for the communist dictatorship in DDR.

1. 
   Humoristic actions in the form of messages sprayed on house walls, parades and pamphlets accomplished by the student movement Otpor belayed ordinary people’s fear of the regime.
   
2. 
   The eighteen opposition parties ceased their mutual disagreement. Instead they formed an alliance. By doing this they presented a realistic and democratic political alternative to Milosevic.
   
3. 
   Thousands of miners and other workers went on strike as a protest against the regime. They represented the economic resistance.
   
4. 
   The resistance movement succeeded in mobilising a hundred thousand or more people in a demonstration in Belgrade. People travelled from all parts of the country in car and bus caravans. This made manifest the Serbian peoples support for the uprising.
   
5. 
   People in the opposition had contact with the regimes source of power which: the police and the military forces. This gave the resistance knowledge in advance of what security forces were planning. As the protestors refused to use violence against the police and instead smile and talk to them in a friendly manner, it was easier for them to join the opposition.
   

Johansen joins in Gandhi´s idea that those wishing to change an unjust society must start building the new just society here and now – new political structures, new democratic forms of organisation – before they take over governmental power in the country. In addition Gandhi advocates “an inner revolution”: it is necessary for individual to accumulate new values and attitudes if the alternative society is to see the light of day. To remove a government is a necessary part of change in rebuilding society, but for the “total revolution” in Gandhian tradition more than a .change of government is needed.

To create effective civic structures, that the whole population can participate in democratic process, that rebels have a positive alternative to the present order, that ordinary people attain the self confidence needed to determine over their work and their everyday life instead of letting chiefs and politicians do it, that a disposition of solidarity spreads to all - this is a part of what must be generated. To carry out a non-violent revolution is a challenge on many levels.
Small scale nonviolence
One does not need to be a crowd to practise peace. All around the world, small groups and individuals live nonviolence. It can be a start to building a large movement, opinion building, to awaken people’s curiosity about a forgotten question or to carry out single important humanitarian contributions. Sometimes it is to make people laugh; a good hearty laugh can be a political source of power.

Here are a few examples of people’s ability to take action and ingenuity around the world.

The activists had also put a label on the back of each doll with the suggestion that they ring their local TV station, to ensure that the media had journalists to do interviews when the news spread. An activist describes the advantages of the action. “The shopkeeper makes money twice, we speed up the economy, the consumer gets a better product and we get our message out.”

The police chief’s wife is an excellent example of the fact that people of all ages can take a stand. Commitment is not just something for young people. In Germany NATO soldiers experienced a situation they had not expected when on a manoeuvre in the middle of the 1980´s. Eight hundred pensioners followed the tanks into the woods and blocked roads and paths so that the manoeuvre had to be abandoned.

French activists resist the use of corporal punishment against children. Based on their nonviolence ideology they maintain that raising children must be without violence. Beating children does not belong in a civilised society.

Feminist nonviolence activists, both men and women, do not just attack men’s violence against women but assert that equality between the sexes is a part of the nonviolent society. To belong to a certain sex and thereby be subjected to less possibility of self- realization is a form of violence.

Many leading figures in the history of nonviolence have pointed to the treatment of animals by humans in laboratories and the food industry, with its unacceptable bloodshed. Mohandas Gandhi, Henry David Thoreau, Bertha von Suttner and Lev Tolstoy saw forward to the day when mankind had ascended to a more peaceful form of diet, that is to say a vegetarian diet.

In the age of the global environmental catastrophe many nonviolence orientated people take up Homo sapiens disregard for nature as a serious neglect “Make Peace with the Earth” is a slogan which is used.

These and other commitments are such as non-violent people live up to in everyday life. How we treat out children, how women and men behave to one another, what food we choose, how our consumption affects the environment – these are not private, but political question. Through our separate choices we influence society.

There is an example of such a meeting below.

Another form of nonviolence is that which is called preventive presence, where activists travel to conflict areas and by their presence have a soothing effect. There is also an example of this work, given by a member of the Christian Peace Movement who travelled in Guatemala.

Colombia
In the pamphlet “Welcome to Colombia” members of the Swedish organisation PeaceQuest talk about meetings they have had with young people in Colombia’s civil war. Here is an extract from an interview of Diego, aged 25 and Daisy, aged 19 from the youth organisation Red Juvenil, “Youth network” made by Fedrik Jansson., from the town of Medellin in Southern Colombia.

“Red Juvenil started in the 1990´s as a reaction against how young people from Medellin´s poor quarters were described by the civic authorities. They felt stigmatised by the authorities and the media and wished to show another picture of young people. The problem of the young is a symptom of the illness, says Diego. By more clearly identifying young people as a part of society one can more easily solve the problems which rest on social problems, alienation and a lack of possibilities. Just now Red Juvenil is working with a school campaign.

We use different participation techniques in our presentations: theatre, forum play, role play and games. In a richer area, they would not let us in o the school area despite an invitation from a friend who attends the school. So we got together outside the school and did a presentation anyway and everybody who took part said it was good, Daisy tells us. Red Juvenil has long been engaged in the struggle against carrying weapons, military service and force recruitment by the armed actors. They work with information and give legal air to conscientious objectors.

-Colombia’s constitution recognises conscientious objection as a right but at the same time say that in a time of war all must do military service. We believe that it is a right not to have to kill someone, not to carry weapons and not to have to take part in a war you do not believe in says Diego. The military in Colombia can stop anybody at will and demand a military service card which shows that one has done military service. If you do not have a card with you, then you are taken directly to the nearest military base. Being taken into custody in this manner is illegal. Call up to military service should be done in writing at the same time as one is informed of their rights in the matter.

-When one of our members is arrested by the police or military, we use all our national and international networks to apply pressure. This has given results. in several cases the military have not touched people they know belong to us or who say that they are conscientious objectors Diego says. He also says that international solidarity is a matter of life and death for them.

- We want people to help by sending letters of protest when something happens. The authorities here know that there are people abroad who have their eyes on us and what happens with our safety. One can be on an e post list on our website www.redjuvenil.org

-In the military, those doing national service are divided into two groups. Those who have basic school and those with no schooling. Those with no schooling are sent to the areas of conflict, while those who have studied serve only one year and are sent to the towns, where the risk that something will happen is less Diego says.