Violence & nonviolence
“Can you dance your tragedies? Can you dance your dreams? If you are Palestinian, you almost have no choice but to try doing both, for if you do one without the other, you choose to indulge in obsessive victimness or naive illusion” [From the introduction to El-Funoun's latest production]
On 9 March 2004, El-Funoun will celebrate its Silver Jubilee. For a quarter of a century, El-Funoun has indeed danced some of the Palestinian tragedies and dreams, challenges and ambitions. But…
I spent last summer as a volunteer on the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel. Participants in this World Council of Churches initiative spend three months living in the region to try to learn more how the conflict affects ordinary people.
On a day-to-day basis we were monitor-ing violations of human rights and international law, providing protection by our presence, and supporting both Israelis and Palestinians in their non-violent acts of resistance to the…
As a Palestinian dance choreographer working in the midst of conflict, I am often asked: what is the rationale of your artistic engagement under the circumstances?
If “engagement” with something is interpreted in a passive sense, as a mere relation to that thing, then the question implies a certain degree of volition in deciding whether or not to relate to issues of conflict and trauma. I personally do not think that in a situation of conflict artists have a choice of whether or…
In January 2004 Rudi Friedrich met Gush Shalom activist and member of the Refuser Parents Forum Adam Keller at his home. A few days earlier five refusers, Haggai Matar, Matan Kaminer, Noam Bahat, Adam Maor and Shimri Tzamaret were sentenced to prison terms of one year by a military court - after more than 14 months' detention already - for their refusal to “serve” in the Occupied Territories. Rudi asked Adam to discuss the situation and relevance of the refuser movement.
RF: How…
"The periodical graswurzelrevolution is the main voice of grassroots democratic activists." - Ralf Vandamme, social scientist. 1
"The group that has most consistentlytried to build a social rhizome and that comes closest to anarchist ethics is ...Non-violent Action. It is not by coincidence that this group's newspaper, amagazine with a relatively wide distribution, is called graswurzelrevolution…
The most dangerous form of violence in South Asia is arguably the threat of nuclear war between India and Pakistan. It colours the statements made by the leaders of both countries and strengthens the extreme right wing in both countries, which feeds off and thrives on the fanaticism of its counterparts next door.
The rhetoric of war, whether it is made by George Bush, Ariel Sharon, Atal Bihari Vajpayee or Pervez Musharraf, gives the cue to these elements to indulge in more violence,…
The recent impasse on re-establishing the institutions of local government in Northern Ireland raises many questions, among them the goodwill of both the republican and unionist communities.
The postponement of elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly, until at least the autumn, is a disappointment, particularly as the normally volatile summer period is nearly upon us. It is usual to seek to blame one side for such an impasse, and, while there can be some point in this at times, it…
I was born and raised in Pyong Yang, now the capital city of North Korea. At that time, the early 1930s, the Korean people were under Japanese rule, which brought us great suffering and pain. It created a deep sense of hostility and enmity towards the Japanese. The cooperation between Korea and Japan, as co-hosts of the soccer World Cup, shows that there is always hope of reconciliation between former enemies.
Soon after our liberation from Japanese occupation at the end of the…
The Iraq Pledge of Resistance is a US campaign of nationally coordinated nonviolent civil disobedience to oppose the war in Iraq. To my knowledge it is the only US campaign of coordinated nonviolent resistance in opposition to the war.
To this date the campaign has been sponsored by about a dozen of the country's major peace organisations. It is being actively organised in 53 cities, with new ones coming on every week; over 5000 people have physically signed the pledge, with another…
The Nonviolent Movement (Movimento Nonviolento or NM), founded in the sixties by Aldo Capitini, “father” of Italian nonviolence, works to remove individual and group violence from every aspect of social life at a local, national and international level, and to overcome the power structures which are fed by the spirit of violence. NM aims to create a worldwide community without classes, promoting the free development of everyone in harmony with others.
The NM fundamental guidelines…
The term “Peace Community” perhaps evokes an image of utopian pacifist experiments. In Colombia, however, the peace communities have been formed by displaced people and face continued pressure from every armed side. Renouncing the use of arms and collaboration with any armed force, they try to establish demilitarised spaces, neutral to the armed conflict.
Members of each peace community make five commitments:
to participate in community work efforts; to say “No” to injustice and…The wild and warlike - and mostly illiterate - Muslim tribesmen known usually as Pathans, who straddled the barren mountains between Afghanistan and British India, were an unlikely source for a nonviolent movement. The story of the movement's intrepid leader, six-foot-three Badshah Khan (Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan) and his redshirted Khudai Khidmatgar (Servants of God) has been told a number of times.
Unlike previous writers Mukulika Banerjee, while recognising the…
The population of Chocó in the north of Colombia is 70 per cent Afro-Colombian, 20 per cent indígena. The zone has attracted the interest of multinationals (because of its reserves of petrol and coal) and of logging companies. And the price of land doubled in one year following president Samper's announcement in 1996 of a new plan for an inter-oceanic link, connecting the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
It was in 1996 that the Colombian government launched a counter-insurgency campaign.…
As popular support waned in the 1980s, guerrilla groups made various attempts to switch to unarmed political struggle. The FARC itself, seeking to negotiate peace in the period 1984-87, set up a political party, the Patriotic Union. In the next five years, at least 2,000 of its leaders and activists were killed by paramilitaries, security forces and members of the drug cartels.
In the early 1990s there was a new wave of negotiations with the government involving guerrilla groups such…
In the spirit of satyagraha, three survivors of the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster began a hunger strike outside the Indian parliament on 28 June.
In July around 100 survivors took to the streets of New Delhi for a nonviolent sit-down. The “indefinite” hunger strike has been taken up by sympathisers in what, according to organisers, is becoming “a mass action, taken up in relay by people all over the world”.
These actions are being taken in protest at the possible…
