Reflection paper: “Strategic Nonviolent Conflict”
Mattia Romano
The use of non violent strategies during a conflict is an extremely important and uneasy decision to take by those groups that enhance these sortof protests. Their importance it is really challenging and often goals are much harder to achieve then with the use of violence.
These strategies as argued by P. Ackerman and C. Kruegler, matter to the outcome of non violent strategies, but to achieve that outcome, the practitioners of non violent direct action involved in non violent conflicts, have to be characterized by courage, self-control and to be ready even to death.
Often non violent mobilizations have the initial impact of changing conditions in the environment in which they operate. Democratization effort, for instance, often begin with mass direct action in a previously cruel political environment, leading to greater political tolerance and safe space in which to organize further efforts.
One of the last demonstration of non violent mass protest that brought a huge potential of “people power” -but also anger against the regime- was the so called Iranian Green Wave. In the aftermath of the results of Iranian presidential elections of 2008, the discussed and unclear re-election of the former president manifested all the corruption and falsity upon which the Islamic Republic is constructed.
A huge mass of civil population reversed in the streets of Tehran demanding for democracy, the respect of their rights and shouting the slogan “Where is my vote?”. No weapons. Except from the ones used by the paramilitary force, Basiji, that strongly repressed with the use of brute power the peaceful and disarmed crowd causing the death of dozen of innocent people. Among them Neda, a young girl who immediately become the symbol of the protest. Since the protest started, the Islamic Republic has unleashed its repressive state apparatus on peaceful demonstrators, killing, injuring, arresting thousands of innocent people and subjecting those who were in jail to torture and rape.
The peaceful demand for individual and social rights, freedom and civil equality have been suppressed by a too corrupted regimes, that it is still far from resemble democratic, that uses the forces against its populations and threatens to use it in the international arena.
P. Ackerman and C. Kruegler’s scheme of principles are useful to clarify the Iranian green wave as a strategic non violent movement.
The Green Wave received much international support even from members of the G8. The distinctive character of the movement is that it comprises lots of parts of the Iranian society, summoning groups from different economic, social, political and religious backgrounds. So, it has a broad legitimacy within the population.
Even though this non-violent protest had a huge resonance at the international level, it also faced a brutal suppression marginalizing the quest for democracy and the respect of the human rights.
Lots are the references to the father of non violent conflict. The movement has been called by the Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo “a Gandhian moment in Iran.” Also the Iranian religious thinker Abdulkarim Soroush recently said: “if Iran’s Green movement has a godfather, it is Gandhi”-“We are insisting adamantly that democratic, nonviolent change is at the heart of this movement”.
Unfortunately, despite this huge potential of this movement and the goals, not all the principles of strategic non violent conflict can be operative in this case and after the first harsh impact of the non-violent strategy no political tolerance and safe space has generated in which to organize further efforts.
The websites of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran make it abundantly, and painfully, clear which side has engaged in the overwhelming majority of the violence in Iran since June 12 2009.
Only one side has the guns, and it’s not the Green movement.