Conflict without the fighting

At a time when the world is poised for a bloody conflict, one man is suggesting the most successful resistance is non-violent, writes PETER CALDER.

The timing seems singularly ironic - or utterly appropriate, depending on your point of view. Barely a fortnight after the terrorist atrocities in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, an American breezes through town hawking a book and a television series that celebrate and promote what sounds like an oxymoron: non-violent conflict.

But Jack DuVall is painting on a canvas far broader than a fortnight. The executive producer of the two-part documentary and the co-author of the weighty book called A Force More Powerful remarks that this is the last place on Earth to be offered the chance to see what he's devoted much of the past five years of his life to.

The two-part film, which screens on Sky's Sundance Channel this month (the companion book, sparsely available in hardback now, will be published in paperback in December), was screened on American public television almost a year ago and is a survey of the 20th century's great non-violent struggles for freedom.

The project was undertaken at the millennium's end, he says, to ensure that we would remember our recent history not just as a series of bloody insurrections and armed conflicts.

"We were concerned that at the end of the century there would be all these media records of the wars and revolutions and there would not also be a look back at other kinds of conflicts."

His choice of words is careful. DuVall, who is fond of the term "non-violent weapons", is anything other than a peacenik and he resists the yoking together of the terms "conflict" and "resolution" because he's keen to distinguish non-violence from inaction.

"We're not necessarily talking about resolution," he says, "but we're saying that when conflict cannot be resolved it needs to be carried on in a non-violent fashion. So we begin to shift the phenomenon of conflict away from the uninformed choice of violence."

They are sobering words for a world staring down the barrel of a US-led response to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But human history is littered with evidence of the failure of violent conflict. When force prevails it gives the illusion of victory, DuVall suggests, but it fails because the very idea that force prevails is an oxymoron.

Both book and film derived from the academic work of Peter Ackerman, whose book Strategic Non-Violent Conflict: The Dynamics of People Power in the Twentieth Century grew out of scholarly research that began in the 1970s.

They amount to a comprehensive survey of the great non-violent movements of the century. Among events he documents with detail and precision, but in an easily digestible style, are Mahatma Gandhi's campaign for self-rule in India, which began with his historic and symbolic defiance of the hated salt laws; the Danes' resistance to occupying Nazi forces, which resulted in the escape to Sweden of almost all Danish Jews; the black occupation of segregated diners in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1960; the 1980 shipyard strikes in Gdansk, Poland, which history would come to see as the first crack in the pedestal of totalitarian communist rule in Europe; and the spectacularly successful 1985 boycotts by black shoppers of white-owned stores in South Africa's Eastern Cape Province.

But at all points, the writers are keen to underline the idea of non-violent struggle as a form of conflict. The Rev James Lawson, a student of Gandhi's methods who inspired three Nashville sit-ins, is quoted as urging that non-violent resistance needs to be organised and orchestrated with military precision.

"It needs fierce discipline," he says, "training and strategies; it does not happen spontaneously."

DuVall, who worked in US Air Force counter-intelligence during the Vietnam War and later was a speechwriter for presidential contenders, including Gary Hart and Walter Mondale, is at pains to emphasise the practicality of non-violence.

Its great proponents, he says, "came to that choice because they had - or thought they had - no other choice available. It doesn't have to be a principled decision - though that is not to say that no valid principle can attach to it."

In the shadow of the atrocities of September 11 and to a West aching for revenge, the idea of non-violence may ring a little hollow. "Try telling that to Osama bin Laden," some may say.

But DuVall says that, in geopolitical terms, the major powers have taken too little note of the effectiveness of non-violent struggle in eroding the power base of terrorist regimes.

"Gandhi didn't bomb the Houses of Parliament," DuVall says. "He went after the Raj's basis of support in his homeland. The same lesson may be drawn from what happened in [the former] Yugoslavia.

"In the book we quote at some length a number from the democratic Opposition in Serbia who say, 'If you had just given us the help that we were asking for in 1993 and 1994 we might have prevented what happened in Bosnia'.

"The Americans believe that Nato bombing 'softened up' Milosevic. But I don't think you'd find a Serbian who agrees with that. If anything, it hardened his grip on power. When, finally, in 2000, US agencies channelled help to non-violent anti-Milosevic forces inside Serbia, they brought him down."

Like many whose analysis runs counter to the prevailing ideology, DuVall seems a little like a voice in the wilderness. The networks in the US shunned his show, though it aired on PBS, which can be received on every set in the country. Here, TVNZ turned the documentary down and it will screen on a channel that only Sky digital subscribers see.

He sees the decisions, though, less as a rejection than as "a kneejerk assumption that they knew what this was about, that their model for non-violence was the saintly Gandhi giving an inspiring speech and everyone saying, 'I will lay my body down to get run over.'

"This is not someone sitting around pleading for morally correct behaviour. We are showing real conflicts in which people are fighting and contending and getting hurt and sometimes losing their lives because they had a passionate cause, but had found it possible to engage in conflict in another way."

He believes the media generally "actively neglect" non-violent struggle (until the baton-waving police move in and it gets violent) because it does not always or necessarily generate dramatic and striking images.

But for all that - and despite the events in America - he feels optimistic. "This latest wholesale act of terrorism - although this may not be apparent right at the moment - will necessarily anathematise the use of violence," he says. "Other strategies will have to be reconsidered and taken up."

* A Force More Powerful screens on the Sundance Channel on October 21 and 28. The book (hardback $81.95, paperback $54.95) is published by St Martin's Press, whose New Zealand representative is Pan Macmillan.