A Season for NONVIOLENCE
Giving "give peace a chance" another chance

By SYD BAUMEL

Nonviolence only seems like the way of the wimp, not the warrior. 

Peaceful resistance – which can take even more guts than the violent kind – has proven its mettle time and again, driving the British out of India, desegregating the American South, replacing the threat of a bloodbath in South Africa with "Truth and Reconciliation" and the vision of "a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world."

Jesus, Gandhi, King, Mandela – these are among the world’s alternative warriors, flexing moral muscle, water on rock, petal on metal. 

Few people know it, but in 1998 the world began celebrating an annual "Season for Nonviolence." 

"A Season for Nonviolence is gathering momentum around the world every year," says Rev. Connie Phelps, pastor of Winnipeg’s Centre for Self-Awareness. Phelps is spearheading Winnipeg’s first year of participation in the global peacefest, along with over 100 other cities in 10 countries. 

The Season starts every January 30th, the anniversary of Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi’s assassination in 1948 and ends 64 days later on April 4, the day Martin Luther King Jr. met the same ironic fate in 1968.

The spirit of the Season is expressed in every conceivable way: film festivals, teach-ins on peaceful conflict resolution, PSAs, lectures and discussions, workshops, seminars . . . High profile participants and endorsers have included Coretta Scott King, the Dalai Lama, Jesse Jackson, and Arun Gandhi, co-founder of the MK Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, named after his legendary grandpa.

1998 was a good year for the cause of nonviolence in more ways than one. Egged on by an appeal from every living Nobel Peace Prize laureate, the United Nations General Assembly dedicated a whole decade – this one – to promoting "a Culture of Peace and Nonviolence for the Children of the World."

From peace brigades to standing army

The Decade and the Season of Nonviolence are just two among many manifestations of a growing nonviolence counterculture bent on waging peace, not war. The movement includes not just high profile organizations like Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders, but a wealth of little known groups, organizations, and institutes. The Middle East conflict alone has spawned scores, if not hundreds.

One of those guerrillas in the war on violence is Peace Brigades International. Founded in Canada in 1981 and nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2001, PBI trains and deploys the modern day version of the freedom fighters who helped liberate the South. The organization responds to requests for small teams of volunteers from independent countries to take up residence in a political hotspot and very openly "accompany" local people whose peaceful political activity has put them in serious danger. The mere presence of a PBI-certified "international" cows the bullies. "Perpetrators of human rights abuses," explains PBI, "usually do not want the world to witness their actions." 

But should accompaniment fail, the human rights organization rolls out its "high-level contact network" of diplomats and politicians for some quiet arm twisting. And if that fails, an "emergency response network" of grassroots PBI volunteers springs into action, publicizing the injustice and bending as many political ears as possible. But it rarely gets that far: In today’s global village, even brutal dictators don’t like to be caught blushing.

Peace activists currently are poised to take the idea of nonviolent soldiering to a whole new level. Their audacious scheme – endorsed by seven Nobel Peace Prize laureates – is to develop not a brigade, but a "standing army" of nonviolent peacekeepers. Thousands of civilians would to be trained in the techniques of nonviolent resistance, ready to march into the eye of any storm where their services are requested.

The Nonviolent Peaceforce, as it’s called, would send as many volunteers, "reservists," and paid "corp professionals" to an area as needed. Instead of packing heat, they would deploy a time-honoured arsenal of nonviolent techniques like accompaniment and: 

• Presence. Standing guard, for example, outside the home of a threatened reformer or a village on the hit list of army or rebel forces. 

• Interpositioning. Getting directly in the line of possible fire. A well-known example are the "human shields" who snuck into Ramallah last spring to protect a besieged Yasser Arafat from Israeli forces. Other "shields" offered to walk ahead of Israeli soldiers as they searched Palestinian houses, so the soldiers wouldn’t explode their way through. As Michael N. Nagler, co-founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley, points out in YES!magazine: "You are there to protect peace, for everyone, and that means getting in the way of violence against anyone – as did the African-American woman from Michigan Peace Teams who covered a fallen Klansman with her own body when he was attacked by an anti-racist mob."

• Witnessing. A picture is worth a thousand words. And words ain’t bad either. Whether with cameras, tape recorders, notebooks, or just a good pair of eyes and ears, peace workers routinely act as a conduit to the outside world of firsthand information about the dirty business peacebreakers would like to hide. 

The Nonviolent Peaceforce is being officially launched in India early this winter. Delegates to the convening conference are scheduled to elect a governing body – and to decide where to strike first, late in 2003. 

Sound naïve? 

Not to Season for Nonviolence co-director Richard Deats, who writes:

"What if in 1980 someone would have predicted that unarmed Filipinos would overthrow the Marcos dictatorship in a four day uprising? That military regimes across Latin America would be toppled by the relentless persistence of their unarmed opponents? That apartheid would end peacefully and that in a massive and peaceful plebiscite all races of South Africa would elect Nelson Mandela to the presidency? That the Berlin Wall would be nonviolently brought down? Such a person would probably have been thought ridiculously naïve and dismissed out of hand. And yet these things happened!"

In Winnipeg, Connie Phelps says it’s time we "realize that nonviolence is not something to be shunned and discredited as weak and ‘feminine.’ In the long run, peace is the strongest and most unceasing power there is."

Phelps and her fellow Winnipeg Season for Nonviolence organizers are looking to spotlight local individuals and groups who are successfully walking the nonviolence talk. She hopes their examples will be contagious. 

Winnipeg SNV is still very much a work in progress. A Centre for Self-Awareness fundraiser this February will bring the American futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard to Winnipeg for a lecture and workshop on her specialty, conscious evolution. A longtime promoter of world peace, Hubbard has a "Peace Room" on her website at consciousevolution.net. [Editor's note: Hubbard has had to postpone the visit due to illness. For the new date, contact SNV Winnipeg (see below).]

To get involved in Winnipeg SNV or for more information, call Phelps at (204) 233-6620 or email her at cfsawpg@mts.net.

64 days, 64 ways

"We learn to practice nonviolence one step at a time, one choice at a time, one day at a time," says Eisha Mason, Executive Director of the Los Angeles Season for Nonviolence. Some SNV participants have taken the one-day-at-a-time theme to heart. The Denver Area Task Force has produced a nonviolence primer called "64 Ways in 64 Days: Daily Commitments to Live By." Some examples:

Day 3 – Today, I will practice nonviolence and respect for Mother Earth by making good use of her resources.

Day 10 – Today, I will oppose injustice, not people.

Day 16 – Today, I will affirm my value and worth with positive "self talk" and refuse to put myself down.

Day 18 – Today, I will cause a ripple effect of good by an act of kindness toward another.

Day 33 – Today, I will identify something special in everyone I meet.

Day 55 – Today, I will practice compassion and forgiveness by apologizing to someone whom I have hurt in the past.

Day 64 – Today, I will serve humanity by dedicating myself to a vision greater than myself.

The main SNV website at www.agnt.org/snv02.htm offers much more food for peaceful thought. 

"Principles of Spiritual Activism," for example, is a guide to translating spiritual values into worldly action: 

Principle #1: Love those with whom we are in conflict. 

Principle #2: We are all spiritual beings. See the image of God in everyone.

There are 14 more principles. 

Thankfully, the primer offers advice on how to follow them. 

Witness in Guatemala

For Valerie Cottrill, a ten-day crash course last year on the ongoing struggle for human rights in Guatemala was all it took to make a life-changing – and potentially life-threatening – decision. 

This February, Cottrill, a United Church minister, will pack her bags and move for one year to a country where most people think decades of bloody injustice were wiped clean six years ago. 

Under the aegis of The Coordinating Committee on International Accompaniment in Guatemala (ACOGUATE), Cottrill and another “international accompanier” will use their wits, interpersonal skills, and bodies to deflect the danger that stalks Guatemalan witnesses in a bold legal action against the former junta leaders accused of perpetrating the infamous “scorched earth campaign” of 1978 to 1983. That brutal counterinsurgency saw 440 villages and tens of thousands of rural Mayan civilians destroyed and massacred by the Guatemalan army.

Though the Guatemalan peace accords of 1996 officially ended thirty years of bloody strife and repression, they have accomplished little, says Cottrill, a 43-year-old resident of Portage la Prairie. “The government has either failed to live up to its commitments, or has done so in as minimal a way as possible. For example, although the government legislated a minimum wage [of $6 a day], nothing is done to enforce this legislation and workers are consistently underpaid. Those who speak out against such injustices frequently ‘disappear’ only to have their bodies discovered in a field somewhere days or weeks later. While wholesale massacres of entire villages by the military are no longer taking place, torture, intimidation and murders carried out by government funded paramilitary groups are still everyday occurrences in Guatemala.”

During her visit to Guatemala last year, Cottrill “was profoundly moved . . . by the unwavering struggle of these poverty-stricken people.” Though she had “never even thought about doing anything like this before,” her conscience made her an offer she couldn’t refuse. “If I didn't do this, I know I would feel profound regret at missing an opportunity to do something very important and worthwhile,” she says.

Although a Truth Commission verified the horrors of the scorched earth campaign, it left alleged perpetrators like ex-Guatemala president and general Efrain Rios Montt unscathed and still powerful. Cottrill and dozens of other accompaniers in Guatemala are therefore helping witnesses speak out in court to make recently filed charges of genocide and crimes against humanity stick.

“Only when those in power know that they can and will be held accountable,” says Cottrill, “can changes begin to take place in Guatemala.”

Such are the dangers of Cottrill’s mission that she won’t even know whom she will be accompanying, and where, until she departs in February.

To help cover the estimated $5000 cost, The Carolyn McDade Sacred Web Singers are holding a fund-raising coffee house at Emmanuel United Church in Winnipeg on Friday evening, January 24, 7:30 to 9:30. [We regret that due to a misunderstanding, we incorrectly gave the date as Sunday afternoon in our print edition.] Cottrill will be there too to talk about an adventure to which she looks forward with a mixture of excitement, trepidation, and a deep sense of purpose.