S. Africa: Can Nonviolence Succeed? : Even in Repressive Societies, Peaceful Protest May Have Effect

Bishop Desmond Tutu, black South African churchman and anti-apartheid activist, joined a Los Angeles audience the other night in paying tribute to the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., civil-rights leader and apostle of nonviolence. The bishop suggested, however, that nonviolence might not work in South Africa.

Tutu, himself a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in behalf of peaceful change in his native land, has vowed to lead a campaign of nonviolence this spring unless the South African government makes “significant changes” in its racist policies.

However, the bishop is not optimistic about the outcome. In his words, “I believe nonviolence can succeed where you have a minimum moral standard. Where you don’t have that, it becomes impossible.”

Despite the growing pattern of violence and counterviolence in Tutu’s homeland, not all South African blacks are so pessimistic. But the bishop has a point--a point that is relevant in many countries far removed from South Africa.

There is a definite correlation between the effectiveness of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience and the nature of the country in which they occur. The greatest successes have occurred in countries where government is restrained by law and moral conscience.

No one in his right mind believes that German Jews could have saved themselves from Hitler’s ovens by nonviolent resistance. Gandhi’s campaign of civil disobedience in postwar India would have turned out quite differently if India had been a colony of Nazi Germany, or a Stalinist Soviet Union, instead of democratic England.

To one degree or another, injustice exists in all countries and in all political systems. Certainly racial oppression, incorporated into law and custom, existed in the American South when King launched his boycotts and freedom marches.

But these injustices occurred within a framework of constitutional law and free speech. King was able to use the power of television to force white Americans to watch Alabama police official Bull Connor and his ilk in action, thereby making the political climate in the country more amenable to remedial steps by the federal courts and Congress.

Even in democracies, people who violate the laws for what they consider a just cause risk incarceration. But they and their sympathizers are free to agitate for a change in the law that they consider unjust.

This is happening now in the case of the 11 persons on trial in Tucson for violating the statutory immigration law by helping Central American refugees enter the country illegally and offering them sanctuary.

This is a far cry from the situation in Argentina under the former military rule, where people who peacefully objected to the arrest or disappearance of their sons or daughters ran a real risk of suffering the same fate. It also differs from the situation faced by dissidents in the Soviet Union and most other communist countries.

In the Soviet province of Georgia, a man whose brother was in trouble with the authorities put up a sign on his balcony criticizing the KGB security police. He was sentenced to four years in a labor camp.

Attempts to enlist outside aid meet with equally severe responses. Members of an independent peace movement called the Group for the Establishment of Trust Between the U.S.S.R. and the United States have been persecuted because they had the audacity to suggest that the Kremlin was partly to blame for the arms race.

The U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee described succinctly what happened to Soviet citizens who tried to monitor their country’s adherence to the human-rights provision of the Helsinki accords.

“Over the years,” the report said, “more than 100 people openly became members of the Helsinki groups and their affiliates. Today, 51 are incarcerated in prisons, labor camps and psychiatric hospitals, or are serving terms of exile. Four have died after years of mistreatment in Soviet labor camps, and one was killed in an automobile accident under suspicious circumstances.”

To quote the Amnesty International report of 1985, “Many Soviet citizens were imprisoned or confined in mental hospitals solely for the nonviolent exercise of their human rights.”

In East Germany a real peace movement, analogous to those in the West, is being shut down by the forcible expulsion of draft-resisters and other peaceniks.

Lech Walesa, founder of the now-outlawed Solidarity trade-union movement in Poland, has always gone out of his way to discourage violent tactics against the communist regime there. Never mind. He now faces trial for publicly challenging official voter-turnout figures in October’s party-managed parliamentary elections.

But Bishop Tutu take note. Within the bounds of peaceful protest a lot can be accomplished, even in repressive societies.

The Poles, whose struggle for national independence goes back a long way, are not exactly helpless. They publish underground books and newspapers, and conduct illegal classes in Polish history and culture.

To quote underground leader Wiktor Kulerski, “The authorities control empty shops but not the market, workers’ employment but not their livelihood, state-owned mass media but not the circulation of information, printing houses but not publishing, the schools but not education.”

This peaceful underground resistance may or may not pay off in the long run, depending on how brutal the communist authorities are prepared to become. But the fact is that Poles enjoy far more freedom than most other Soviet Bloc peoples, precisely because they do not docilely accept the limitations laid down by their communist masters and are prepared to test the limits of what can be achieved within the limits of nonviolent protest.

When Tutu says that peaceful protest probably won’t work in South Africa, he may well be right. But civil disobedience on the massive and sustained scale employed by Martin Luther King has not really been tried in South Africa.

Until it is, you have to wonder whether opponents of apartheid should give up on nonviolence just yet. You also have to wonder whether even the governments in places like Warsaw and Moscow can be sure that the crushing of nonviolent dissent won’t in the long run drive desperate men and women to less peaceful means of protest.