When Serb nationalist leaders were inflicting ethnic cleansing on Bosniaks in 1995, NATO was relatively swift about using military force to stop it; and it offered the same assistance to Kosovar Albanians in 1999. Today, Israel is three years into its genocide in Gaza, which now increasingly extends into the West Bank. Western governments would be horrified to even contemplate military force to end this much more catastrophic, and extensively-documented[1], genocide. The West’s still mostly liberal democratic governments are, with rare exceptions, not trying to do much of anything, by any means, to stop it. The most prominent and powerful Western governments are more committed to inflicting draconian punishments on those who are trying[2]—and trying nonviolently[3].
The West is already paying for this bend in its moral arc[4]. And it seems bound to pay increasingly more as the domestic and geopolitical consequences of the fecklessness of its leadership class unfold. There is, though, at least one “silver lining” opportunity arising from the West’s persecution of nonviolent resisters of genocide, and the resisters gaining ground anyway. The odds-beating small victories that the pro-Palestine movement has enjoyed nurture the forbidden hypothesis that nonviolent collective action can potentially stop a genocide. The mounting evidence for that hypothesis may eventually become a universal acid that dissolves the foundations of militarism.
Up to now, it has been received wisdom that genocides must be stopped by violence before they reach their conclusion, otherwise they end by reaching their conclusion. The mandarins of the West who most regularly remind us of this received wisdom might reconsider that wisdom, though, when the genocide-targeted people are Palestinians. Such mandarins habitually frame violence by, or on behalf of, Palestinians as “terrorism” and thus something forbidden to contextualize, even if the context is an ongoing genocide against Palestinians.
It has long been normative, in fact, to scold Palestinians for not having had a Gandhi arise among them. My sense is those who complain the loudest on this score (without reviewing the historical evidence of what typically happens to Palestinians who adopt Gandhian methods) do not really want a Palestinian Gandhi anyway. Such complainers often count nonviolent Palestinian resistance to colonial occupation as terrorism also. And for those most committed to rationalizing the killing and oppression of Palestinians, the latter commit “terrorism” just by continuing to live and breathe.
The West has acknowledged some genocides as unjust, though. With these genocides in mind, received wisdom in the West strains against the idea that anyone could put a nonviolent, anti-war ethos in service of an anti-genocide struggle. The common assumption was—and, in some contexts, remains—that whenever a potentially genocidal power targets people worthy of life for aggression, all pacifists and other war-resisters could only ever be useful idiots of the genocidaires.
Against this view, there is much evidence that nonviolent resisters can make valuable contributions to anti-genocide struggles. This evidence includes the fascinating, and often moving, documentation of successful operations to rescue individuals and families among the hunted. It is often other civilian individuals and small communities who carry out these nonviolent rescues, with rescuers sometimes explicitly committed to pacifism.[5]
In support of the received wisdom, though, there is little evidence that the typically small-scale anti-genocidal contributions of nonviolent actors can scale up to fully stop a genocide. The closest thing to a historical case for the genocide-stopping power of nonviolence is the disciplined success of Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s nonviolent army, the Khudai Khidmatgar (Servants of God) against early 20th century British rule. Khan, a Pashtun ally of Mohandas Gandhi, and hailing from what eventually became the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan, was an unusually persuasive teacher of nonviolence.
Khan is known for having persuaded a substantial part of his fellow Pashtuns to adopt nonviolence as a kind of intensification, rather than compromise, of their longstanding martyrdom-ready ethos. Khan successfully argued that his people’s courage to face death in honor-related struggle would be more honorable, and powerful, with all the killing taken out of it. His hundred thousand-strong army of Khudai Khidmatgar recruits thus stayed unusually perseverant in nonviolence through some brutal and indiscriminately murderous British onslaughts against them during the struggle for independence. Khan’s nonviolent army did things like march into lines of British soldiers commanded to shoot at every man, woman and child in the non-dispersing crowds. This is as high stakes as “nonviolent direct action” ever gets.
In one such instance, the Qissa Khwani massacre of 1930, the British kept shooting into those nonviolent crowds for six hours, but did eventually lose their stomach for mass killing unarmed people. The backlash in British public opinion after that massacre contributed greatly to eroding British resolve to maintain its colonial possessions in what was then the British Raj. That erosion of resolve, combined with the perseverance and ubiquity of collective nonviolent action against British rule throughout the Raj, led eventually to Britain’s former colonial subjects there declaring independence and self-determination.
As the Qissa Khwani massacre illustrates, the idea that nonviolence could only defeat the British Raj because noble and kindly Britain embodied the moral antithesis of genocide is laughable. By bringing an end to the Raj, Khan and his army, his ally Gandhi, and the millions of others in the independence movement also ended the horrors of British colonial misrule. That misrule included not only the various indiscriminate massacres of noncombatants that the British inflicted, but also things like the millions-starving Bengal famine of 1943. So the Khudai Khidmatgar, together with the rest of the nonviolent Satyagraha movement, helped put a stop to some close-to-genocidal[6] behavior. So that can happen.
Consider also the Indonesian genocide against the East Timorese. Though armed international peacekeepers finally brought the genocide to an effective end in 1999, and the East Timorese resistance began with armed struggle in 1975, nonviolent resistance emerged as a deliberate resistance strategy alongside it in the late 1980s. Nonviolent international solidarity measures followed, including boycotts and vigils. Journalists Amy Goodman, Allan Nairn and Max Stahl also intensified international outrage at the genocide by taking fire while standing between the army and protesters during the Santa Cruz massacre of 1991. A largely nonviolent democracy movement in Indonesia brought an end, in 1998, to rule by U.S.-backed dictator Suharto, who had overseen most of the genocide. As noted above, United Nations peacekeepers were needed a year later to bring the genocide to a final close, but nonviolent action had laid much of the groundwork for that conclusion.
A more historically recent case of nonviolence against proto-genocidal violence was the Christian-Muslim solidarity work of the Women’s Peace Movement in Liberia. That movement arguably made the greatest contribution—a nonviolent one—to the end of Liberia’s brutal civil war in 2003. The movement also drew international attention that likely set the stage for the prosecution of Liberian president Charles Taylor for his war crimes (in Sierra Leone), and also for the election of the first woman head of state in modern Africa: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
Such examples are probably exceptional, though, and among my examples, only the Indonesian genocide against East Timorese reached fully genocidal proportions. My guess is that for most genocides and attempted genocides that sufficient numbers of international genocide scholars and major human rights organizations recognize as such, some violent party ended them violently. Or the genocides ended by reaching the genocidaire-intended conclusion.
The violence of powerful armies, not violent resistance by the genocide-targeted, is what typically cuts genocides short—though violent resistance can help attract powerful sponsorship
Click here to read more: Palestine’s Predicament is Making Necessary the Once Unthinkable: Ending Genocide Nonviolently - CounterPunch.org
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