Statement Responding to Errors in a New Book, The New Cold
War: Revolutions, Rigged Elections and Pipeline Politics in the Former Soviet
Union, by Mark MacKinnon.
A new book by Canadian journalist Mark MacKinnon, entitled The
New Cold War: Revolutions, Rigged Elections and Pipeline Politics in the
Former Soviet Union (Random House Canada, 2007), contains several erroneous statements about the
International Center on Nonviolent Conflict:
- Mr. MacKinnon describes the Center as “an
American consulting firm.” However, it is not a firm, and it does
not do consulting. The Center is chartered under law as a nonprofit
educational foundation which is engaged in the distribution
of generic knowledge about nonviolent resistance, to whoever
requests that information. This resistance is often the only way that aggrieved
and oppressed people can seek to obtain their rights or end repression.
It includes tactics such as strikes, boycotts and civil disobedience – forms
of direct political action that are commonplace in open democracies such
as the U.S., Canada, and more than 100 other countries.
- Mr. MacKinnon describes our Center’s
past activity this way: “The business of ‘colour revolutions’ was
being privatized.” This bears no resemblance to our work. First,
the Center is focused on all types of nonviolent struggle – campaigns
for rights (for women, workers, refugees and minorities), for self-determination
(against military occupations, as in Palestine and Western Sahara), and
against corruption and social violence (as in Central America and Africa),
as well as for democracy. Second, because no governments have ever possessed
expertise in nonviolent action, there was nothing for our Center to “privatize”.
Our chair Peter Ackerman told Mr. MacKinnon that since many activists do
not want to be influenced by governments, nongovernmental organizations
dedicated transparently to specific missions were now sought after as unbiased
sources of help. He did not say that “private foundations like his” could “rid
the world of tyranny.” Rather, as Mr. Ackerman and other scholars
in nonviolent resistance have said for decades, only the people who resist
tyrants through their own civilian-based movements are capable of that.
- Mr. MacKinnon claims that Peter Ackerman spread
a “formula” for “revolution” from “Serbia
to Georgia to Ukraine.” In fact, our Center did not exist at the
time of the October 2000 fall of Milosevic in Serbia, did not provide any
materials to Georgians prior to the “Rose Revolution,” and
did not provide any materials to Ukrainians prior to the “Orange
Revolution.” At no time did our chair or staff communicate with
those involved in these events. As for reducing the practice of nonviolent
resistance to a “formula,” it is impossible. While there are
common elements or steps that can be taken in developing a nonviolent movement,
there is no formula or recipe that guarantees that such steps, once taken,
will produce success, and we would not pretend to offer one.
- Mr. MacKinnon falsely suggests that Mr. Ackerman
explained nonviolent resistance as having the purpose of creating a regime’s “final
collapse.” In fact, in none of our Center’s educational programs
or materials is the development of nonviolent resistance described as inducing
a “final collapse.” Nonviolent movements can take years or
decades to develop, since space for action must be created, large numbers
of ordinary civilians must be recruited and mobilized, and tactics chosen
that reduce the support and loyalty required for governments to be repressive.
Nonviolent struggles do put pressure on governments to change their actions,
but rulers lose power only if they try to defend what the people oppose.
Thus nonviolent struggle may produce decisive political changes or even
alter the system of government, but this is not the same thing as “regime
change” on the model of a coup. Instead, such struggles more often
have the effect of forcing negotiations leading to new elections (as in
Poland and South Africa), enabling a nonviolent opposition to neutralize
voting fraud and win elections (as in the Philippines and Chile), pushing
a colonial or military occupier to give way to self-determination (as in
India), or pushing a government to furnish civil or political rights to
a group that was oppressed (as in the American civil rights movement).
Our Center’s work is focused on one thing: Making the knowledge of how
to engage in nonviolent struggle accessible to as many educators, students,
civic groups and activists in the world as request it from us. That is why
ordinary people in over 80 countries have seen documentaries we have distributed,
and why people in places as diverse as West Papua, Western Sahara, Sierra
Leone, Egypt, Guatemala, Pakistan, Iraq, Palestine, Nigeria, and Eritrea have
requested and obtained that knowledge through workshops, seminars and other
events.
Mr. MacKinnon was given this and other information sufficient for him to have
avoided the errors we have cited. But his larger error is a false picture
of how nonviolent movements bring about political change. In no historical
instance has external support or assistance been pivotal. That is because
only indigenous causes and strategies can be successful in mobilizing discontented
majorities. To believe otherwise, as Mr. MacKinnon apparently does, is to
believe that a few American NGOs were capable of persuading one million Ukrainians
to stand, sleep, occupy and demonstrate on the freezing winter streets of
Kiev for 17 days and nights, until their government agreed to reject the results
of a stolen election.
While our Center was not involved in those events, we congratulate the Ukrainian
people – who were the real force behind the “Orange Revolution” – for
what they accomplished. Authoritarian rulers want the world to believe that
nefarious outsiders, and not their own repressive crimes and outrages, are
responsible for civic movements of people pushing for change. They want to
change the subject from their oppression to someone else’s alleged intervention.
Mr. MacKinnon has unfortunately bought their propaganda. The cartoon of nonviolent
revolutions hatched in windowless rooms in Washington, drawn in Mr. MacKinnon’s
book, is only that. It is not reality.
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