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Pacifism and the Congo Dilemma

here are those who challenge the pacifist position with such questions as, “A man with a gun is aiming it at your mother. You have a gun in your hand. What nonviolent action do you take?” Our usual answer is, “I’m a pacifist. I don’t have a gun in my hand. Next question.”

But at least once in every generation—more frequently, alas, in these violence-ridden years—the challenge is a harder one to shrug off with a flip answer: “What can nonviolence do to stop the slaughter now in Bosnia, Kosovo/a, East Timor, Aceh, the Congo?” The challenger means, “Don’t you have to admit that only armed intervention will make the killing stop?” Over the last few years, this magazine has offered few direct answers to that question. We have to admit that there is no good pacifist answer—there is little nonviolence as such can do today, now, to stop the slaughter in the Congo. There are pacifists around the world who are broaching the idea of an unarmy, a peace force with no force but the bodies of its unarmed soldiers, to go to such places and intervene; we don’t know if it would work, but it would be a holy experiment. Since it doesn’t yet exist, however, we can’t send it to the Congo and find out. Thus, at this moment we appear to have no answer to, “What can nonviolence do now to stop the slaughter in the Congo?” But the question is a trick one, for there is very little violence can do either. The pledge printed at the top of this page is not merely an ideal; it is based both on logic and on the historical record. Logic says killing does not stop killing; guns don’t stop shooting. Going from logic to fact, the instances where armed intervention may have reduced death tolls are few, far between and arguable, and such interventions have a particularly disastrous history in Africa. On the record, political and economic pressure work far better, where they can be applied.

Indonesia, for instance, as a major receiver of military and other aid from the United States, is particularly vulnerable to such pressure, which is why this editorial sees no dilemma around Aceh. As this is written, the people of Aceh and their supporters worldwide are pleading for the U.S. and other governments to demand that Indonesia act to halt the violence; they make that plea with the conviction that firm pressure from this and other weapons-supplying countries would stop the slaughters virtually immediately. Even in the Congo, however, stopping the flow of arms and calling in the diplomats might well have as much of a chance as armed intervention to bringing a stop to the death toll.

But pacifism has more to say about the Congo, summed up by, “It should never have come to this.” Pacifism holds, for instance, that, to the extent that war is a crime against humanity, those who provide for profit the means to such slaughter share the guilt; if U.S. arms manufacturers hadn’t armed every side of every conflict in Africa, tens of thousands of lives would have been saved. Pacifism holds that wars are caused by crises, ruptures in society that can be healed before the shooting starts. The North has caused many of those ruptures in Africa, from the creation of nation-states based on colonial boundaries and continuing through the International Monetary Fund and World Bank “restructuring” that have starved thousands and led to bitter battles for resources that the North will buy.

So yes, pacifism can’t tell the world how to stop the killing now—nor can any other “ism.” But pacifism does have a blueprint for stopping it before it starts:

1. Respect self-determination; stop making the map of the world in the North’s image.
2. Stop the flow of arms. Period. Stop arming every belligerent and potential belligerent across the globe and cut the flow of spare parts and ammunition for weapons already supplied, and see how quickly the death toll slows.
3. Use the world’s wealth and resources to feed, clothe and heal the world’s people, not to force them into meeting the needs of global capital.
4. When conflicts do arise, send in the negotiators and mediators early, not the armies when it’s too late; and send them to negotiate on behalf of the people who will be affected by the result, not the corporations looking for where and how they can plunder the most.

Those four steps alone would be a fairly effective vaccine against slaughter. All the armed intervention in all the world can’t provide that.

—Judith Mahoney Pasternak