The fourth most populous country on earth is in turmoil, and Indonesian activists are considering violence as an option. On an exploratory training trip in March,01, I worked with student activists in Jakarta seeking once again to bring down a corrupt elite. After a strategy game, the group turned to their most pressing question: even if we accept that methods of nonviolent action can be powerful, why not add violence to the mix?

By George Lakey

April01

The fourth most populous country on earth is in turmoil, and reasons to use violence are everywhere. "To protect ourselves," "to counter the right wing," "to show we're not intimidated," "to get payback" -- passionately caring Indonesians often feel driven by one need or another to violent tactics.

On an exploratory training trip in March,01, I worked in two different settings: the Jakarta of student activists seeking once again to bring down a corrupt elite, and the secessionist province of Aceh where Peace Brigades International is fielding a new team within hearing range of automatic weapons at night.

---

Indonesian student activists: why not violence?

About 30 student activists gathered at a youth hostel near Jakarta to spend their weekend considering the pros and cons of nonviolent action. Justly proud of their success in bringing down the military dictator Suharto in 1998, the students now face an even tougher task: how to use their power to build a more democratic society while holding accountable politicians who cave in to the army and special interests.

The participants included two new women's groups (significant in a highly sexist society) and was sponsored by LINKS, the Circle of Democracy and Humanity. They were a fun-loving and somewhat rowdy group, full of the rebel energy needed for nonviolent struggle.

One young man's eyes filled with tears as he described to me what it was like to watch comrades die on the street where they'd been shot by soldiers during a demonstration. "I want payback," he admitted softly. And then, "Tell me another story of your nonviolent direct action. I want to know how you keep going."

The training included stories and case studies, and also went to the theory of nonviolent coercion. Students had forced out strongman Suharto 99% nonviolently, but didn't have the theory fully to understand how they did it. From there it was a short step to the "spectrum of allies," a strategy tool TFC trainers have used in a variety of cultures and movements.

---

Why not add violence to our toolkit?

After two simulation/strategy games plus coalition-building work, the energy of the group cycled round again to their most pressing question: granted that methods of nonviolent action can be powerful, why not add violence to the mix?

They watched us keenly as we unfolded once more the spectrum of allies. We asked them: how will violence affect the array of political actors in Indonesia and bring some of them to your support?

The participants plunged into vigorous dialogue; we didn't even try to impose a linear, one-at-a-time communication style on their intense discussion, fingers poking at the graphic display of potential allies. We watched the excited faces as they worked out for themselves the counter-productiveness of violence in their situation. A sudden silence came to the group when one person, forefinger stabbing the air, exclaimed, "And that's why the government pays provocateurs to come among us to get the violence going!"

I hadn't known the extent of the army's use of provocateurs in Indonesia, although my co-facilitator Michael Beer did. Beer, the program director of Nonviolence International, has lived in the region and led workshops in Indonesia three times before; he organized this trip and was lead facilitator for the workshop.

The students wanted to know not only the power dynamics of nonviolent action, but also how to build a stronger movement for democracy in the longer run. We explored three areas:

• ending gender oppression among activists
  
• developing a vision of a just and democratic Indonesia
  
• how to design nonviolent campaigns on specific objectives short of bringing down governments.
  
• how to accept and support diverse leadership styles
  
• the role of the military in Indonesian society (led by Indonesian resource person Honig).

The students' evaluation was glowing. They appreciated the practicality of the workshop and the new tools they learned. Further, they agreed to meet at least twice again: in one week and in 90 days, to assemble a radical organization that would support nonviolent activism for democracy and justice.

The entire workshop was organized by Yenti Nurhidayat, the leader of LINKS, who also provided some translation.

---

Warring for independence in Aceh

Indonesia spreads across the Earth an equal distance to the spread of the U.S. from New York to San Francisco. In that expanse, however, are 300 languages and cultures ranging from Stone Age to a modern megalopolis, from Hindu Bali to animism in parts of Borneo. Indonesia contains the largest Muslim population of any country in the world. In the Northwest extremity of the country an armed struggle movement has been growing, despite dismal prospects for success in its main objective of independence. After the humiliation of losing East Timor, the Indonesian national state has no intention of losing more, and it has the firepower to destroy Aceh "in order to save it," as a U.S. general so famously put it in the course of the Vietnam War.

Michael Beer and I found a situation of increasing human rights violations and Indonesian security forces almost out of control. Not only are torture and disappearances routine, but soldiers put homes of the poorest villagers to the torch. We met an eyewitness reporting the casual police shooting of a taxi driver because the driver didn't seem docile enough.

An Acehenese student told me that increased army violence is pushing people toward the guerrilla movement for protection, although he didn't express optimism that protection could be found in an intensifying war zone.

Peace Brigades International, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, has sent a team to Aceh to give protective accompaniment to human rights workers who are valiantly trying to maintain political space. The team asked me to facilitate one day of skill-building and a retreat day as well. The retreat was to enable the team to fine-tune their communications and operational systems for the stressful road ahead.

The one-day workshop focussed on three areas.

• The team explored its diversity of styles and how to make the most of them under pressure.
  
• With increasing anxiety and trauma in Aceh, the team members needed heightened skills in listening for the emotive dimension of communication. They practiced how to give each other as well as Acehenese more support when emotional distress is present.
  
• I also taught them a group dynamics tool which they can use (especially with rotating personnel) to grow as a high performance team; it helps them spotlight what is being marginalized in the group. The team hopes for a return visit so they can continue their professional development as individuals and as a team.

I left with deepened respect for PBI and its courageous team members (also operating in war-torn Colombia) who nonviolently risk their lives to increase the political space in which local stakeholders can work out their destiny.

---

Globalization: top-down, or bottom-up? TFC in Thailand

Norwegian peace researcher Johan Galtung clarifies the complex forces at work in what is called "globalization." He divides each nation into a center and periphery, based on criteria related to power in determining the direction of the nation. The usual pattern of influence among nations, he says, is that the center of a large nation makes alliances with the centers of smaller nations. The chief benefits flow to the centers, but the periphery of the most powerful nation also benefits, especially compared to the disadvantages suffered by the peripheries of the smaller centers.

Empires show this arrangement dramatically. In the British Empire, London's alliance with the center of each of its colonies (the maharajas of India, for example) brought fortunes to the British owning class and some trickle down to other Britons, as well as significant power and privilege to rich Indians. The masses of India became poorer.

Thailand escaped being colonized -- a rarity in Asia. By the mid-eighties, however, thoughtful Thais were troubled by the appearance of a new and more subtle form of empire, which they called globalization. Marxists noticed deals being made between great centers of capital of large nations (including the World Bank) and their own elite, and predicted greater poverty in Thailand. Greens, including Buddhists grouped around Nobel Peace Prize nominee Sulak Sivaraksa, were alarmed by the environmental and cultural threat.

The corporate globalists try to tap a kind of idealism, a yearning for world community that could transcend the wars of rival armed nation-states. The credibility problem for the corporate globalists lies in their inability to deliver social justice and environmental basics for the peripheries of their own countries. Why should Thai (or Mexican) peasants who watch U.S. Democrats and Republicans alike refuse to eliminate poverty for millions of U.S. children believe that the U.S. center will care about their children? Much less global warming: the Senate has a grandly bipartisan coalition refusing to secure the future from disaster.

Since centers continue to put greed first, as they historically have done, it is up to the periphery to take up the advocacy of authentic world community: the Thais as early as the 1980s and, more recently, labor and environmentalists and youth in the industrialized West.

---

Periphery-to-periphery transfer of "appropriate technology"

In 1989 George Lakey was invited to begin work in Thailand, and continued ever since to maintain a people-to-people relationship of technology transfer. Since TFC's mission in the U.S. is to the periphery, not the center, it could be trusted in these post-colonial times not to be the subtle emissaries of top-down influence which weave together the interests of center to center. The relationship of this Thai Buddhist grouping to TFC is illustrative of a growing phenomenon of periphery-periphery connections that actually hold the promise of justice and environmental sustainability.

Paulo Friere, the radical Brazilian teacher, put the "popular" in popular education in his work with the poor. His "pedagogy of the oppressed" resonated in many places, including among an activist group in Philadelphia which had already seen the power of participatory training in the civil rights movement. Philadelphia's training center for the Movement for a New Society attracted a critical mass of inventive activists who expanded and developed the methodology, which received a successful "trial run" among the anti-nuclear power activists of the U.S. and Germany in the '70s.

When TFC began offering workshops in 1992 it embarked on further expansion and development of activist-oriented educational methods. A group of Training Associates did research and development to find no-guilt ways of doing diversity work, clearer ways to invite participants' full responsibility for their own learning, methods of preparing activist trainers, and ways to assist participants with their emotional barriers to accelerated learning.

After years of workshops led by TFC Board members Lillian and George Willoughby, TFC Associate Karen Ridd, and George Lakey, the Spirit in Education Movement (SEM) -- an arm of the Buddhist grouping -- invited TFC to build a Thai training capacity in liberation pedagogy for activists.

We started the project in 1995. Working closely with SEM, we created a four-level curriculum, each level a workshop of five days co-facilitated by Thai and TFC trainers. The work in Thailand was supplemented by key Thai trainers participating in advanced TFC training of trainer workshops in Philadelphia, especially the Super-T.

By 1998 the first three of the four levels were led entirely by Thai trainers, and the first class of 18 graduated from the fourth level that year.

---

Growth in confidence and outreach

Because I'd been called to work in nearby Indonesia, SEM invited me to join the team facilitating the March01 fourth level workshop, Ouyporn Khuankaew and Pracha Hutanwatr. SEM decided to invite previous fourth level grads to attend as well. The result: 23 participants in the workshop, 10 of whom had previously graduated and were returning to pick up more tools and growth as facilitators.

Participants have been using their skills with a variety of groups. One mostly works with poor fisherfolk in Southern Thailand; another with the thousands of peasants in the Northeast who have made their resistance to the Pak Moon Dam an international issue. Some work with university student activists and others with Buddhist monks and nuns. (This workshop itself included three nuns and three monks.) Environmental and women's trainers participated as well as a Kachin woman who leads workshops for her people inside Burma.

The workshop focussed on their goals:

• how to ask deeper, more probing questions in the debrief
  
• dynamics of co-facilitation
  
• diagnosing a group
  
• designing workshops for groups of 100 ore more
  
• developing self-confidence
  
• confronting power dynamics in a group, e.g. between genders
  
• diversity work, especially homophobia
  
• learning some brand-new training tools invented at TFC
  
• personal and spiritual growth and the trainer.

Their major criticism of the workshop was the tough pace with resulting fatigue. They found the feedback from fellow participants doing their practice sessions was the highest quality yet, they met their major learning goals, and for some it was an inspiring and life-changing workshop.

I found a quantum leap in participants' competency, awareness of themselves as trainers, and ability to make connections to the macro, societal level and also to their own personal growth issues. As compared with my last visit two years ago, I saw more turning to each other as resources, less dependency on the workshop facilitators (my Thai colleagues or me), and a wish to go beyond their recently mastered skills to invent new tools for the Thai culture.

It was deeply satisfying to observe these behaviors of sustainability, and then listen to their discussion of next steps: to meet as a network, to develop a Thai trainers manual, to invent and share new tools, and to co-facilitate more often with each other. SEM plans to continue its institutional role in nurturing this process, and invites me back in two years time for a different kind of collaborative effort.

Thanks to the community of support around TFC, Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting of Friends, and the Pemberton Fund of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends, which combined to make this extended trip possible.

Copyright ©01 George Lakey

• Printer-friendly version
• Send to friend
• PDF version