Triennial Day 3

On the second morning (the third day) of the Triennial, we had our first "reflectors" session. The reflectors were five people who had been chosen to give their reaction to the conference so far. There were four women (all English-speaking, one African, one Australasian, one European, one North American) and one man (Spanish-speaking, Latin American).

Incidentally, this reminds me of something Jai Sen said about the book he co-edited: World Social Forum: Challenging Empires. They set themselves a very difficult standard in terms of contributors: achieving balance between continents and genders. (For more about the book, and other valuable publications on the way: http://www.cacim.net)

Two of the women (I didn't catch their names, but later found out one was Vanessa Boaz of the International Centre for Nonviolent Conflict) said that we had so far had a lot of "the problem", but not a lot of "the solution". One said that we had not lived up to the "nonviolent livelihoods" element of the conference. The other said we had not been sharing the many successes of small movements, no exchange of strategies and tactics. At the moment it felt like the problems were so big, there was no impossible to succeed by nonviolence.

Though there were valiant efforts by the chair, Stellan Vinthagen, to re-route the morning towards "solutions" and methods/strategies of success, the presentations by Maguiorina Balbuena (Via Campesina farmers' movement, Paraguay) and Ramesh (Ekta Parishad land rights movement, India) were focused very much on "the problem". One lingering question for me was the way in which Maguiorina's other organisation, COMURI, a national network for women farmers and indigenous women, had struggled with sexism inside and outside the social movements. Exactly why had the organisation been formed (in 1999), and what problems had it overcome?

As for the "nonviolent livelihoods" question, this is in the title: "Nonviolent livelihood struggles and global militarism - links and strategies". I haven't heard any speakers address it specifically, and it is in the title of only one workshop (mine).

However, in the programme, Howard Clark explains the meaning used here: "nonviolent livelihood struggles - that is, nonviolent resistance by communities to localised threats". That was supposed to be the theme of the two main panels - about Indian resistance to mining and Paraguayan farmers' land rights struggles. The emphasis in both was more the violent repression of such struggles than the nature and successes of the nonviolent resistance.

Lots of the workshop titles had this theme, which is to say "the violent repression" rather than "the nonviolent resistance".

So we have had: "Mining, threat to community, fuel for war"; "Military bases and displacement"; "Violence against regional identities (with special reference to Kashmir and north-east India"; "Displacement and indigenous communities"; "Women and development-induced displacement"; "Corporate Gujarat with special focus on land"; "Mediterranean cemetary - African refugees"; "Militarism and energy development projects in Latin America".

On the more positive side (I am only speaking of titles, I don't know what actually happened in the workshops), we have had: "India and the struggle for land rights"; "Resisting Zionism: nv resistance in Palestine and war resistance in Israel"; "The essence of a strategic perspective on nonviolent struggle"; "Resistance to a globalised NATO"; "Peace movement in Iraq"; "Another development vs overdevelopment"; and my own "Towards nonviolent livelihoods: class, peace and conversion".

During this session, we had a brief small groups discussion throwing up possible definitions of "nonviolent livelihood". People were in threes or fours. We had a Hindi/Gujarati group (6), a Korean-language group (4) and three English-speaking groups (3 in each). The definitions varied widely. In one group, a man had proposed self-sufficiency (growing and making what you need for daily life) as the test of a nonviolent livelihood. The two women in the group said this was not feasible as they didn't have the time to do that. I teased them: "So, a nonviolent livelihood is good... but you're too busy."

There was quite a strong emphasis overall on low personal consumption and "small is beautiful" - small workshops rather than giant factories, for example. (One person pointed out that if the economy was structured in the way most people wanted it to be, most people in the room could not have travelled to the conference in the way that they did....)

Curiously, given this "small is beautiful" feeling of the group, the final thing I did in the workshop was to set out the Lucas Aerospace example, a high-tech factory-based positive example.

Lucas Aerospace was a 17-plant 13-union company whose workforce created a unified "combine" of shop stewards elected from the workforce, bringing together clerical, technical and shopfloor workers, which drew up a conversion plan for replacing military contracts and aerospace work with alternative, generally socially-useful products. That process of workers' planning took a whole year (1975) and led to the Lucas workers' "corporate plan", an inspiring document detailing 150 products with 1,000 pages of technical detail backing up the feasibility and marketability of the products. The final proposal to the corporate management focused on 12 products. It was rejected.

Both trade unions and management were aghast at the combine idea. There was lukewarm support in the Labour government and the Lucas plan was never implemented.

There were particular features of the Lucas situation - a highly-skilled workforce, plant configured for short-run production, and a heavy reliance on government funding (50% of income was military, tax breaks from the government almost exactly balanced the taxes Lucas Aerospace paid).

This was a situation of maximum flexibility and maximum opportunity for government influence - especially given the Labour Party's 1974 industrial strategy of "compulsory planning agreements" championed by Tony Benn (Industry secretary). (As minister, Tony Benn met with the Lucas Aerospace combine and encouraged the planning process.)

Under the compulsory planning agreement system, government grants would only be given to companies (as they regularly were/are) if the company (a) had long-term production goals acceptable to the government and (b) produced a plan for the future in conjunction with the government and the workforce. It was a long way short of nationalisation/socialisation and a long way short of workers' control, but it was a move towards both.

After the workshop (which had spectrum lines, large group discussions, small group discussions, go-rounds - every single person in the group got to speak at least once to the large group and almost everyone got to speak twice), someone referred to the participatory budgeting process used in Brazil and in Kerala, India.

It would be wonderful if that kind of cross-continental inspiration (Kerala, Sao Paolo, compulsory planning agreements, the Lucas plan) could be brought together, if that could have been the core of this Triennial. Ideas that people have had, strategies that they have carried out, policies that have been implemented. The gold is here, no doubt, and quite a lot of it glints out during the formal sessions. The challenge is to create structures, cultures of meeting that make it mostly "the solution" rather than "the problem".

A challenge not only for War Resisters International, but for everyone holding conferences, gatherings. (Some food for thought for the Peace News Summer Camp....)

Day 2 Part 4 "You - We"

One of the most poignant moments of the conference so far was Samarendra Das's cry to the audience: "We do not want your research! It is not useful to us. We have simple questions, such as: what should the price of bauxite be?"

The interesting things here are "useful research" and "we - you". What is that polarity?

Before talking about that, I should explain about the pricing question.

Bauxite is often found on mountain tops; it's the raw material for aluminium. In India, these mountains are for some reason often in tribal areas, and are sacred mountains. The bauxite has the capacity to retain water and release it gradually (Samarendra told us), so that there are perennial streams even in the hot season. After the bauxite has been mined, this capacity is lost, and whatever water does run in the streams is polluted (I think he mentioned arsenic).

Incidentally, producing one ton of steel requires 44 tons of water. Producing one ton of aluminium requires 1,378 tons of water.

So bauxite mining and aluminium production both contribute, each in their own way, to India's water shortage.

Samarendra said that in India building sand costs Rupees 1,000 per ton, while bauxite only costs Rs 56 per ton.

The price of bauxite excludes all the harmful impacts on people displaced by mining, water reduction and pollution, and so on. What is needed is a price that adequately reflects the cost of bauxite, and its nature as an unrenewable resource (Samarendra said) - in that it is not possible to return a mined mountain to its previous state, in the way that you can decommission a dam or reafforest a deforested area.

Okay, what about the "useful research" question. No doubt there are many aspects to this, but one aspect is "usability". I posed this question to a participant from a centre for development studies in an Indian city (a neighbour at lunch). The centre studies participatory grassroots development, with reliance on locally-generated materials for education. I suggested that often such projects are brilliant at speaking in the vernacular, using language that ordinary folk can understand, using people's own experiences to bring them to a new understanding of themselves and their place in society, but that when these projects are studied and written up, they are described in a language that is no longer accessible to ordinary folk elsewhere, who might benefit from knowing about such things.

My friend said that the fancier language used in academia is known as "Sanskritic" Hindi and that it is indeed inaccessible to most people. I got the impression that the centre did not disseminate materials in ordinary everyday language for people to use for themselves. The method of dispersal often seems to be: middle class person uses participatory techniques with working class/tribal people; the same or another middle class person writes up the experience in a way that is exclusive of the working class/tribal people who were the original "empowered" target group; another middle class person reads the monograph or the paper and applies the techniques again elsewhere.

I confessed to my friend that I am in the same boat. I write books that are not accessible to everyone, and several people have told me that they couldn't read my books, or found them very hard-going.

I'm running out of energy now, and the afternoon sessions are starting, so a final word on "you, we".

Samarendra spoke as one of the dispossessed: "We don't need your research." Most presentations have been from a privileged perspective. For example, during an excellent presentation today, someone of Ekta Parishad, the Indian land rights group said: "You and me, we cannot be in the forefront of their struggle." Meaning that the landless must lead their own movements. Which I entirely support. What I found interesting, and this person was only clearer and more transparent than other speakers, was the assumption that "we" in the audience were separate from the oppressed. Largely true, I suppose, but universally so? Was everyone in the audience of a middle-class activist background? Or were there people there who actually are from the affected communities?

On the first evening I was introduced to a long-time Indian activist who mused that most of the speakers were middle class and not actually of the oppressed classes. Interesting questions.

To say: "I am a privileged person, of a class that is insulated from this suffering, and yet I am participating in this struggle" is fine. What I find difficult is the assumption that everyone in the audience was of the insulated classes.

Triennial Day 2 Part 3

What was the "breaking news" I promised at the beginning of the last posting? Well, yesterday I sat in on a discussion group that decided to put forward a major proposal to the council of War Resisters International, suggesting an investigation of the feasibility and desirability of WRI addressing the extent to which climate change, and in particular the threat of runaway climate change, affects the anti-militarist and social justice struggles it is currently involved in, or supporting.

The peace movement, by and large, operates on the assumption that the basic fabric of life will continue to be much as it is, with perhaps some deterioration or some improvement. (I only know of the British and US peace movements, but my impression is that this is a more general phenomenon.) We assume a continuing stable climate framework within which our opponents and ourselves will continue our struggle.

This is not a tenable assumption.

Desertification, floods and inundation, drastic changes to food production (for example the likely geographical shift and modification of the monsoon on which hundreds of millions of Asians rely) and the resulting large-scale migrations, will have a dramatic effect on the national security debate throughout the world, as more far-sighted military planners recognise.

Unlike many other issues, unlike many traditional peace movement issues, climate change is an issue with a clock on it. There is a limited period of time within which changes can have a significant effect before we reach a tipping point where our carbon emissions begin to have non-linear effects. One tonne of CO2 produced after that tipping point will have a dramatically larger effect than one tonne of CO2 produced before that point.

This point was made forcibly by Indian author Jai Sen, wrapping up a workshop on climate change, war and resistance yesterday.

Three people huddled together after the meeting (I sat in) to draft a proposal to the WRI council and to work out how to make it fit the organisation. Perhaps this will lead to something that can be useful to anti-militarist and social justice movements all over the world.

If so, it will have come out of an Indian initiative, starting with Jai Sen's email two days before the Triennial, challenging in the most genial and charming manner the inadequacy of the proposed agenda to deal with the potentially shattering effect of climate change on all the issues to be discussed at the conference.

Triennial Day 2 Part 2

The breaking news just doesn't stop.

After lunch yesterday (23 January) we broke up for workshops. For some reason we had two workshop slots of differing lengths, and there was also the option for many of them of continuing the workshop after the break. The first slot (2 hours) I went to hear Bela Bhatia talking about the conflict in the state of Chhattisgarh, where police and Maoists are fighting a vicious war in a tribal area. (Tribal people are known as "adivasis" or "earliest/original inhabitants".)

Her talk was embedded in a workshop entitled "War on terror", and Jorgen Johannsen started things off with a definitional PowerPoint presentation on terrorism and counter-terrorism. I couldn't help butting in at the start of his Q&A to quote AJ Muste, and the primary need to deal with the violence of established power.

After some wandering discussion, we then heard Bela describe at the micro level what has been happening in these war-torn areas. Some speakers have described some of these security force occupations/operations in some parts of India as "genocide"; I don't think Bela used the term.

She started by observing that the armed revolutionary communist movement which started in 1967 used to be known as the "Naxalites" but now is called the "Maoists". Through factionalism, there are now 60 groups around India. Howard Clark of the Peace News Board, who was in the audience, was incredulous and asked for a confirmation of the 60 figure. (Now I wonder if I misheard and it should have been "16"!)

The main Maoist group, the Communist Party of India (Maoist), was formed by merger of three groups in 2004 and has pursued a somewhat bizarre anti-state campaign of attacking railway stations, electricity pylons and so on. Originally the Naxalite armed actions were related to people's concerns - during the famine, seizing food from the warehouses and distributing them; taking land from big landowners and re-distributing it; retaliating against landowners who had raped local women; and so on. Now, CPI (Maoist) actions are not understood by the people, Bela said.

Okay, I've run out of time.... More later.

WRI Triennial Second Report

Can international conferences like this be justified? Lots of my friends think not. I have breaking news from Peace News on this score - the survey they dared not print. Well, no one has not dared to print it, actually, but it dramatises the story.

Earlier today, in the morning plenary session, we had a searing moment which really made the whole thing worthwhile. We had two plenary speakers. One was Samarendra Das, who has been working for 16 years with poor communities facing displacement and pollution and brutal repression from the mining industry. The other was Elavie Ndura (her name is actually much longer - she said a paragraph-long name - but this is what is printed in the programme), a peace-oriented scholar from Burundi now based in the USA. Elavie made general remarks about the need for collective struggle, though she said that for herself she was not one for street protests or arrests ("prison would kill me").

Samarendra made an incendiary, wandering speech without notes. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the mining industry, its penetration and subversion of international institutions and national politics and popular movements, which formed the backdrop for his cri de coeur, a passionate call for relevant research and street protest. As leading Indian intellectual Jai Sen said in the question period, "I heard rage in your heart, trying to reach out to build a fire in us. How can we build this fire and make it a global fire?"

The moment of clarity for me came later in the question time, when Rosa Biwangko Moiwend of the Office for Justice and Peace in West Papua, got up and spoke from the floor. She said (roughly speaking): "The Indian experience we have been hearing is the reflector of West Papua, my homeland, where 'mountain is sacred' [a point Samarendra had emphasised was a global phenomenon among tribal peoples] and 'the land is mother'. If you destroy the land, mother cannot give you life and your people will die [in a film clip we saw, women at an anti-mining protest shouted 'kill us, because when you take our land we die'].... Maybe we will die."

Rosa said that people in India were struggling by themselves, now we had to connect the struggles around India with the struggles in West Papua, and the global struggles elsewhere against the extractive industries. She said: "This is an important moment." What was needed was to link not just organisations, "because organisations work to their own interests", but also people, so that our peoples can know that they are not alone. She asked the forum how these links could be forged from this conference. A question I am not sure anyone is going to answer.

That moment of clarity was the sense of connection, face to face, like a breath going from one body into another and strengthening both, between two struggles unaware of each other. Some writers and intellectuals associated with these struggles may connect them intellectually (Samarendra knew lots about West Papua, as well as lots of other places), but grassroots activists have never heard of their parallel work, parallel defeats and parallel victories. How can this kind of thing happen, how can the possibility occur, without face-to-face international conferences? This is the justification for the carbon crimes we have committed to come here.

Okay, the breaking news. I conducted a poll of 25 international participants (there are said to be 100 internationals coming over the period of the conference, though I haven't seen that number). No one was aware of the carbon cost of their flights (except me). Two were planning to do carbon offsetting. Some objected to offsetting on grounds of principle (not to buy a good conscience as a mercantile transaction).

Before I came, I worked out that the carbon cost of my flights (I'm also going to Nepal before coming back) was about 1.8 tonnes of CO2 equivalent. I haven't come to a conclusion as to what to do about offsetting. While sceptical about the commercial offsetting projects, I can't help feeling something has to be done. The real answer would be to make a corresponding cut in my emissions for the rest of the year. I don't know how I could do that.

I reported these findings to Howard Clark, co-chair of the proceedings, and he suggested I report back as a 'news item' tomorrow - he is encouraging people to give theatrical or other non-linear presentations of news at the start of each day. Well, I say "encouraging". Today he was down on his knees literally begging....

On another note, I'm not sure how much I'm going to be able to write. My RSI is interacting in a creative way with my frozen shoulder and the pain may get too much. I am taking voluminous notes at the moment. This may come down to one-word evaluations of presentations....

Peace News in India

The War Resisters International Triennial (now held every four years, in a cunning ploy to avoid police detection and repression) is being held here in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, at Gujarat University or "Gujarat Vidyapith". Coming from the recent ice, snow and slush of southern England, Ahmedabad is jarringly hot - but not too hot, dusty but not too dusty. The university, which was closed down  three times by the British authorities during the national freedom struggle, was founded by Gandhi, and the library has an extensive section called "Gandhiana" (I just saw it while looking for the internet facilities).

I hadn't known that Gandhi had agreed to a World Pacifist Meeting in India in co-operation with WRI. He stipulated that it must take place only after liberation from the British occupation. Unfortunately he was assassinated before that took place. This is the third WRI Triennial in India (the first and second were in 1960 and 1985-86). There's a lot of history around the event: people with long records of struggle were being memorialised yesterday, the long record of speakers was being invoked, a lot has been done to entwine this international gathering with the specificity of long-standing campaigns for justice and peace within India.

For me, unexpected bits of personal history have been thrown up, as I encounter friends not seen for over a decade. Jean Dreze, a naturalised Indian, and Bela Bhatia, were leading figures within the Gulf Peace Team in 1990-91, whose organising phase I participated in. They've been involved in extraordinary work since then. Jean helped to put into place a Right to Work Act, which guarantees by federal law that everyone who asks for it can get public employment within 15 days at the minimum wage. Each family can apply for 100 days of work a year, and as the minimum wage is twice the market rate, this translates into 200 days of work a year guaranteed for the poorest families in the country. As part of a council of advisors to the leader of the Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi, Jean also helped to push through a Freedom of Information Act which he describes as the strongest FOIA in the world. I'm in no position to judge at this moment, but for bureaucratic
India to have any FOIA at all is astonishing.

Bela has been immersed in research and activism with deprived communities caught up in struggle in different parts of India, and has an in-depth knowledge of the interactions between the brutal Indian police (my words, not hers), the rightist paramilitaries, the "Maoists" and the communities these groupings attempt to control.

I put the word "Maoist" in question marks because Arundhati Roy, the first speaker at the Triennial, questioned the use of this label. I have to enter a caveat here. After an eight-hour flight, and a seven-hour train journey, and only eight hours' sleep in three days, I was not quite in phase with the opening plenary. My ability to be present came through in waves....

Nevertheless, I'm pretty sure that Arundhati Roy, the celebrated Indian author, questioned the "Maoist" label. Her opening remarks were highly critical of transnational corporate capitalism, as expected. They were also highly critical of the neoliberal corporate globalisation agenda, as expected. They also critiqued the impact of these forces on local communities in India, as expected. They also expressed a certain agnosticism towards different forms of struggle - as I'm sure most people must have expected. Her phrase was "a biodiversity of resistance".

There's been an exchange recently in Peace News about the "diversity of tactics" (though the phrase was hardly used). Smash EDO focused on the same issue as Arundhati Roy: "effective resistance". Roy said: "That is where we get stumped. What do we do about it all?" She referred to the fight against the Narmada dams that affect millions of people in Gujarat and other states. Roy said that the anti-dam movement won the arguments, but could not handle the actuality. (For more on Narmada, see http://www.narmada.org .)

Perhaps nonviolence is the right way for us, Roy said (I assume she meant the audience), but she did not know what to say to villagers facing repression. She called violence an indicator species, a stress signal in society. Then she said (according to my notes): "I stand for biodiversity of resistance, because we have to stop this." (My notes are not 100% reliable, some of them are not written in any known script, but this sentence is pretty clear.)

One possible interpretation (if my memory and notetaking of the event is correct) is that Roy was saying something similar to what Barack Obama said in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, which is that nonviolence is not always the answer and therefore there must be room for the use of force.

There are troubling questions here, which I wonder if we will explore at this pacifist convention. Gandhi himself said: "I do believe that where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence." I'm taking this from the Wikipedia entry, which cites Bondurant, Joan V. Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict, page 28.

In a letter of 22 September 1941, Gandhi wrote to a friend:

"Principles can have no exception. Two plus two can only be four. If I have made a mistake, it must be called a mistake. Can there be a different duty under stress? A mistake committed under stress may be pardonable. The moment Yudhishthira uttered a small falsehood, his chariot-wheel came down to earth. When I say that those who are not able to practise ahimsa should prefer violence to cowardice, I am not providing any exception to the principle."

You can find this by searching Gandhi's collected works, it's in volume 81, page 113 (http://www.gandhiserve.org/cwmg/VOL081.PDF). There are a lot of references to cowardice and violence. Gandhi was very concerned about cowardice - I'm not entirely sure why. I can't help feeling that "effective resistance" is more important than "brave resistance", but perhaps there is some underlying unity between those two things.

Last night someone at dinner said that there was not a lot of "militant nonviolence". My ears pricked up, having used the same phrase in Peace News recently. By this, she meant "nonviolent activists willing to die for the cause". No, there's not a lot of that around, and that's another question for the Triennial - I wonder if we will debate it, discuss it. It's certainly easier to criticise the forces of tyranny than to try to grapple with our own failings.

Finally, there were a lot of other interesting contributions yesterday afternoon and last night, but the one thing I must write about is plagiarism! I don't want to make any personal accusations, but I happen to know that the member of the WRI council who organised human bingo at the opening plenary attended last year's Peace News Summer Camp, where human bingo was played not once but twice!

There were different lists of questions handed out to all participants in the hall. You had to find five people who, for example, had walked to Afghanistan (!), could dance like Michael Jackson, used a spinning wheel, and so on. All the statements had to be in English, Spanish and Hindi. (There is simultaneous translation into these languages, but I haven't sampled it yet.)

I will be watching closely to see whether other aspects of Peace News gatherings have been brazenly appropriated...