The events in Tunisia are the latest instance of largely nonviolent protest in the Middle East. The campaign in Tunisia succeeded in ousting for the first time a modern Arab dictator, the long-ruling Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. The campaign had mass support, and with its numbers, defied the security forces. While the success in Tunisia was historic, the tactic of mass — and for the most part, nonviolent — protest in the region was not.
The most famous Middle Eastern pro-democracy movement in the recent past has been in Iran, with a nonviolent uprising — the Green Movement — daring to take on the government after a questionable presidential election in 2009. While the struggle has not yet emerged victorious, it has managed to persevere in spite of intense repression. Iran’s history provided guidance for the Green Movement protesters.
The 1979 Iranian Revolution was essentially a broad-based nonviolent rebellion against the Shah, with nearly all of the violence being inflicted on the protesters by the monarch’s security apparatus. The anti-Shah forces comprised a broad spectrum of society, ranging from workers and students to intellectuals and clerics. And they engaged in strikes, civil disobedience and massive rallies to topple the Shah. Within the Arab world itself, there have been a number of recent instances of nonviolent mass agitation.
The Cedar Revolution in Lebanon in 2005 demanded an end to Syrian domination of its neighbor. The movement compelled Syrian troops to leave the country and to relax its grip on Lebanon. Egypt has had an active pro-democracy campaign named Kefaya (Enough!) aimed at the longstanding Hosni Mubarak dictatorship. It hasn’t been able to strike the same chord or get similar-sized crowds out in the street as the campaign in Tunisia, but it has shown remarkable determination in the face of brutal government repression, including sexual assaults on female participants.
Beleaguered from all sides, a nonviolent resistant movement also formed in Iraq to resist the U.S. occupation. This coalition was made up of a loose network of civil society organizations, unions in the oil sector, women’s groups and students. Despite being outgunned and largely ignored in the U.S. media, such entities persisted in their peaceful resistance to the U.S. presence in Iraq.
And then there’s Palestine, where nonviolence has played a large part in the struggle against the Israeli occupation. The Palestinian uprising in the late 1980s and the early 1990s — the First Intifada — was predominantly nonviolent, with the significant and controversial exception of stone throwing at Israeli security forces.
Palestinian protesters in the village of Bilin and in a number of other communities continue to engage in regular, mostly nonviolent, demonstrations against the Israel-Palestine separation barrier, which has often traversed into Palestinian territory and appropriated Palestinian land. (The International Court of Justice ruled in 2004 that the barrier was illegal on its current route.) Some people feel nonviolence cannot work in the Middle East. They contend that mass protest doesn’t have any resonance in the area or in Islam.
But the above instances point out how fallacious such notions are. Tunisia provides us yet another example — one that should further inspire people throughout the region.
This column was produced for the Progressive Media Project, which is run by The Progressive magazine, and distributed by the Tribune News Service.