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Many of us have felt great despair and helplessness at the scenes of suffering of vulnerable civilians, writes Lubna Nadvi
We are currently living through a time when the average citizen may well be considered as being under siege from war-mongering forces in both explicit and non-explicit ways.
Recently this has been most explicitly demonstrated in the Middle East region, whose oil and other natural reserves have become the bane of its civilian populations.
Ordinary people have to bear the brunt as the global War on Terror is articulated and manufactured by opportunistic and profit-motivated northern states under benevolent pretences of "liberation" and "democracy".
How many of us have not felt great despair and helplessness as the media conveys to us scenes of the suffering and degradation of helpless and vulnerable civilians? The question we must put to ourselves is: what can we do in the face of forces which are so much bigger and more powerful than ourselves?
This critical question was recently addressed by Phyllis Bennis, veteran activist, author and commentator on global citizens' movements, at the Harold Wolpe Lecture delivered at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
Bennis focused in large part on the question of "empire", and its quest to dominate the world, and contends that a major aspect of this agenda links up integrally with what is currently occurring in the Middle East in the form of wars and occupations, perpetrated primarily by the imperial agents that constitute the "empire".
Bennis referred in particular to the policy of war-mongering adopted by the Bush administration and its coalition partners, which she argued has effectively become synonymous with the consistent implementation of state-sponsored aggression towards any form of dissent against the governments of the "empire".
She further emphasised the phenomenon that has become prevalent throughout the globe. This is the typical scenario when citizens in the Middle East, or indeed anywhere else, protest against invasion or occupation, or resist on behalf of those civilian populations that are subjected to such treatment.
Torture They are usually labelled as terrorists and the global War on Terror machinery spins into immediate action, through its extended structures of surveillance, detention and often torture and death, seriously violating civil liberties and universally guaranteed human rights. Most often innocent people become the victims of state and police brutality.
A key point of reference for Bennis is the debates inspired by a New York Times article in the wake of millions of people around the world protesting against the impending war in Iraq in 2003.
The New York Times declared in February 2003 that a second superpower had emerged, and this new superpower was a global citizens' movement which demonstrated a collective, principled objection to the war and which, according to Bennis, also resulted in the United Nations refusing to legitimise the war through its own structures.
So, even though the global citizens' movement was unable to actually stop the war, it did, according to her, arguably still make a powerful impact.
We may well be negative about the latter argument in light of the recent war in Lebanon, where the tragic reality remains that no amount of global civil society mobilisation was able to stop the huge civilian losses, particularly within the Lebanese civil population, in the face of Israeli state aggression.
While Hizbollah, as the regional guerrilla movement, clearly articulated a strong military resistance against Israeli aggression, the question of whether militias actually protect or in fact expose civilian populations to greater vulnerabilities emerges as an overarching question for the international community.
Bennis referred to a variety of international tools such as international law and charters on human rights, which place a certain degree of responsibility on citizens.
She argues that these tools be used effectively to articulate certain outcomes and that they actually don't have any meaning unless they are strategically enforced.
Yet do we really feel that such tools still retain any efficacy? We have witnessed the very flawed and citizen-unfriendly United Nations Security Council structure which allows the United States, in particular, to continuously veto decisions and resolutions that attempt to hold either it or Israel accountable for war crimes and other infringements of international law.
It would appear that the United Nations is only as powerful as its collective membership allows it to be, and the space for citizens to make tangible contributions through existing mechanisms has become seriously constrained as a result of its obdurate bureaucracy and dubious diplomatic rhetoric.
Invasions Yet Bennis still holds out hope for a programme of citizen action that will impact on oppressive government policies, particularly as they relate to addressing the challenges of ending invasions and occupations of countries in the Middle East.
She makes reference to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa as an example of an effective citizens' movement and articulates the notion that the post-apartheid nation has great potential for actually challenging the "empire" and holding states such as the United States and Israel accountable for their actions in the Middle East.
She argues that South Africa has consistently been an active participant within the United Nations on the Middle East question, acting in favour of the Palestinian struggle for independence and refusing to join the coalition that instigated the war in Iraq.
However, we have seen the current South African government compromise its moral authority by making military deals with the very forces that are responsible for the suffering of Palestinian, Lebanese and Iraqi civilians.
Bennis recommended a programme of boycotts, sanctions, divestments and general isolation, targeted in particular at Israel. She emphasised that such a campaign must be focused and should, in particular, target companies such as Caterpillar, which manufactures bulldozers that destroy Palestinian homes.
Although such campaigns have been in effect for many years now, efforts need to be re-energised to isolate Israel and its supporters, who continue to pursue an aggressive agenda against civilian populations in the Middle East region. These are pressing questions for our times. Future generations will no doubt judge us by the choices that we make in our time.
Given that state institutions in most parts of the globe are generally becoming increasingly hostile to civilian populations, it is clearly citizens' movements that must rise to the challenge of protecting themselves and, indeed, the most vulnerable among them, from such hostility.
Lubna Nadvi is a research associate of the Centre for Civil Society.
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