Freedom is not won by placards alone

NON-VIOLENT protest takes courage, but force is often required for the advance of liberty.

YEARS later, a government minister in a faraway land, the Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky returned to the jail cell where he had started his long and bitter imprisonment. And he told his tale to those who were gathered there.

He recounted how, after many months, his captors took him to his latest interrogation and showed him a film. It was a television documentary featuring his wife, Avital, in London. And she was on the street outside the Soviet embassy, with a group of students, calling for his release. The purpose of screening the film was for Sharansky to understand the charges against him: that he was a troublemaker, undermining the Soviet Union. But Sharansky saw something else. He saw only his wife, someone he hadn't seen for years, since he had agreed that she should leave the country when he was denied an exit visa.

He wanted to see the film - and his precious wife - again. So he told his interrogators that he was having difficulty with the English, that if they wanted him to appreciate the charges, they needed to screen it one more time. When it was finished, he tried for one further showing of the demonstration. Finally his jailers understood. They looked at him with pity and contempt. And the chief officer spoke. "You think that they will save you, don't you? But they are just housewives and students. We are the KGB."

This story Sharansky told in freedom. He has told it many times, as he travels the world.

Reading the stories of political dissidents, it is impossible not to be awed by their courage and their inner strength. Aung San Suu Kyi had known since her youngest days that the time might come when she was required to fulfil her destiny as the daughter of Burma's great nationalist leader. In her early love letters to her British fiance she warns that one day she might have to give herself to the struggle for liberty and that, when the moment came, she would need his love and understanding. The moment came in 1988, and she did not flinch. Neither did he.

Her resolve to stay in Burma, alone and far from her children, when her husband was dying and the authorities were happy to offer her a one-way ticket out of the country, was extraordinary. His consent to her decision, knowing that he would never see her again, was bravery of the highest order.

But a campaign of non-violence such as the one to which Suu Kyi has devoted herself requires more than just courage. It also requires discipline, almost unimaginable self-discipline. So much is made clear in Taylor Branch's magisterial history of the US civil rights movement, America in the King Years.

Much of the first volume of Branch's survey is devoted to the training that students and activists underwent so that they could live by Martin Luther King's doctrine of non-violence. Demonstrators were taught how to endure blow upon blow without striking back and how to respond when others were hurt. Placards were discouraged on marches, lest they become weapons, and those queueing to register to vote were not even allowed to carry a pencil lest it be seen as a tool of violence.

King's followers chafed against these orders. And in the final volume of the trilogy Branch relates how the need for this heroic discipline finally broke the student civil rights movement. The head of the student non-violent co-ordinating committee, Stokely Carmichael, turned away from King towards his own clenched-fist black power doctrine. He didn't do it out of strength and youthful spirit, as appeared the case at the time. He did it because he had seen too many of his friends die, shot in cold blood by Southern white rejectionists who escaped any sort of punishment for their crime. The murders turned Carmichael. And in many parts of the US his fellow African-Americans turned to rioting.

King is a towering figure. So his assassination stands alone in the public imagination as a terrible event, or perhaps one linked to the death of the Kennedy brothers in the same decade. It should more properly be seen as one in a series of killings of civil rights workers.

As you follow the movement's course, King's death comes to seem inevitable, and it certainly seemed so to him. All of which establishes one more feature of non-violent movements. They are rarely self-reliant. King may not have allowed his followers to carry pencils, but he required federal officers carrying guns to enforce the law. When law officers failed in their duty, as they did when King marched in Chicago, bloody riots stopped the civil rights activists in their tracks. And Sharansky's jailers were right when they said that the students and housewives wouldn't be enough to free him. He needed them, of course. Their achievement was remarkable.

But Sharansky was ultimately freed in a swap for spies whom the West had captured; he was freed because state actors, with their weapons and their pencils, intervened. The heroism of non-violent leaders is necessary, but not sufficient. And the more daunting the foe, the more obviously this is so. Non-violent resistance to Hitler? Non-violent resistance to Saddam? Non-violent resistance to the Taliban?

The publication of George W. Bush's memoirs last week has been greeted as one might have expected. He says he is willing to wait for the verdict of history, but I doubt he will become a liberal hero any time soon. Indeed liberals are more likely to regard him as a war criminal.

Yet the willingness of people like Bush and Tony Blair to commit their country's blood and treasure to military endeavour and police action has often been necessary for the advance of liberty. And often will be. If we treat the difficult decisions of our leaders, and even their errors, as if they were crimes it will be liberty that pays the price in the end.

The Times