Gene Sharp – a frail man with powerful ideas
Channel 4 News International Editor Lindsey Hilsum interviews Professor Gene Sharp who says anti-government protesters in Syria who pick up arms are suicidal.
Gene Sharp is frail now, but his ideas are still powerful. The Syrian opposition, he believes, is making a huge mistake by picking up arms.
“Maintain non violence,” he says. “Do not organise mutinying soldiers to use violence against the army. That is suicidal. That’s what the government would want you to do. Don’t play into their hands.”
Professor Sharp is the guru of non-violent protest, the author of the manual “From Dictatorship to Democracy”, which has been translated into 34 languages and used by protest movements in Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia and more recently across the Arab world. In it, he outlines 198 techniques to bring down dictatorships, from strikes and protests to civil disobedience and boycotts.
He’s in the UK to promote a film about his work. At 83, his eyes are rheumy and he speaks quietly, but he hasn’t wavered from the beliefs which landed him in jail in 1953 after protesting about conscription for the Korean War.
Nowadays, he frequently finds himself on the same side as the US government – in recent years, the American administration has frequently ended up supporting protestors. But he disagrees with foreign intervention which, he believes, distorts the process of change and means that any new government is subject to an agenda set by foreigners rather than by their own people.
Libya, he says, proves the point. – the Libyans, he believes, lost control of their own revolution by taking on Gadaffi’s forces with arms, and inviting in NATO. I put it to him that if Nato hadn’t intervened Gadaffi would still be in power. He wasn’t convinced – the process, he thought, would have been longer, but the outcome more likely to lead to democracy on Libyan terms.
Watch an extended version of Lindsey Hilsum’s interview with Gene Sharp here.
So what would Sharp advise the people of the Syrian city of Homs to do when the tanks are rolling down the streets towards them? Like the famous man carrying a plastic bag in Tiananmen Square, should they just stand there? Sharp’s answer is yes.
Regimes crumble when the military and police refuse to fire on the people. “They have to use mutinying soldiers to persuade rest to mutiny,” he said. The key moment comes when the army refuses to obey orders. The military will inevitably be better at violence than civilians, so taking up arms is a recipe for losing.
Even winning isn’t easy. “Bringing down a dictatorship is only Part 1,” says Sharp. “Part 2 is constructing a new society, a democratic system.
You can follow Lindsey Hilsum on Twitter @lindseyhilsum