 Our next speaker, Peter Ackerman, is someone who has been really interested in the Institute, but has really been interested in one specific aspect, which is nonviolent conflict. And I hope a lot of you have seen that he made an excellent two-part PBS series on this subject. And if you haven't, I'm sure you'll find a way that you can probably see it. I'm sure it will come up again, because it was called A Force More Powerful, A Century of Nonviolent Conflict. And Peter has been a distinguished international banker, structuring a lot of really very, very complex deals. And I guess that experience for him with complex deals decided that he would have, he has this other interest. He's chairman of the board of the Tufts Foreign Service Institute, but his other interest is really how do you bring about subtle conflicts through nonviolent means? And while he's dealt with this as he did in India or South Africa, and I'm sure you will be very interested in all the examples Peter has. So Peter Ackerman. Thank you, Mark. In this presentation, I've been asked to address several questions. First, can people striving for freedom succeed through nonviolent means? And if so, then how and under what conditions? And how did people power in Serbia lead to the overthrow of Milosevic? Can people power work against Saddam Hussein or other tyrannical regimes in order to advance democratic rule? And what should the U.S. government do to support such popular efforts? Now, before I respond, I'd like to share two vignettes of climatic moments in the recent history of people power. In December of 1981, after 16 months in which the Free Trade Union movement had shaken the foundation of communist power in Poland, martial law was imposed. When Lekulecso was taken away for incarceration, he told his captors, at this moment you lost. We are arrested, but you have driven a nail into your communist coffin. You'll come back to us on your knees. Then a few years later in South Africa, a brilliant 27-year-old named Emkezeli Jack led an amazingly successful economic boycott in Port Elizabeth. Not long after its commencement, the government declared its first state of emergency in decades. While escaping the roundup by police, here is what he perceived was happening at the time. And I quote, if they declare a state of emergency, they were panicking because we were becoming effective. They were feeling us coming. They were feeling us coming. So to us, the state of emergency showed that extraordinary measures were to be implemented in order to keep apartheid alive. And we knew then that we got apartheid in a crisis. And apartheid was in a crisis, and we were there. We were there to give it the push, the push, the push. Now the obvious point for us to consider here is why at the very moment that solidarity in Poland and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa were under the most severe repression, did its leaders think that they were in fact winning? What did Leckel Lessa and Emkezeli Jack see that made them so confident? At the very least, it tells us that they had a vision that the nonviolent weapons they were using were punishing their opponents, and that they were plotting their next forays against their adversaries that they believed would lead to victory. And by the way, in both cases, history proved their prognosis correct. What we also see is that successful examples of people power are much more than spontaneous uprisings of the masses. Each of the successful examples in the 20th century, to name a few including the Indian independence movement, the American civil rights movement, the South Africa anti-apartheid struggle, solidarity in Poland, and the anti-Punoshe resistance. And even the overthrow of Marcos and Philippines, from which the term people power is coined, involved marshaling a battery of weapons that are very different from the ones used by violent insurrectionists. In each of these cases, planning was a huge ingredient that shaped the conflict, behavior was strategic. For this reason, I think it is more apt to substitute the term people power with strategic nonviolent conflict or nonviolent resistance I also think the widely used term, quote, nonviolence, close quote, is confusing because it connotes an ethical state rather than a method of fighting. Another often used term, passive resistance, also fails to convey how nonviolent conflict requires tremendous energy and aggressiveness. The tactics or techniques of what I would refer to as strategic nonviolent conflict are extremely varied and they include protests such as petitions, parades, walkouts, and mass demonstrations that intensify civilian participation and methods of non-cooperation such as strikes, boycotts, resignations, and civil disobedience that subvert the operations of government and finally direct interventions such as sit-ins, nonviolent sabotage, and blockades that frustrate a tyrant's capacity to subjugate those they seek to exploit. Now, in each of the cases I just mentioned, plus many others in the 20th century, people consciously chose to use nonviolent techniques for at least one of three reasons. Either they had participated in a violent uprising that recently failed or they had no viable military option though they also had no inhibition to use armed force if they thought it would work, or lessons from past cases of successful nonviolent resistance provided inspiration and direction. Way down on the list was the notion of a moral imperative to remain nonviolent or a belief that they could convince their opponents to stand down. Lacking no illusions about the tyrant's superior armed power, they conceived of nonviolent conflict as a way to fight and win. So to answer the first question, can a strategy of nonviolent resistance succeed against political tyranny? The answer is a resounding yes. However, we should not confuse the possibility of a successful nonviolent resistance movement with the excessive claim that all nonviolent resistance movements will inevitably prevail because its methods are just. As with violent insurrections, strategic nonviolent conflicts have had significant failures. For example, it is yet to give Anson-Suki victory over Slork and Burma. The prospects for nonviolent resistance need not be evaluated from a standpoint of perfection, but according to its relative viability versus armed resistance in specific conflicts. And we do know that attempts at violent revolution have had a high failure rate in the 20th century, often leading to disastrous results. Witness Chechnya in 1995 and 2000 and the sad fate of Grozny. To make an informed judgment about the future of popular resistance movements, it is useful to understand the key ingredients of past successes. And they include first, a unified command committed to a nonviolent strategy. Second, the wise selection of objectives that will mobilize the population so that all demographic and economic elements of society are engaged in the struggle. Third, a plan for attacking the adversary where his control is most vulnerable. Fourth, the capacity to actively mitigate the effects of new oppression and terror which will always follow. And fifth, the co-optation or support the authoritarian needs to stay in power, particularly among the military and the police. Now, it has not taken long for the world to witness the millennium's first successful nonviolent conflict. We are now in the middle of shooting a documentary on the fall of Milosevic. Though more evidence still needs gathering, we can't say with confidence the following. During and for a significant period of time after the bombing over Kosovo ceased, Milosevic was able to consolidate his power, although it is fair to say that the Serbian opposition did capitalize on the widespread outrage felt over the bombing's devastation. Several months after the commencement of a planned nonviolent resistance movement and over a year after the bombing ended, Milosevic fell. The critical student opposition organization, OPPOR, sent representatives to Budapest where they were trained in nonviolent techniques by Bob Helvey who had done similar work with Burmese dissidents. And the key operating manual OPPOR will tell you they were lying on was a translation of from dictatorship to democracy written by my colleague Gene Sharp. Furthermore, the resistance organized last year was very different in scope and character than the 90 days of street demonstrations in Belgrade in 1996 and 97. While those demonstrations did force Milosevic to back off his manipulation of the municipal election results, they did not lead to a wider erosion of his power. But by way of contrast, last year's opposition extended geographically to as many as 70 small towns outside of Belgrade and directly led to Milosevic's loss of police support. Most interesting was how private NGOs had a tremendous impact on the outcome. With a provision of only tens of millions of dollars as opposed to billions for the bombing, the opposition was able to sustain both an independent organizational base as well as create a communications infrastructure so the resistance seemed ubiquitous and unstoppable. This was a significant factor in neutralizing the terror and involving a much wider slice of Serb population. It became altogether overwhelming for Milosevic when Kastanica emerged as the unifying leader of the opposition. Finally, the CNN pictures we all remember seeing of people storming the parliament building in Belgrade conveyed the impression of a 1917 style Bolshevik uprising. And this was completely misleading. Those climactic moments were planned and actively negotiated with the police who simply backed away. So now can the events in Serbia happen elsewhere? Well, why not? Still, many retain the impression that nonviolent resistance movements only work against benign adversaries. But the lesson of Serbia, as with other cases in the 20th century, is that the issue isn't how brutal the opponent is. It is whether he has to reach out beyond his fanatical core to exert total control and whether those elements outside the core remain loyal. Now, some people will be quick to argue, for example, that nonviolent action, no matter how strategic, cannot work against Saddam Hussein. Yet, in my opinion, at the zenith of power, Pinochet and Chilean both in South Africa, where every bit is dominating and ruthless. The only thing we do know is that a U.S. call for a violent uprising after the Gulf War led to a slaughter of Shiites and Kurds and the solidification of Saddam's hold on the military at a point where one would have expected his support to weaken since he just lost tens of thousands of men in the desert. We may have had a different dynamic in play had we encouraged a general strike in Baghdad. And indeed, our sanctions policy may have been more effective if combined with a nonviolent resistance inside Iraq. Now, we learned Sunday that the Clinton administration approved $12 million of aid for the Iranian National Congress. And that included humanitarian supplies and communications equipment. While an encouraging step, it would be tragic if this were prelude to arming the opposition in another attempt to overthrow Saddam. For some reason, the foreign policy community retains a blind spot on the idea of strategic nonviolent conflict and remains skeptical as to its possibilities. Traditionally, the phenomenon has been lumped into peace studies and wrongly seen as a form of conflict prevention or conflict resolution. Nonviolent tactics have not been considered relevant when the fight begins for then only the correlation of armed forces matter. For defense intellectuals, strategic nonviolent conflict should be a compelling notion of a wooly-headed idealist and is dismissed as soft and certainly incompatible with real politic. Furthermore, whatever success has occurred is argued to have been a fluke explainable by exogenous factors like the fall of the Soviet Union with respect to the triumph of polar solidarity or that the dictator was never as powerful as he once seemed. We're already hearing that reassessment about Milosevic. But despite the skepticism, even at this moment, among people whose lives and freedoms are now threatened, the appetite to learn more about nonviolent conflict and how to wage it is growing dramatically. Since our documentary has appeared, we have received inquiry from the fallen gong, as well as opposition groups from Zimbabwe, the Ivory Coast, and Belarus, as well as from students in Iran who want tapes of the documentary translated into Farsi. So before we miss other opportunities, foreign policy elites like those in this conference here and in Europe and Japan, which Chet calls the security exporters, need to understand how strategic nonviolent conflict may offer a more viable alternative or supplement to our current concepts of peacekeeping and peacemaking. We also should not forget that in the overwhelming number of cases of successful nonviolent resistance, civil society was so engaged that the new regime in power was decidedly more democratic. And before we support on-protagonists, even though we may be seen to be fighting, they may be seen to be fighting enemies of civilized norms of behavior, that is their war criminals, we should remember that in the 20th century there have been virtually no instances of successful violent insurrections that resulted in stable democratic forms of government. Thank you. Thank you, Peter. We have a few minutes for questions to Arne. Yes. Both Mr. Crocker and Mr. Burger referred to the intervention in East Timor in 1999 as a success story. And two things, I want to question that on one very important ground, and that is I think that if there had been serious economic pressure exerted by the U.S., Japan and the World Bank months earlier, the worst violence might have been prevented. In fact, by the time the Australians got on the ground in September, hundreds of thousands of people had been driven from their homes, tortured or killed, and the violence was over. And so I would characterize that as a partial success story, and I wonder if Mr. Crocker perhaps could comment on that before we start holding this up as a model of successful humanitarian intervention. And then a second related question is, how do you maintain U.S. and international interest and commitment to a faraway, tiny place like East Timor outside the sphere of obvious U.S. interest once the intervention is over, but the problems and the institution, the problem solving has just begun and the institution rebuilding has just started, which will require an enormous investment of time, money and expertise. How do you sustain that interest when East Timor now is faded from the international headlines? Thank you. Good question, Mr. Chetka will answer it. I'll speak for Sandy on this one, I'm sure. What I refer to as a success story in East Timor is the ability that we demonstrated to coalition build behind a regional power that was prepared finally late in the day to act. I completely agree with you, it was late in the day. But we were able to sort of make it possible to provide the legitimacy, the framework, the international support that would make it clear that the Australians would have all the mandates they needed and they wouldn't have to worry about getting some kind of blessings. We'd take care of that and we'd be supporting them. That's a form of coalition building, but I think your other question about sustaining a coalition is a bigger one. Obviously, if it's military coalitions we're talking about, that's the most arduous, but diplomatic coalitions can be sustained. But you need a driver at the head of the effort who cares. Let us suppose there had been an international coalition in 1994 and Alan challenged me on this to respond to the impending genocide in Rwanda. That coalition could have been led by us, we didn't do that. We instead allowed the situation to become polarized, but it would have included neighboring countries, it would have included obviously the French, the Belgians, perhaps others in Europe, and the international financial institutions. Once the immediate crisis was taken care of there would have been a way, I believe, for American leadership to sustain the coalition needed to get Rwanda back on its feet. Instead, what you've seen is a polarized international community continuing the polarization within the region. That's the worst possible outcome. Alan, do you want to say something? Yes, briefly. The answer, I think, to your question of how to sustain the interest after, for example, a reform government has taken power is with great difficulty. With great difficulty we've seen this time after time after time for a simple reason that these causes become fashionable in their day. When did South Africa stop becoming a fashionable cause and when did people stop concerning themselves whether we were assisting the new South African government, the Mandela government, with adequate financial resources, technical assistance, and the rest? We did a lot. But it gets to be a question of trying to divide the time and focus in any bureaucracy in foreign affairs. And one of the dilemmas that we have in these matters, and it's one of the dilemmas with people, the so-called people of power or nonviolent resistance movies that take power, is that there's that old cliché that we campaign in poetry, but unfortunately we govern in prose. And the fact of the matter is that what you're saying there is a bit of what Dr. Rogoff said this morning. When did Russia stop being fashionable? Well, after Yeltsin took over or six months past, a year past, I was very much in the middle of that thing. I watched it happen. You could just watch the recession of interest. I mean, isn't there any longer, or at least not consistently? Obviously, if there's money, the NGOs and others will be there to try and work with the government on that. But basically, it's a global problem. And it's a problem that I hope this administration will think seriously about in terms of tackling priorities in this regard. And the situation, as you say, in East Timor was hardly a victory for any of us. I think one more question over here. Thank you. Michael Southridge from the Department of State. I'm very interested in what Dr. Crocker said about the criteria for U.S. involvement. And I would like to hear his comments and perhaps others on the panelists about the situation in eastern Congo and how those criteria would apply. Thank you. Eastern Congo is hard to address in a vacuum. We're talking about Central Africa. We're talking about a region, as you know, Mike, which is about the size of mainland China. It's bigger than Western Europe. It involves nine neighboring countries. It involves the organized military forces of seven countries, as well as numerous militant groups and armed groups of various kinds. If you're talking about Central Africa, you're talking about a potential black hole in the middle of a region that has a lot of problems. And we haven't begun to see how far down is down in Central Africa. So I can find a way to argue to you that this should make the cut and get on the radar of an incoming administration, or, for that matter, an outgoing one. Now, how would you apply the criteria? I mean, why do I say that? It's not just the scale and the size. Two million people close to it beyond what would normally be expected have died in the Congo in the past year and a half. This is an enormous humanitarian crisis. What could be done about it is to create the kind of coalitions that Dick Solomon asked me to talk about. I'm not talking military coalitions. I'm talking diplomatic coalitions. We have the capacity, I believe, to catalyze neighbors and allies and international institutions to define a path forward in the Congo. We've got to decide it's important enough to get some key people focused on it and to sustain that focus. It's late in the day. There's been a lot of things done that I might have done different in that part of the world, but I do think it's possible. And I would apply those criteria to C2 that the Congo made the cut. That doesn't mean every conflict in every region makes the cut. This one's a big one. Thank you. For Alan, 16 years on the board, I think he gets the last word. Well, thank you, Mark. Well, actually, you didn't read my question. My question was longer. The questions that Dick gave me were at least as long as chess, but we'll let that... But then you wouldn't have had any time even to answer? No. I just want to say a general word about coalition building. I'm sorry that we didn't get a chance at Senator Biden couldn't stay because he deserves, he and Senator Helms and Kofi Annan and, of course, Dick Holbrook and his team deserve an enormous amount of credit. What really is one of the great coalition building exercises in recent American history, just negotiating that agreement within the Congress, within the UN community to reduce our tariffs and so forth, and getting us back into a straight reasonable relationship, or at least the first step in that. Now we have to pay the money out in the center of Lugar if those of you who watch the hearings ask, well, how soon is Congress going to act on this? But the Congress is not just notoriously laggard in acting on things it has to follow up on. So we'll see whether the UN gets its money. But if it does, it's a model for what could occur in this administration. We have a divided capital. We have, I spent 20 years of my life working in bipartisan groups of one sort or another in the center I run as bipartisan. And we have an opportunity to use that very polarization to try to negotiate coalitions of the sort that will be able to act in Africa, that will be able to act in the Balkans, that will be able to act elsewhere with a certain amount of goodwill and above all else the kind of energy, the fierce energy that Senator Biden and others on the Hill put into getting an Ambassador Holbrook into getting this settlement. Because it doesn't just happen. And if anyone, one of the problems is providing bipartisanship. I noticed an old friend Steve Solar in the audience who was one of the builders of bipartisan coalitions in the Philippines and a heck of a lot of other places in Burma, and you name it. But the fact of the matter is it doesn't just happen. And unless we get the energy level in this new Congress and in the administration that recognizes they've got to reach out, you can't use Congress as a photo op background to go to see them when you've already decided what you want to do, you've got to really consult. If we don't establish, if you will, the kinds of rules of behavior for our own government, our own Congress administration that we would insist upon in our own families, then I think we're in for more of the same. Sorry, thank you, Mark. Thank you. I think that very well sums it up. I mean, the coalition building usually in the government starts between state treasury and defense and often doesn't get much beyond that. So once you start with that and then you get the Congress, you're already somewhat there, but what we're trying to deal with is if you get there, how do you get beyond there? I know you've enjoyed what our panelists have said and we hope you'll come back and hear more of them at some later date when we can go into this in greater detail. Thank you.