Peaceful Resistance

Advancing Human Rights and Democratic Freedoms

Robert M. Press

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351912372
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Droits de l'homme

An innovative study that examines how peaceful, domestic tactics by individual human rights activists and organizational activists, with public support, can force an authoritarian regime to make key concessions. Robert Press explores the creation and impact of a culture of resistance. He examines how domestic pressure can be more important than foreign pressure for political reform, especially in underdeveloped, authoritarian states. This study of contemporary Kenya fills a gap in traditional social movement theory to show how a resistance movement actually starts. Contrary to long-dominant theory, the book shows how the initiative for such a movement can come from activists themselves in the face of severe obstacles in society. With its unique findings on the effects of individual activism and peaceful resistance, this book will attract a broad audience in the study and practice of international relations, comparative politics, sociology, interest groups, peace and conflict, and human rights.

Chapter 1

Establishing a Culture of Resistance: Theoretical Perspectives

“Turn it on now,” the prison guard said.

Almost immediately a torrent of water from the fire hose hit the naked body of political prisoner and human rights activist Wanyiri Kihoro. Wherever he moved in the basement cell, the guard aimed the hose at him. He screamed in pain but the hosing continued for some four minutes.

When the torture ended, the cell, with a specially raised doorway designed to trap water, was flooded ankle deep. Then guards slammed the cell door shut and turned off the lights.

On three separate occasions, between July 29 and October 10, 1986, he was forced to stay in the flooded cell, once for ten days, twice for seven days each. At first he was given nothing to eat in an attempt to starve him into submission. Each time he was confined in the flooded cell, he stood as long as he could, shifting his weight from one foot to another to keep one out of the water. But eventually, exhausted, he had to sit in the water despite the corroding effect on his buttocks.

Shortly after his secret detention began earlier that year, he had been stripped and beaten with clubs by government guards. They wanted to know about his activism as a university student and later about his contacts with Kenyan dissidents in London where he went for graduate studies. The confession they sought would be used in a sham trial to imprison him for years. Not satisfied with his answers, they resorted to the water torture to break him.

Like many authoritarian African heads of state in the mid-to-late 1980s trying to stem growing agitation for more human rights and democratic freedoms, Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi, who had survived a coup attempt in 1982, was cracking down on suspected dissidents. Kihoro, an attorney, was one of many Kenyans detained in this period. By the time a group of mothers of detainees began their protest in 1992 in a public park in downtown Nairobi, there were some 50 known political prisoners.

A 1987 report by Amnesty International detailed torture and other abuses in Kenya, including a distortion of the judicial system in an attempt to give the trials of political prisoners an air of legitimacy.

Most of the confessions those brief trials recorded were obtained by torture according to Amnesty’s report, based in part on the secretly-written details of his own torture that Kihoro was able to smuggle out eventually after the water torture ended.

African Resistance

Against such repression, a resistance movement was gathering strength in many African countries in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Across much of sub-Saharan Africa the twin pinchers of deteriorating economies and harsh political rule stirred human rights and democracy activists to action. In the next few years, well into the 1990s, lawyers, clergy, students, mothers, opposition politicians and others would take great risks in challenging authoritarian regimes determined to hold onto power. They and the crowds that supported them would face riot police armed with guns, clubs and tear gas. Political opponents faced expulsion from ruling parties and financial ruin; activist leaders faced possible imprisonment and torture.

Yet against these odds, the resistance paid off in many countries. The glacial pace of political reform speeded up; authoritarian, one-party regimes were replaced by multi-party systems. In 1989, only five African states had more than one political party; by, 1995, three out of four African states had “competitive party systems.”¹

Though some of the newly elected leaders later became abusive themselves, for the most part they were not as repressive as the old ones. Human rights and democratic freedoms took a major leap forward in the early 1990s in sub-Saharan Africa. The momentum for reform slowed by the mid 1990s, and economies generally continued to languish. And there were exceptions, including Togo and Zimbabwe, whose repressive leaders managed to hold on to power longer than most of their fellow heads of state. But across much of Africa, basic freedoms such as freedom of speech, the right to assemble, and the right to choose one’s leaders, are today accepted norms.

How did this happen? What forces or combination of forces led to such changes?

This chapter presents a model or way of explaining how a culture of resistance is established, involving individual and organizational activism as well as mass public support at rallies, including illegal rallies. With some modifications, the study uses concepts of social movements to examine the dynamics of human rights and democracy activism, especially in the initial stages of movement formation.

In this book a culture of resistance is one in which public challenges to the abuse of power by a regime becomes a norm for activists and a visible segment of the general public.² The term social movement is used to describe the process by which a culture of resistance is established.³

Despite some excellent statistical studies about events during Africa’s move toward greater freedoms, and despite probing studies of the role of civil society in the changing African political climate, few, if any, studies have offered a close-up analysis of the often-dramatic efforts by human rights and democracy activists in the late 1980s and 1990s. One scholar notes a lack of social movement studies focused on activism. “In particular, little attention is given to understanding, and depicting the processes that generate and sustain highly committed activists and that examine systematically the roles such activists play in the movement.”⁴ In examining how a culture of resistance was established in Kenya, among the findings that come to light is the existence of a pre-organizational phase of activism that this book identifies as individual activism. Though individual activism – unsupported in any significant way by an organization – played a major role in the re-emerging resistance to authoritarian rule in Kenya, it is a concept barely recognized by most of the literature.

This chapter examines various theoretical perspectives regarding the resistance movement that developed in Kenya to authoritarian rule, including a new way of looking at resistance to a regime as a social movement. Social movements normally focus on government policy changes or strengthening particular values in a society. The social movement or resistance movement in Kenya began as a human rights and democratization effort, but it soon focused on a much larger goal: regime change. The concept of resistance movement is used to encompass various elements of political and civil society that are normally analyzed separately.

It should be clearly noted here, as in the preface, that this study does not predict that activism automatically leads to democratic elections. It may or may not. After a period of growing activism, Kenya did have a fair election that saw the ouster of the ruling party. And though this has happened elsewhere, it did not happen everywhere. Regimes using excessive force, for example, can keep an opposition activist movement off balance and even break it up or force it underground.

This book builds on previous studies, adding to an understanding of how a nonviolent resistance movement starts, how it operates, how it grows, and the impact it has on human rights and democratic freedoms. Based on extensive interviews in Kenya and a careful search of documents, this book offers a close look at patterns of activism and theoretical explanations that help explain those patterns. Archival research of events and crosschecking the interviews greatly diminished the risk of an interviewee overstating their role in the resistance.

The result is a fresh (and rare) application of social movement theories to an African case. Most social movement studies take as a starting point the existence of such a movement: this one captures the formation phase of a movement. In so doing, it reveals a force almost entirely overlooked in political analyses: individual activism. Though later replaced by organizational activism, individual activism played an important part in resistance in Kenya to authoritarian rule.

This book also provides evidence regarding the importance of domestic resistance in addition to international pressures in bringing about reforms and suggests that sometimes domestic pressure can be more important than international. The combination of domestic and international pressures is seen in what happened to Wanyiri Kihoro, who survived the water torture.

“The physical and mental exertion was traumatic,” he later wrote of his ordeal. Somehow Kihoro decided he would not make a confession that would give the government an excuse to imprison him for years. Somehow he resolved to endure the torture and hoped he would survive to be released.

“I was furious at the violation of my legal and human rights in my own country…. The longer they continued to hold me without charge, the more certain I became that they did not have the file which could do the damage. Delay was calling off the police bluff.”⁵

At one point in his confinement in a secret basement cell in a government building in downtown Nairobi (Nyayo House), a sympathetic prison guard arranged a brief meeting with Kihoro’s wife, Wanjiru, in a car in an adjacent parking lot. There he was able to recount his torture and ask his wife to contact an attorney to represent him. His wife contacted human rights lawyer Gibson Kamau Kuria.

Two other detainees had managed to get word to Kuria asking for representation: Mukaru Ng’ang’a, former university lecturer who died in 1997; and Mirugi Kariuki, another human rights attorney, who, like Kihoro, was later elected to Parliament.

Kuria prepared documents detailing the torture and filed notice February 26, 1987 with the government, as required by the law, that he intended to sue the government to stop the torture and to release the detainees. But the government instead detained Kuria, though they did not torture him.

If the regime thought Kuria’s detention would end the matter, it was mistaken. Kuria’s law partner, Kiraitu Murungi, refiled the papers.

“I knew that I would be detained on doing it,” said Murungi. For the next few days he stayed at home. “Every time a vehicle passed by we thought it was the police and we couldn’t sleep for several weeks. But finally nothing happened to me.” He attributed this to “the dust which had been kicked up”,⁶ especially by the international community – more specifically The American Bar Association, The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights and Amnesty International.

And by the Washington Post.

Before he filed papers in the case, Kuria briefed Washington Post reporter Blain Hardin about the torture in case Kuria, as he anticipated, was detained himself. Hardin wrote the story that his editors published March 13, 1987 with a photo of President Moi and US President Ronald Reagan emerging together from the White House. The headline of the story read: “Police Torture is Charged in Kenya.”

The President apparently was furious. Hardin was nearly expelled from Kenya. In a rare interview, with Hardin, Moi denied that Kenya practised torture and insisted that any minor incident should not be interpreted as government policy. Amnesty’s report makes clear that torture was a regular practise, however.

But the torture of political dissidents soon dropped dramatically. Had Kihoro and the other two detainees not resisted confession; had Kihoro not managed to smuggle out details of his torture; had two attorneys not been willing to take up the case and challenge the government, things might have been different. International pressure certainly helped reduce the torture in Kenya, but the domestic resistance was a critical factor.

Theoretical Perspectives

Human rights and democracy activists can help tame or bring down an authoritarian leader, as they did in Kenya in December 2002. The transition was rapid and peaceful, by way of an election; but the process of resistance leading up to that election took more than a decade. Starting first with individual activism then broadening to include organizational activism, the resistance increasingly attracted domestic public support and some international help.

This chapter examines theoretical perspectives on the overt resistance movement in Kenya from about 1987 to 2002. This case study offers one answer to a puzzle in a world where human rights abuses are increasing and many authoritarian regimes persist: how can people living under a regime that pretends to uphold the principles of human rights and democracy but severely abuses them develop an effective, nonviolent resistance to the regime?

More than a compelling account of political change, the investigation offers insights on a number of current debates in the discipline. For example, it joins a growing debate on a key aspect of political process theory that has been dominant in social movement literature for several decades, one with potentially wide applicability in political science: that “opportunity” for po...