Build capacity when regime tries to take away all capacity: Prof Gene Sharp

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 15 February 2012, 17:26 GMT]
In an exclusive interview to TamilNet on Friday in Oslo, Dr. Gene Sharp, Emeritus Professor of Political Science of the University of Massachusetts, provided some insights on non-violent strategies to be pursued by nations against states and powers that deny them their legitimate rights. “They have to build up some capacity for strength when the regime is trying to take away all capacity for strength from the oppressed people,” he said, adding, “We need to have a wise strategy – not something where you express anger but which achieves smaller victories and finally a big victory.” However, the leading theoretician of non-violent struggle who was not specifically addressing on any of the current struggles, conceded that “The situations are very different for different people of different countries.” 

“To plan a strategy, people used to come to us and say, tell us what to do. We don’t do that. We tell them no. Because we don’t know your situation,” Sharp said.

84-year old, Prof Gene Sharp, was in Oslo as a participant in the Human Rights Human Wrongs documentary film festival. An author of over ten influential books, his From Dictatorship to Democracy, published in 1993, is considered as a guidebook for non-violent struggles in many parts of the world, especially in the Balkans and the Middle East. 



Sharp is intellectually influenced by the Indian activist M.K. Gandhi and the American thinker Henry David Thoreau. He has been termed a ‘non-violent Clausewitz’ by the mainstream media. 

However, Professor Sharp has not escaped criticism. French intellectual, journalist and political activist Thierry Meyssan in 2005 alleged that Sharp and his organisation Albert Einstein Institution had been helping NATO and the CIA to train the leaders of the soft coups. Crediting Sharp with unifying the Tibetan opposition under Dalai Lama, Meyssan alleged that Sharp tried to form a “dissident group within PLO” so that Palestinian nationalists would stop “terrorism”. Professor Sharp responded in an open letter to Thierry Meyssan categorically denying the allegations in 2007.

While some of the world powers that architected the genocidal war against Eezham Tamils are now engaged in pre-emption instead of justice, and hence are anxious whether their hoodwink would lead to another armed struggle, Prof Sharp’s thoughts on non-violent struggle and step by step achievement may find criticism as ways of imperialism’s ‘counterinsurgency’ and are ineffectice against planned structural genocide in the island.

But Sharp’s interview raises some serious issues for Eezham Tamils to ask themselves, whether they have tried their full capacity in the island, in Tamil Nadu and in the diaspora for a non-violent struggle in the given context.

If people are not able to plan a non-violent strategy then they are not able to plan a violent struggle either, Sharp said in the interview.

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