Why I hate the "Where's their Mandela?" question about Palestinians, Tamils, etc.
So, time and time again I've heard about groups undertaking armed resistance, "they just need their Mandela to show them to resist non-violently. Where is he?"
I dislike that a lot, and on the occasion of the great man's passing, I'm probably going to hear it even more: whether about Palestinians, Tamils in Sri Lanka, Muslims in Burma, Mayans in Mexico, etc., etc. It's a complete and deliberate misreading of history and of Mandela's life.
Mandela was the founder of Umkhonto we Sizwe (abbreviated "MK" for reasons that escape me), an armed wing of the ANC, that killed dozens of people before his arrest and hundreds after it. Like how usually happens with occupation resistance movements, most of the targets of their violence were members of the oppressed race who seemed too collaborationist (c.f. the IRA, Hamas, LTTE, etc...), but government installations and "security" forces were targeted as well. Amnesty didn't list Mandela as a prisoner of conscience during his incarceration, because of the MK's violence. That surprised me when I learned it.
To me the power of Mandela's story is not as a clone of the Gandhi and MLK stories, but is a somewhat more modern post-colonial story of a resistance fighter who became part of the political process (Sinn Féin produces more examples, though none as dramatic). Castigating current resistance leaders for not being like Mandela is particularly irritating, because (to me) the whole point of the Mandela story is that the way to stop violent resistance is to not lock the resistance out of the political process. That's what eventually took the heat away from MK's fire: that the ANC was allowed into the political process in South Africa. The Sri Lankan government may think it has militarily defeated the LTTE, for instance, but barring a political inclusion I am willing to guarantee the LTTE 2.0 will be active by the end of the decade; the Irish and South African models are, in my opinion, the only workable way forward for Sri Lanka, the Occupied Territories, and a lot of other places.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a brilliant effort which unfortunately has not been mirrored in places that could use it (the US and the civil rights era comes to mind -- it's not too late!). This doesn't get mentioned much in the west, but the majority of amnesty applicants were actually MK and ANC agents and leaders.
Calling Mandela's story a story of non-violence is like calling Malik El-Shabazz's story a story of racial inclusiveness: it's an important part, and if you're a teleologist I suppose it's the "end" in that sense, but it misses how they got there and what made them who they are. There's something, to me, much more powerful about a freedom fighter renouncing violence than a pacifist refusing violence (though both deserve praise).
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