A rare victory for the forces of good over the last two weeks: faced with the refusal of South African cargo unions to unload a shipload of weapons destined for Zimbabwe, the People's Republic of China has (apparently) decided to bring the ship back home. The heroism of the dock workers and their union, the South African Transport Workers Union, is a stirring reminder of the possibilities of nonviolent resistance to evil.

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The governments of Mozambique and Tanzania have apparently also refused to allow the ship entry, at least partly because they believe — as did the dock workers — that the arms (three million rounds of small arms ammunition, 3,500 mortars and mortar tubes and 1,500 rocket propelled grenades) were destined to support the forces of Robert Mugabe, who seems prepared to take by force what he did not win at the ballot box.

As Dayo Olopade noted in The New Republic, effective nonviolence is harder than it looks; at one point “the South African port workers found themselves standing up to three authoritarian forces at once—China, Zimbabwe, and ruling party leader Jacob Zuma, who made haste to set up clearances as though this were typical cargo.” Olopade also notes that Angola may well end up accepting the cargo.

Zimbabwe doesn't have the media clout of the China-supported crisis in Darfur, nor the China-caused violence and oppression in Tibet. But I'm surprised, given all the coverage of the Olympic protests, that this story didn't see more play in the US media — it feels like a perfect fit for narratives about China's position with respect to human rights, trade, and its investment policies in Africa.

I assume most Printculture readers are citizens of the United States, and also that they're not particularly fond of selling weapons to dictators. So let's remember that the US, too, has done plenty of the latter, and that any easy feelings of righteousness have to account for that sad doubling. (Sunday's New York Times, thinking of Mugabe, had a quick and dirty guide on how to get rid of dictators; most of the solutions involved violence or bribery. Not much better than the “regime change” plans of every American's least favorite presidential administration (69 percent disapproval ratings = highest ever!).

So the point here is not that China is selling weapons to murderers; everyone does it. The point is that a group of people, given the choice of abetting that sale, decided instead to refuse it. This seems like good news for the planet, and has me casting about for ways to say no to what I can around here as well.

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