IB History Violent Opposition Notes

Violent opposition: A Comparative Overview

1. This article compares coercive opposition through force-feeding of suffragettes, the Amritsar massacre, the Oka confrontation, and the Battle of the Camel.
2. The British case uses force-feeding of suffragettes to establish how coercive opposition worked inside a parliamentary system.
3. In India, the Amritsar massacre shows how anti-colonial conditions changed the operation of coercive opposition.
4. The Canadian evidence centres on the Oka confrontation and the contested relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state.
5. Egypt’s experience of the Battle of the Camel tests whether rapid mobilisation could overcome durable institutions.
6. Comparison reveals that coercive opposition depended on leadership, organisation, and the state’s capacity to resist.
7. A defensible judgement must explain why force-feeding of suffragettes produced a different result from the Battle of the Camel.

Violent opposition to the British suffragette movement

State Repression as a Response to Militancy

1. The suffragette movement faced severe opposition from the state, law enforcement and anti-suffrage groups.
2. Authorities used force, imprisonment, surveillance and legal repression.
3. While these methods aimed to weaken the movement, they often had the opposite effect.
4. Officers used physical and sexual violence against suffragettes during mass demonstrations such as Black Friday in 1910.
5. Prison authorities force fed hunger striking suffragettes, a practice suffragettes themselves described as torture and as a form of sexual assault.
6. The Cat and Mouse Act of 1913 turned the repeated release and rearrest of hunger strikers into official government policy.
7. Hostile crowds and organised anti suffrage groups attacked suffragette speakers and marchers at open air meetings.

Police violence

1. The “Black Friday” protest of 18 November 1910 is a key example.
   1. Police assaulted and sexually harassed over 300 suffragettes outside parliament.
   2. The deputation followed the collapse of the Conciliation Bill, a proposed law that would have given the vote to a limited number of property owning women.
   3. Herbert Asquith’s government let the bill lapse in November 1910, prompting the WSPU under Emmeline Pankhurst to march roughly 300 women from Caxton Hall toward the House of Commons.
   4. Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary, oversaw the police response that followed and later refused to authorise a public inquiry into police conduct.
   5. The clash between police and suffragettes lasted roughly six hours before the crowd dispersed, and many women reported being groped and having their clothing torn by police and bystanders.
   6. Suffragettes Mary Clarke and Cecilia Haig both died within months of Black Friday, their deaths attributed in part to injuries they suffered.
2. Force-feeding converted imprisonment into a public dispute over bodily autonomy and state responsibility.
   1. The Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act 1913 allowed authorities to release weakened hunger strikers and rearrest them later, reducing deaths in custody while extending coercive surveillance.

Violent opposition to the Indian national movement

1. The Indian national movement faced intense and often violent opposition from the British colonial government.
   1. State repression, police brutality, mass arrests, censorship and political executions were deployed throughout the struggle, from the earliest mass campaigns of 1919 through to the final years before independence in 1947.

The Rowlatt Acts and the Road to Punjab, 1919

1. The Rowlatt Acts, passed in March 1919, extended the emergency powers of the First World War into peacetime, allowing the colonial government to detain suspects without trial and try political cases without a jury.
2. Gandhi called a nationwide hartal, a general strike and shutdown of business, for 6 April 1919 as an act of satyagraha against the Acts.
3. In several cities, including Delhi and Bombay, police opened fire on crowds of protesters even before events in Punjab escalated further.
4. In Amritsar, the arrest and deportation of two popular local leaders, Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew and Dr Satyapal, on 10 April triggered rioting in which a mob killed several Europeans and attacked a bank.
   1. The colonial government treated the unrest as the start of an organised rebellion.

Martial Law in Punjab

1. On 13 April 1919, the colonial government placed Amritsar and much of Punjab under martial law, administered locally by Brigadier General Reginald Dyer under the authority of the Lieutenant Governor, Sir Michael O'Dwyer.
2. Dyer's regime imposed curfews, banned gatherings of more than four people, and introduced the so called “crawling order” on Kucha Kurrichhan, the street where a British missionary had been assaulted, forcing any Indian who wished to pass to crawl on all fours.
   1. Public floggings were carried out at a whipping post for those who defied the order.
   2. Amritsar's electricity and water supplies were cut off as collective punishment, and schools across the city were closed.
3. In Gujranwala, aircraft were used to fire on and drop bombs near crowds on 14 April, killing several people in an early example of aerial force used against civilians.

The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, 13 April 1919

1. On the afternoon of 13 April, the day of the Baisakhi festival, thousands of unarmed men, women and children gathered in the walled garden of Jallianwala Bagh, unaware that a ban on public assembly was now in force.
2. Dyer marched fifty riflemen into the garden's only exit and, without warning the crowd to disperse, ordered continuous firing for about ten minutes.
   1. Official figures recorded 379 dead, while Congress investigators put the toll at over 1,000, with more than 1,200 wounded.
3. The 1920 Hunter Committee inquiry condemned Dyer's actions and he was removed from active command, though he continued to receive support from some quarters in Britain; Winston Churchill formally condemned the massacre in the House of Commons.
4. In 1940, Udham Singh, who had been present at Jallianwala Bagh as a young man, assassinated Michael O'Dwyer in London in revenge for authorising the martial law regime that led to the massacre.

Violent opposition to the Indigenous rights movement in Canada

1. Indigenous peoples in Canada have endured military force, mass displacement, police brutality, forced assimilation and targeted violence over centuries.

Military Suppression and Starvation

1. The Red River Resistance (1869-1870) and the Northwest Resistance (1885) were both met with Canadian military force.
   1. Louis Riel led the Métis resistance in 1885 and was executed for treason later that year, an act that deepened Indigenous and Métis distrust of the Canadian state.
   2. After the Métis defeat, the federal government withheld food rations from Indigenous bands on the prairies to force compliance.
   3. The deliberate destruction of the bison herds by settler hunters removed the primary food source for Plains nations and deepened the starvation crisis.
   4. Indian Commissioner Edgar Dewdney refused to distribute food rations unless bands relocated onto designated reserves, using hunger as a tool of control.

The Indian Act and the RCMP's Role in Enforcement

1. The Cypress Hills Massacre (1873), in which American wolf hunters killed dozens of Assiniboine people in present-day Saskatchewan, was one of the incidents that prompted Canada to form the North-West Mounted Police (NWMP) that same year.
   1. The NWMP became the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in 1920, after merging with the Dominion Police.
2. The Indian Act (1876) gave the federal government near-total legal control over the land, governance and daily movement of registered Indigenous peoples, and the NWMP and RCMP served as its enforcement arm.
   1. From 1885, a pass system required Indigenous people living on reserves to obtain written permission from an Indian agent before they could leave.
   2. NWMP and later RCMP officers enforced the pass system by arresting Indigenous people found off-reserve without a pass, even though the system had no legal basis in the Indian Act itself.
   3. The Indian Act also allowed the state to strip a person's legal status through enfranchisement, a process sometimes applied without consent to remove status from individuals who challenged Indian agents or the reserve system.
3. An amendment to the Indian Act in 1920, pushed by Deputy Superintendent Duncan Campbell Scott, made residential school attendance compulsory for status children aged seven to fifteen.
   1. RCMP officers and government-appointed truant officers were responsible for locating children who did not attend and forcibly removing them from their families.

The Oka Crisis, 1990

1. In March 1990, the town of Oka, Quebec, approved the expansion of a golf course onto land that included a Mohawk burial ground and sacred pine grove at Kanesatake.
2. Mohawk protesters erected a barricade to block construction, and on 11 July 1990 the Sûreté du Québec stormed it; Corporal Marcel Lemay was killed in the exchange of gunfire that followed, though it was never established which side fired the fatal shot.
   1. Mohawk warriors at Kahnawake blockaded the Mercier Bridge into Montreal in solidarity, and the Canadian army eventually deployed roughly 2,500 soldiers, tanks and armoured vehicles to end the standoff.
3. The 78-day crisis ended in September 1990 without the golf course expansion going ahead, and it brought international attention to unresolved Indigenous land claims across Canada.

Violent opposition to the Egyptian Revolution of 2011

1. The Egyptian government responded to the 2011 revolution with extreme violence.
   1. State security forces used police crackdowns, mass arrests, torture and military force, but despite the brutality, resistance grew and forced Mubarak to resign, though violent repression intensified under his successors.

Police crackdowns and the Day of Rage

1. On 25 January 2011, police used tear gas, rubber bullets and batons.
   1. On 28 January, the “Day of Rage”, live ammunition was fired into crowds, killing dozens, and protesters set fire to police stations in defiance.
   2. Historian Jean-Pierre Filiu argues Mubarak's use of police violence mirrored tactics of past Egyptian rulers.

The Battle of the Camel

1. On 2 February 2011, pro-Mubarak forces attacked Tahrir Square using horses, camels, whips, machetes and live ammunition. The military did not intervene.

Mass arrests, torture and internet blackout

1. Thousands were arrested and taken to detention centres where they faced severe beatings, electric shocks and psychological abuse.
   1. The killing of Khaled Saeed in 2010 had already become a symbol of state brutality.
   2. The government imposed a nationwide internet blackout on 27 January 2011, blocking Facebook and Twitter, but activists used landlines, VPNs and face-to-face mobilisation to continue organising.

Post-revolution violence

1. After Mubarak resigned on 11 February, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) continued suppressing protests.
   1. At the Maspero Massacre in October 2011, at least 28 Coptic Christian protesters were killed by armoured vehicles.
   2. The Rabaa Massacre on 14 August 2013 was the most violent suppression: security forces stormed a pro-Morsi protest camp, killing at least 817 people in a single day, which Amnesty International called “one of the worst mass killings of protesters in modern history.”