***** New York Times Magazine 26 November 2000
[The full story is available at
<http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20001126mag-serbia.html>.]
Who Really Brought Down Milosevic?
By the time of the October revolution [!] the most important battle
-- for the hearts and minds of average Serbs -- had already been won
by student activists operating in the countryside.
By ROGER COHEN
...American assistance to Otpor and the 18 parties that ultimately
ousted Milosevic is still a highly sensitive subject. But Paul B.
McCarthy, an official with the Washington-based National Endowment
for Democracy, is ready to divulge some details. McCarthy sits in
Belgrade's central Moskva Hotel, enjoying the satisfaction of being
in a country that had long been off limits to him under Milosevic.
When he and his colleagues first heard of Otpor, he says, "the
Fascistic look of that flag with the fist scared some of us." But
these feelings quickly changed.
For those Americans intent on bringing democracy to Serbia, the
student movement offered several attractions. Its flat organization
would frustrate the regime's attempts to pick a target to hit or
compromise; its commitment to enduring arrests and even police
violence tended to shame the long-squabbling Serbian opposition
parties into uniting; it looked more effective in breaking fear than
any other group; it had a clear agenda of ousting Milosevic and
making Serbia a "normal" European state; and it had the means to sway
parents while getting out the critical vote of young people.
"And so," McCarthy says, "from August 1999 the dollars started to
flow to Otpor pretty significantly." Of the almost $3 million spent
by his group in Serbia since September 1998, he says, "Otpor was
certainly the largest recipient." The money went into Otpor accounts
outside Serbia. At the same time, McCarthy held a series of meetings
with the movement's leaders in Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro,
and in Szeged and Budapest in Hungary. Homen, at 28 one of Otpor's
senior members, was one of McCarthy's interlocutors. "We had a lot of
financial help from Western nongovernmental organizations," Homen
says. "And also some Western governmental organizations."
At a June meeting in Berlin, Homen heard Albright say, "We want to
see Milosevic out of power, out of Serbia and in The Hague," the site
of the international war crimes tribunal. The Otpor leader would also
meet with William D. Montgomery, the former American ambassador to
Croatia, in the American Embassy in Budapest. (Washington had by then
severed diplomatic relations with Belgrade.) "Milosevic was personal
for Madeleine Albright, a very high priority," says Montgomery, who
was yanked out of Croatia in June to head a group of officials
monitoring Serbia. "She wanted him gone, and Otpor was ready to stand
up to the regime with a vigor and in a way that others were not.
Seldom has so much fire, energy, enthusiasm, money -- everything --
gone into anything as into Serbia in the months before Milosevic
went."
Just how much money backed this objective is not clear. The United
States Agency for International Development says that $25 million was
appropriated just this year. Several hundred thousand dollars were
given directly to Otpor for "demonstration-support material, like
T-shirts and stickers," says Donald L. Pressley, the assistant
administrator. Otpor leaders intimate they also received a lot of
covert aid -- a subject on which there is no comment in Washington.
At the International Republican Institute, another nongovernmental
Washington group financed partly by A.I.D., an official named Daniel
Calingaert says he met Otpor leaders "7 to 10 times" in Hungary and
Montenegro, beginning in October 1999. Some of the $1.8 million the
institute spent in Serbia in the last year was "provided direct to
Otpor," he says. By this fall, Otpor was no ramshackle students'
group; it was a well-oiled movement backed by several million dollars
from the United States.
But other American help was as important as money. Calingaert's
organization arranged for a seminar at the luxurious Budapest Hilton
from March 31 to April 3. There a retired United States Army colonel,
Robert Helvey, instructed more than 20 Otpor leaders in techniques of
nonviolent resistance. This session appears to have been significant.
It also suggests a link between the American-influenced opposition
base in Budapest and the events in Vladicin Han.
It was Aca Radic, one of the students tortured in Vladicin Han, who
founded the Otpor branch there. His motives were similar to Davorin
Popovic's. "I just felt, enough of tolerance," he says. "Enough of
patience." So this good-looking young man -- like Davorin, a student
of physical education -- made his way up to Belgrade in December
1999. At the Otpor office there, he was closely questioned and then
given flyers, leaflets, sprays, posters, Otpor T-shirts and $130 and
a cell phone. "I was happy," Radic said, "I felt like a revolutionary
going home to spread the word."
The man who gave him this insurrectionary material was Srdja Popovic.
Lean and trenchant, Srdja calls himself -- half jokingly -- the
"ideological commissar" of Otpor. He combines a Leninist intensity
with the skills of a Washington lobbyist. (His favorite word is
"networking.") It was he who coordinated the training of Otpor's
70,000 members in 130 branches, including the one that opened in
Vladicin Han.
These training methods were heavily influenced by Helvey. Gathered in
a conference room of the Budapest Hilton ("We thought it was stupid
to organize a revolution in a luxury hotel," Srdja says, "but the
Americans chose that place"), the Otpor activists listened as Helvey
dissected what he called the "pillars of support" of the regime.
These naturally included the police, the army and the news media, but
also the more intangible force of Milosevic's "authority." That is,
his capacity to give orders and be obeyed.
Find nonviolent ways to undermine authority, Helvey suggested. Look
at Myanmar. There, the opposition National League for Democracy took
a farmer's hat as its symbol; so everyone started to wear farmer's
hats. The regime tried to make the hats illegal, but such repression
merely provoked outrage.
The same thing would happen in Serbia with Otpor's T-shirts adorned
with the fist symbol. "We focused on breaking Milosevic's authority,
on ways to communicate to dissatisfied people that they are the
majority and that the regime could only dig itself into a deeper hole
through repression," Srdja recalls. "We learned that fear is a
powerful but vulnerable weapon because it disappears far faster than
you can recreate it."
Helvey stressed the sources of momentum in a nonviolent movement.
"There is an enormous price -- domestic and international -- paid
today for using force against a nonviolent movement," he says. "The
battle is asymmetrical. The dictator still may hold the externalities
of power, but he is steadily undermined." This process has been
dubbed "political ju-jitsu" by Gene Sharp, an American writer who is
close to Helvey and who emerged as a sort of guru to Otpor leaders.
His book "From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for
Liberation," became a samizdat passed around Otpor branches in the
last months of Milosevic's rule. In it, Sharp writes, "The stark
brutality of the regime against the clearly nonviolent actionists
politically rebounds against the dictators' position, causing
dissension in their own ranks as well as fomenting support for the
resisters among the general population, the regime's usual supporters
and third parties."
Srdja is often to be found in Belgrade with heavily underlined copies
of Sharp's work, parts of which were translated into Serbian as the
"Otpor User Manual." Not for nothing were Otpor's activities drawn
from Sharp's list of 198 "methods of nonviolent action." In an
interview, Sharp says: "My key principle is not ethical. It has
nothing to do with pacifism. It is based on an analysis of power in a
dictatorship and how to break it by withdrawing the obedience of
citizens and the key institutions of society."
According to Srdja, Otpor simply represents the "ideology of
nonviolent individual resistance." It was developed, he says,
"because we finally understood that nobody from Mars was going to
come and remove Milosevic." Organization was intense. Throughout
Serbia, activists were trained in how to play hide-and-seek with the
police, how to respond to interrogation, how to develop a message in
posters and pamphleteering, how to transfer fear from the population
into the regime itself and how to identify and begin to infiltrate
Helvey's "pillars of support" in the police and elsewhere.
Just how effective that infiltration was became clear to Srdja 12
days before Milosevic's July 27 call for a presidential election.
Otpor received advance word of Milosevic's intentions in secret
e-mailed messages from anonymous dissenters within the regime. As a
result, Otpor already had more than 60 tons of electoral propaganda
ready on July 27. Some of it went to Vladicin Han, where Aca Radic
and his friends went out every night to plaster slogans. When he was
arrested and beaten seven weeks later, Radic had a last message to
communicate to the police: "I was silent as they beat me, determined
not to react, trying to look Stojimenovic in the eye to show him I
was not afraid and convey one thing: You can hit us and beat us, but
our time will come as well."... *****
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