"Color Revolution" Fails in Iran: The Grassroots Takeover Technique (2009)

"Color Revolution" Fails in Iran: The Grassroots Takeover Technique
By Thierry Meyssan
Originally published in Voltairenet.org
June 27, 2009
Images and captions added by Color Revolutions and Geopolitics

"Color revolutions" are to revolutions what Canada Dry is to beer. They look like the real thing, but they lack the flavor. They are regime changes which appear to be revolutions because they mobilize huge segments of the population but are more akin to takeovers, because they do not aim at changing social structures. Instead they aspire to replace an elite with another, in order to carry out pro-American economic and foreign policies. The "green revolution" in Tehran is the latest example of this trend.

Origin of the concept

CIA Chief Stansfield Turner

This concept appeared in the 90s, but its roots lie in the American public debate of the 70s-80s. After a string of revelations about CIA instigated coups around the world, as well as the dramatic disclosures of the Church and Rockefeller Senate Committees [1], admiral Stansfield Turner was given the task by President Carter to clean up the agency and to stop supporting "local dictatorships." Furious, the American Social Democrats (SD/USA) left the Democratic party and sided with Ronald Reagan. They were brilliant Trotskyist intellectuals [2], often linked to Commentary magazine. After Reagan was elected, he charged them with pursuing the American interference policy, this time using different methods. This is how the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was created in 1982 [3] and the United States Institute for Peace (USIP) in 1984. Both of these institutions are organically intertwined: NED administrators sit on the USIP board of directors and vice versa.

Westminster Speech, June 8, 1982: U.S. President Reagan speaks to the British Parliament and outlines his new policy proposal for supporting "democracy" around the world.   The speech sets the stage for the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, the Solidarity Center and the Center for International Private Enterprise.

Legally the NED is a not-for-profit organization under US law, financed by an annual grant voted by Congress as part of the State Department budget. In order to operate, this organization is co-financed by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which is part of the State Department. This legal structure is used jointly as a cover by the American CIA, the British MI6 and the Australian ASIS (and occasionally by Canadian and New Zealand secret services).

The NED presents itself as an agency promoting democracy. It intervenes either directly or using one of its four tentacles: one designed to subvert unions, the second responsible for corrupting management organizations, the third for left-wing parties and the fourth for right-wing parties. It also intervenes through friendly foundations, such as the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (UK), the International Center for Human Rights and Democratic Development (Canada), the Fondation Jean-Jaurès and the Fondation Robert-Schuman (France), the International Liberal Center (Sweden), the Alfred Mozer Foundation (Netherlands), the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, the Friedrich Naunmann Stiftung, the Hans Seidal Stiftung and the Heinrich Boell Stiftung (Germany). The NED thus claims to have corrupted over 6000 organizations throughout the world over roughly 30 years. All of this, of course, under the disguise of training and assistance programs.

As for the USIP, it is an American national institution. It is financed annually by Congress as part of the Defense Department budget. Contrary to the NED which serves as a cover for the three allied states, the USIP is exclusively American. Under the guise of political science research, it can pay salaries to foreign politicians.

Gene Sharp: the Pentagon was impressed

As soon as it commanded resources, the USIP financed a new and discrete structure, the Albert Einstein Institution [4]. This small association for the promotion of nonviolent action was initially charged with designing a form of civil defense for the populations of Western Europe in case of an invasion by the Warsaw Pact. It quickly became autonomous and designed a model following which a state, whatever its nature, can lose its authority and collapse.

First attempts

The first attempted "color revolution" failed in 1989. The goal was to overthrow Deng Xiaoping by using one of his close collaborators, the Chinese Communist Party secretary-general Zhao Ziyang, in order to open Chinese markets to American investors and to bring China into the US orbit. Young supporters of Zhao invaded Tiananmen square [5]. They were presented in the Western media as unpoliticized students fighting for freedom against the party’s Conservative wing, when in fact this was infighting within the Deng entourage between pro-American and nationalist factions. After having ignored provocations for a long time Deng decided to use force. Depending on sources, the repression ended with 300 to 1000 dead. 20 years later, the Western version of this failed coup has not changed. Western media which recently covered the anniversary of that event presented it as a "popular uprising" and expressed surprise that people in Beijing do not remember the event. This is because there was nothing "popular" about this struggle for power within the Party. This was not a concern for people.

The first successful "color revolution" succeeded in 1990. As the Soviet Union was disintegrating, state secretary James Baker went to Bulgaria to participate in the electoral campaign of the pro-American party, heavily financed by the NED [6]. However, despite pressure from the UK, the Bulgarians – afraid of the social consequences induced by the transformation from Soviet Union to market economy – made the unforgivable mistake to elect in Parliament a post-communist majority. While European community observers testified to the legality of the voting process, the pro-American opposition screamed that electoral fraud had occurred and took to the streets. They set up camp in the center of Sofia and threw the country into chaos for the following six months, until pro-American Zhelyu Zhelev was elected president by the parliament.

June 1990: street demonstrations in Sofia, Bulgaria

"Democracy": selling your country to foreign interests behind the people’s back

Since then, Washington has kept instigating regime changes everywhere in the world, using street unrest rather than military juntas.  It is important here to understand what is at stake. Behind the soothing rhetoric of "the promotion of democracy," Washington’s actions aim to impose regimes that are opening their markets to the US without conditions and which are aligning themselves to their foreign policy. However, while these goals are known by the leaders of the "color revolutions," they are never discussed and accepted by the mobilized demonstrators. In the event when these takeovers succeed, citizens soon rebel against the new policies imposed on them, even if it is too late to turn back. Besides, how can opposition groups who sold their country to foreign interests behind their populations’ backs be considered "democratic"?

In 2005, the Kyrgyz opposition contested the legislative elections and brought to Bishkek demonstrators from the south of the country. They toppled President Askar Akayev. This was the "Tulip Revolution." The national assembly elected Kurmanbek Bakiyev as president. Unable to control his supporters who were looting the capital, he announced having chased the dictator and pretended that he intended to create a national union government. He pulled General Felix Kulov (former Bishkek Mayor) out of prison and named him prime minister. After the situation was back under control, Bakiyev got rid of Kulov and sold the country’s few resources to US companies with no invitation to tender but with significant backhanders. He set up a US military base in Manas. The population’s standard of living had never been lower. Felix Kulov offered to get the country back on its feet by federating it to Russia as it used to be. He was quickly sent back to jail.

Realpolitik in Central Asia: the 2001 opening of a U.S. military base in Manas, Kyrgyzstan has placed American military hardware on the doorstep of both Russia and China

A blessing in disguise?

It is sometimes objected that for states which were subjected to repressive regimes, even if these "color revolutions" only bring the appearance of democracy, they nonetheless constitute an improvement for their populations. Experience shows however that this is far from certain. The new regimes can turn out to be far more repressive than the old ones.

Looks like revolution to me

In 2003, Washington, London and Paris [7] organized the "Rose Revolution" in Georgia [8]. According to a classic scheme, the opposition blew the whistle about electoral fraud during legislative elections and took to the streets. The demonstrators forced president Eduard Shevardnadze to flee and they seized power. His successor, Mikheil Saakashvili, opened the country to US economic interests and broke off from his Russian neighbor. The economic aid that Washington promised to replace Russian aid never came. The already weakened economy collapsed. In order to continue to please his backers, Saakashvili needed to impose a dictatorship [9]. He shut down the media and filled up the prisons, which did not prevent Western media from continuing to describe him as a "democrat." Continuing on his collision course, Saakashvili decided to bolster his popularity by engaging in a military adventure. With the help of the Bush administration and of Israel to which he rented air bases, he ordered the bombing of the population of South Ossetia, killing 1600 people, most of whom also held Russian citizenship. Moscow stroke back. American and Israeli advisers fled [10]. Georgia was left devastated.

Enough!

The main mechanism of the "color revolutions" consists in focusing popular anger on the desired target. This is an aspect of the psychology of the masses which destroys everything in its path and against which no reasonable argument can be opposed. The scapegoat is accused of all the evils plaguing the country for at least one generation. The more he resists, the angrier the mob gets. After he gives in or slips away, the normal division between his opponents and his supporters reappears.

Egypt's Hosni Mubarak: the scapegoat 'unifier' of the Egyptian opposition.  Since at least 2004, the Washington-based International Monetary Fund (IMF) used the Egyptian government as an instrument to intensify attacks upon the living standard of regular Egyptians.  At the same time, the United States government funded and trained Egyptian opposition leaders in pursuit of a "democratic revolution."  There is absolutely no contradiction here.  Austere economic policy always intensifies social unrest; and social unrest normally requires an enemy to blame.  The U.S. regime change infrastructure works to ensure that replaceable leaders always play that role, thereby diverting attention from the real menace--international financial hegemony and the austere policies that continue unabated.

Selling the "Cedar Revolution"

In 2005, in the hours following the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri, a rumor spread in Lebanon according to which he was killed by "the Syrians." The Syrian army, which had been maintaining order since the end of the civil war according to the Taëf agreement, was now booed. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was personally accused by the US authorities, which was as good as proof for the public opinion. To those who noted that Rafik Hariri, despite stormy episodes, had always been useful to Syria and that’s his death deprived Damas of a central collaborator, it was answered that the "Syrian regime" is so fundamentally evil that it cannot help but killing even its friends. The Lebanese people were calling for the G.I.s to come and get rid of the Syrians. But to everyone’s surprise, Bashar al-Assad, considering that the costly deployment of his army was not welcome in Lebanon any longer, decided to pull it back. Legislative elections were organized in which the "anti-Syrian" coalition triumphed. This was the "Cedar Revolution."  After the situation calmed down everyone realized that even if Syrian generals had looted the country in the past, the departure of the Syrian army did not change anything to the country’s economic situation. Furthermore, the country was now in danger: it was not able to defend itself from the expansionism of the Israeli neighbor. The main "anti-Syrian" leader, general Michel Aoun, thought better of it and joined the opposition. Furious, Washington multiplied assassination plans to get rid of him. Michel Aoun formed an alliance with Hezbollah on a patriotic platform. It was about time: Israel attacked.

In every case, Washington prepared the "democratic" government in advance, which confirms that these are takeovers in disguise. The names composing the new team are kept secret for as long as possible. This is why the pointing out of the scapegoat is always done without suggesting a political alternative.

Serbia, 2000

In Serbia, young pro-US "revolutionaries" chose a logo that belonged to the Communist popular imagination (the raised fist) to hide their subordination to the United States. They used "he is done!" as a slogan, which federated the anger against the personality of Slobodan Milosevic, who was held responsible for the bombing of the country even though it was done by NATO. This model was replicated numerous times, for example by the Pora! group in Ukraine, or by Zubr in Bielorussia.

The deceiving appearance of nonviolence

The PR staff members of the State Department maintain the non-violent image of the "color revolutions." They all put forward the theories of Gene Sharp, who founded the Albert Einstein Institution. Yet nonviolence is a combat method used to persuade authorities to a political change. In order for a minority to seize power and to exercise it, it must always use violence at some point. All "color revolutions" did.

Popovic, Sharp, Helvey

Srdja Popovic, Serbian leader of the Otpor movement, Gene Sharp, founder of the Albert Einstein Institution, and his assistant colonel Robert Helvey, most senior member of the training academy for embassy military attachés. In 2000, Slobodan Milosevic called for anticipated elections despite still having a year to run as president. After the first round, neither he nor his principal opponent, Vojislav Koštunica, had secured a majority of the votes. Without waiting for the second round, the opposition claimed voting fraud and took to the streets. Thousands of demonstrators walked on the capital, including the miners from Kolubara. Their daily salaries were paid indirectly by the NED, without them realizing that they were paid by the United States. The pressure from the demonstration was insufficient so the miners started attacking buildings with bulldozers that they had brought, hence the name "bulldozer revolution."

Belgrade, Serbia, October 5, 2000

In cases when the tension is just dragging on, and when counter-demonstrations are being organized, the only solution for Washington is to throw the country into chaos. Inciting agents are then placed in both camps to fire on the crowd. Each party can then observe that the others are shooting while they are peacefully advancing. The confrontation spreads.

In 2002, Caracas’ upper-class took to the streets to protest the social policies of President Hugo Chavez [11]. Using clever manipulation, private TV stations created the impression of a human tidal wave. There were 50,000 people according to observers and 1 million according to the press and the State Department. Then there was the Llaguno Bridge incident. TV stations clearly showed armed pro-Chavez supporters firing on the crowd. In a press conference, the National Guard general and vice minister of domestic security confirmed that the "Chavez militias" fired and killed 19 people. He resigned and called for the dictator to be overthrown. The president was quickly arrested by military rebels. However millions of people descended in the capital’s streets and constitutional order was restored.

A subsequent journalistic investigation went over the details of the massacre of the Llaguno Bridge. It brought to light a deceptive picture manipulation, where chronological order was modified as proved by the protagonists’ watch dials. In reality, the pro-Chavez supporters were under attack and after having fallen back, they were trying to escape by using their weapons. The inciting agents were local policemen trained by a US agency [12].

Obama & Odinga

In 2006, the NED reorganized the opposition to Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki. It funded the creation of the Orange party of Raila Odinga. He received the support of Senator Barack Obama, who was accompanied by destabilization experts (Mark Lippert, current chief of staff for the national security adviser, and general Jonathan S. Gration, current US special envoy to Sudan). During a meeting with Odinga, the Illinois Senator invented a vague family relationship with the pro-US candidate. However Odinga was defeated during the 2007 legislative elections. Supported by Senator John McCain as president of the IRI (the NED’s Republican pseudopod), he disputed the validity of the vote and called for his supporters to take to the streets. This is when anonymous text messages were sent en masse to ethnic Luo voters.  "Dear Kenyans, the Kikuyu have stolen the future of our children… we must treat them in the only way that they understand… with violence." The country, despite being one of the most stable in Africa, suddenly erupted in violence.

Kenya, 2007: a nation obviously consumed by a passion for democracy

After days of rioting, president Kibaki was forced to accept the mediation of Madeleine Albright as president of the NDI (the NED’s Democrat pseudopod). A prime minister position was created and offered to Odinga. Since the hate text messages had not been sent from the Kenyan installations, one can wonder which foreign power was behind them.

Mobilizing the international public opinion

During the last few years, Washington had the opportunity to instigate "color revolutions" with the understanding that they would fail to seize power but that they would help manipulate public opinion and international institutions.

In 2007, many Burmese were up in arms because of the domestic fuel price increase. Demonstrations spread as Buddhist monks took a leading role in the protest. This was the "Saffron Revolution" [13]. Washington could not care less about the Rangoon regime; however they were interested in orchestrating the people of Burma in order to exercise pressure on China which holds strategic interests in Burma (pipelines and military bases for electronic intelligence gathering). It was therefore crucial to distort people’s perception of reality. Pictures and films shot on mobile phones started to appear on YouTube. They were anonymous, impossible to verify and without context. It was precisely their lack of reliability that gave them authority, and allowed the White House to fit them with their interpretation of the situation.

Burma, 2007

More recently, a 2008 student demonstration brought Greece to a grinding halt following the murder of a 15 year old young man by a policeman. Hoodlums were soon seen rioting. They had been recruited in neighboring Kosovo and brought in by bus. The city centers were devastated. Washington was trying to scare foreign investors away in order to secure a monopoly on the investments in the gas terminals that were being built. The weak Karamanlis government was portrayed as being iron fisted. Facebook and Twitter were used to mobilize the Greek Diaspora. Demonstrations spread to Istanbul, Nicosia, Dublin, London, Amsterdam, The Hague, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Paris, Rome, Madrid, Barcelona, etc.

The Green Revolution

The operation conducted in 2009 in Iran belongs to the long list of pseudo revolutions. First, a 400 million dollar budget was voted in 2007 by Congress to orchestrate a "regime change" in Iran. This was in addition to the ad hoc budgets of the NED, the USAID, the CIA & Co. How this money is being used is unclear, but the three main recipients are the following: the Rafsanjani family, the Pahlavi family and the People’s Mujahedin of Iran.

The Bush Administration decided to instigate a "color revolution" in Iran after confirming a decision by the Joint Chiefs of Staff not to conduct a military attack of that country. This choice was then approved by the Obama Administration. The plans for a "color revolution" which had been drawn up by the American Enterprise Institute in 2002 with Israel were then reopened. I had published an article at that time regarding this plan [14]. In it, one can identify the current protagonists: that plan has not changed much since then. A Lebanese chapter was added which predicted an uprising in Beirut in case of a victory of the patriotic coalition (Hezbollah, Aoun), but it was later cancelled.

The script included huge support for the candidate chosen by Ayatollah Rafsanjani, the disputing of the presidential election results, widespread bombings, the toppling of president Ahmadinejad and of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, setting up a transition government headed by Mousavi, restoring the Monarchy and creating a government headed by Sohrab Sobhani.

Tehran, Iran, 2009: young demonstrator holds up a poster of Mir Hossein Mousavi, the pre-packaged "revolutionary" leader of Iran

According to the 2002 plans, the operation was overseen by Morris Amitay and Michael Ledeen. It mobilized in Iran the Irangate network. Here is a necessary quick historical background: the Irangate (Iran–Contra affair) was an illegal arms deal. The White House wished to supply weapons to the rebels in Nicaragua (to fight against Sandinistas) and to Iranians (in order to drag the Iran-Iraq war for as long as possible), but was prevented from doing so by Congress. Israelis then offered to act as subcontractors for both operations. Ledeen, who has both US and Israeli citizenships, served as a link in Washington, while Mahmoud Rafsanjani (the brother of the Ayatollah) was his counterpart in Tehran. This took place over a background of widespread corruption. When the scandal broke out in the United States, an independent inquiry committee was headed by Senator Tower and General Brent Scowcroft (Robert Gates’ mentor) to investigate.

Michael Ledeen

Michael Ledeen is an old fox involved in many secret operations. He could be found in Rome during the assassination of Aldo Moro. He also appears to have been linked to the fake Bulgarian connection after the assassination attempt on John Paul II, or more recently to the fake claims of Nigerian uranium supply to Saddam Hussein. He currently works for the American Enterprise Institute [15] (with Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz) and for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies [16].

Morris Amitay

Morris Amitay is a former director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). He is today the vice president of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the director of a consulting company for the weapon industry.

On April 27, Morris and Ledeen held a seminar on Iran with Senator Joseph Lieberman at the American Enterprise Institute, regarding the Iranian elections. On May 15, a new seminar was held. The public part of the event consisted of a round table discussion headed by Senator John Bolton about the "haggling" over Iran: would Moscow agree to end its support of Tehran in exchange for Washington renouncing its missile shield project in Central Europe? French expert Bernard Hourcade took part in the debates. At the same time, the Institute launched a website, intended for the press, about the coming crisis: IranTracker.org. The website includes a section on the Lebanese elections.

Hashemi Rafsanjani

In Iran, the responsibility for overthrowing old rival Ayatollah Khamenei rested on Ayatollah Rafsanjani. Born in a family of farmers, Hashemi Rafsanjani built his fortune on real estate speculation during the time of the Shah. He became the main pistachio dealer in Iran, and increased his wealth during the Irangate. His assets are estimated to several billion dollars. After he became the wealthiest man in Iran, he became successively president of the parliament, president of the Republic, and now chairman of the Assembly of Experts (an arbitration body for the parliament and the Guardian Council of the Constitution). He defends the interests of Tehran’s merchant class. During the electoral campaign, Rafsanjani required Mir-Hossein Mousavi, his former adversary who became his protégé, to promise he would privatize the oil sector.

With no connection to Rafsanjani, the People’s Mujahedin of Iran have been used by Washington [17]. This organization, protected by the Pentagon, is considered a terrorist organization by the State Department and has been considered as such by the European Union. Indeed, it is responsible for dreadful operations in the 80s, including a huge bombing which killed Ayatollah Beheshti, four department heads, six department head assistants and one fourth of the parliamentary group of the Islamic Republic party. The People’s Mujahedin of Iran is headed by Massoud Rajavi, who first married the daughter of former President Abol-hassan Banisadr and then the cruel Maryam. Its headquarters are located outside of Paris and its military bases in Iraq, first under the orders of Saddam Hussein, are now under the Defense Department. The People’s Mujahedin provided the logistics for the bombing attacks which took place during the electoral campaign [18]. They were responsible for instigating clashes – which they probably did – between Pro Ahmadinejad supporters and their opponents.

Should chaos have followed, the Supreme Leader could have been overthrown. A transition government, headed by Mir-Hossein Mousavi, would have privatized the oil sector and brought back the Monarchy. The son of the former Shah, Reza Cyrus Pahlavi, would have ascended to the throne and would have nominated Sohrab Sobhani as prime minister. With this in mind, Reza Pahlavi published in February a number of interviews with French journalist Michel Taubmann, the director of Arte’s information office in Paris, and who presides the Cercle de l’Observatoire, the club for French neo conservatives. It is useful to remember that Washington had made similar plans for the restoration of the Monarchy in Afghanistan. Mohammed Zahir Shah was supposed to ascend to the throne again and Hamid Karzai would have become prime minister. Unfortunately, at age 88, the pretender had become senile. Karzai thus became president. Both Sobhani and Karzai hold United States citizenships. Both were involved in the Caspian sea’s oil sector.

As far as propaganda was concerned, the initial plan had been given to Benador Associates, a public relations firm. But it evolved with the influence of Goli Ameri, the United States Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs. This American Iranian woman is John Bolton’s former colleague. As a new media specialist, she implemented infrastructure and Internet training programs for Rafsanjani’s friends. She also developed radio and television programs in Farsi for the State Department propaganda, in conjunction with the BBC.

Iran’s destabilization failed because the main drive behind the "color revolutions" was not appropriately initiated. Mir-Hossein Mousavi did not manage to make Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the focus of popular anger. The Iranian people did not fall into the trap; they did not hold the outgoing president responsible for the United States’ economic sanctions against the country. Therefore the protests were limited to the northern suburbs of Tehran. The authorities refrained from creating counter demonstrations, and let the plotters expose themselves.

However, it must be noted that the propaganda was successful with the Western media. International public opinions really believed that two million Iranians took to the streets, when the real figure was ten times lower. The fact that foreign correspondents were under house arrest facilitated these exaggerations because they were exempt from having to provide evidence for their allegations.

Having given up war, and having failed at overthrowing the regime, what is Barack Obama’s remaining option?


Footnotes:

[1] The numerous reports and documents published by these committees are available online on the following website: The Assassination Archives and Research Center.

[2] "New York Intellectuals and the invention of neo-conservatism", Denis Boneau, Voltaire Network, November 26 2004.

[3] "The NED, the networks of democratic interference", Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, January 22 2004.

[4] "The Albert Einstein Institution: non-violence according to the CIA", Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, January 4 2005.

[5] "Tiananmen, 20 ans après", professor Domenico Losurdo, Réseau Voltaire, June 9 2009.

[6] At the time, the NED was relying in Eastern Europe on the Free Congress Foundation (FCF), operated by Republicans. Later on, this organization disappeared and was replaced by the Soros Foundation, operated by Democrats, with the assistance of which the NED would plot new « regime changes ».

[7] Concerned with smoothing out relations between France and the US, French president Jacques Chirac tried to establish better relations with the Bush Administration on Georgia’s back, all the more because of French economic interests in Georgia. Salomé Zourabichvili, number 2 in the French secret services, was nominated as ambassador in Tbilisi. She then switched nationalities and became the Foreign Secretary for the « Rose Revolution ».

[8] "The Secrets of the Georgian Coup", Paul Labarique, Voltaire Network, January 7 2004.

[9] "Géorgie : Saakachvili jette son opposition en prison" (Georgia: Saakachvili jails the opposition) et "Manifestations à Tbilissi contre la dictature des roses" (Protests in Tbilisi against the dictatorship of the roses), Réseau Voltaire, September 12 2006 and September 30 2007.

[10] The Bush Administration was hoping that this conflict would act as a smoke screen. Israeli bombers were supposed to take off simultaneously to strike neighboring Iran. But even before attacking Georgian military installations, Russia bombed the airports that had been rented out to Israel, pinning its planes to the ground.

[11] "Opération manquée au Venezuela" (Failed operation in Venezuela), Thierry Meyssan, Réseau Voltaire, May 18 2002.

[12] Llaguno Bridge. Keys to a Massacre. Documentary by Angel Palacios, Panafilms 2005.

[13] "Birmanie : la sollicitude intéressée des États-Unis" (Burma: United States’ selfish concern), Thierry Meyssan, Réseau Voltaire, November 5 2007.

[14] "False reasons to intervene in Iran", Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, February 12 2004.

[15] "The American Enterprise Institute in the White House", Voltaire Network, June 21 2004.

[16] "Les trucages de la Foundation for the Defense of Democracies" (The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies’ tricks), Réseau Voltaire, February 2 2005.

[17] "Les Moudjahidin perdus" (The lost Mujahedin), Paul Labarique, Réseau Voltaire, February 17 2004.

[18] "Le Jundallah revendique des actions armées aux côtés des Moudjahidines du Peuple" (The Jundallah claims responsibility for actions with the People’s Mujahedin), Réseau Voltaire, June 13 2009.

Revolution U: What Egypt Learned From the Students Who Overthrew Milosevic

Srdja Popovic as foreign policy's "Coca Cola Kid": the company pays ME to expand the market.  Why am I in your town?  Because I love Coca Cola?  

Revolution U: What Egypt Learned From the Students Who Overthrew Milosevic

By Tina Rosenberg

Foreign Policy Magazine

February 16, 2011

Images and captions added by Color Revolutions and Geopolitics 

Early in 2008, workers at a government-owned textile factory in the Egyptian mill town of El-Mahalla el-Kubra announced that they were going on strike on the first Sunday in April to protest high food prices and low wages. They caught the attention of a group of tech-savvy young people an hour's drive to the south in the capital city of Cairo, who started a Facebook group to organize protests and strikes on April 6 throughout Egypt in solidarity with the mill workers. To their shock, the page quickly acquired some 70,000 followers.

But what worked so smoothly online proved much more difficult on the street. Police occupied the factory in Mahalla and headed off the strike. The demonstrations there turned violent: Protesters set fire to buildings, and police started shooting, killing at least two people. The solidarity protests around Egypt, meanwhile, fizzled out, in most places blocked by police. The Facebook organizers had never agreed on tactics, whether Egyptians should stay home or fill the streets in protest. People knew they wanted to do something. But no one had a clear idea of what that something was.

The botched April 6 protests, the leaders realized in their aftermath, had been an object lesson in the limits of social networking as a tool of democratic revolution. Facebook could bring together tens of thousands of sympathizers online, but it couldn't organize them once they logged off. It was a useful communication tool to call people to -- well, to what? The April 6 leaders did not know the answer to this question. So they decided to learn from others who did. In the summer of 2009, Mohamed Adel, a 20-year-old blogger and April 6 activist, went to Belgrade, Serbia.

Mohamed Adel

The Serbian capital is home to the Center for Applied NonViolent Action and Strategies, or CANVAS, an organization run by young Serbs who had cut their teeth in the late 1990s student uprising against Slobodan Milosevic. After ousting him, they embarked on the ambitious project of figuring out how to translate their success to other countries. To the world's autocrats, they are sworn enemies -- both Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and Belarus's Aleksandr Lukashenko have condemned them by name. ("They think we are bringing a revolution in our suitcase," one of CANVAS's leaders told me.) But to a young generation of democracy activists from Harare to Rangoon to Minsk to Tehran, the young Serbs are heroes. They have worked with democracy advocates from more than 50 countries. They have advised groups of young people on how to take on some of the worst governments in the world -- and in Georgia, Ukraine, Syria-occupied Lebanon, the Maldives, and now Egypt, those young people won.

In Belgrade, Adel took a week-long course in the strategies of nonviolent revolution. He learned how to organize people -- not on a computer, but in the streets. And most importantly, he learned how to train others. He went back to Egypt and began to teach. The April 6 Youth Movement, along with a similar group called Kefaya, became the most important organizers of the 18-day peaceful uprising that culminated in President Hosni Mubarak's departure on Feb. 11. "The April 6 Movement and Kefaya are the groups that have led the charge in actually getting protesters organized and onto the streets," a Feb. 3 report from the geopolitical analysis group Stratfor said. The tactics were straight out of CANVAS's training curriculum. "I got trained in how to conduct peaceful demonstrations, how to avoid violence, and how to face violence from the security forces … and also how to organize to get people on the streets," Adel said of his experience with the Serbs, in an interview with Al Jazeera English on Feb. 9. "We were quite amazed they did so much with so little," Srdja Popovic, one of CANVAS's leaders, told me.

As nonviolent revolutions have swept long-ruling regimes from power in Tunisia and Egypt and threaten the rulers of nearby Algeria, Bahrain, and Yemen, the world's attention has been drawn to the causes -- generations of repressive rule -- and tools -- social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter -- animating the wave of revolt. But as the members of the April 6 movement learned, these elements alone do not a revolution make. What does? In the past, the discontented availed themselves of the sweeping forces of geopolitics: the fall of regimes in Latin America and the former Soviet bloc was largely a product of the withdrawal of superpower support for dictatorships and the consolidation of liberal democracy as a global ideal. But the global clash of ideologies is over, and plenty of dictators remain -- so what do we do?

The answer, for democratic activists in an ever-growing list of countries, is to turn to CANVAS. Better than other democracy groups, CANVAS has built a durable blueprint for  nonviolent revolution: what to do to grow from a vanload of people into a mass movement and then use those masses to topple a dictator. CANVAS has figured out how to turn a cynical, passive, and fearful public into activists. It stresses unity, discipline, and planning -- tactics that are basic to any military campaign, but are usually ignored by nonviolent revolutionaries. There will be many moments during a dictatorship that galvanize public anger: a hike in the price of oil, the assassination of an opposition leader, corrupt indifference to a natural disaster, or simply the confiscation by the police of a produce cart. In most cases, anger is not enough -- it simply flares out. Only a prepared opponent will be able to use such moments to bring down a government.

Ivan Marovic talking "revolution" in Mexico City, 2011

"Revolutions are often seen as spontaneous," Ivan Marovic, a former CANVAS trainer, told me in Washington a few years ago. "It looks like people just went into the street. But it's the result of months or years of preparation. It is very boring until you reach a certain point, where you can organize mass demonstrations or strikes. If it is carefully planned, by the time they start, everything is over in a matter of weeks."

CANVAS is hardly the first organization to teach people living under dictatorship the skills they can use to overthrow it; the U.S. government and its allies have funded democracy-promotion organizations around the world since the early years of the Cold War. Living under two dictatorships -- Chile under Augusto Pinochet and Nicaragua under the Sandinistas -- and visiting perhaps a dozen others, I had seen armies of them at work and served as an election monitor myself. But I had never seen anything like CANVAS.

Traditional democracy-promotion groups like to collaborate with well-credentialed opposition parties and civil society groups; CANVAS prefers to work with rookies. The theory is that established parties and organizations under a dictator are usually too tired and tainted to be able to topple him, and that hope rests instead with idealistic outsiders, often students. The Serbs are not the usual highly paid consultants in suits from wealthy countries; they look more like, well, cocky students. They bring a cowboy swagger. They radiate success. Everyone they teach wants to do what the Serbs did.

Srdja Popovic

If CANVAS has torn up the old democracy-promotion playbook, it's because the group's leaders have drawn up a new one, taken from their own firsthand experience. The group traces its roots to an October 1998 meeting in a cafe in Belgrade, where Popovic, a tall, sharp-featured man, then 25 and a student of marine biology at Belgrade University, had called several of his fellow students together. At the time, Milosevic had been in office for nine years and was firmly entrenched in power. He had started and lost three wars and was in the process of launching a fourth, in Kosovo. Popovic and his friends had been active in student protests for years. They had marched for 100 days in a row, but their efforts had yielded next to nothing. "It was a meeting of desperate friends," Popovic says. "We were at the bottom of a depression."

The students christened themselves Otpor! -- "Resistance!" in Serbian -- and began rethinking revolution. The first and most daunting obstacle was the attitude of their countrymen. Surveys taken by the opposition showed that most Serbs wanted Milosevic to go. But they believed his ouster was simply impossible, or at least too dangerous to try. And Serbia's extant political opposition was hardly inspiring: Even the anti-Milosevic parties were largely vehicles for their leaders' personal ambitions.

But Otpor's founders realized that young people would participate in politics -- if it made them feel heroic and cool, part of something big. It was postmodern revolution. "Our product is a lifestyle," Marovic explained to me. "The movement isn't about the issues. It's about my identity. We're trying to make politics sexy." Traditional politicians saw their job as making speeches and their followers' job as listening to them; Otpor chose to have collective leadership, and no speeches at all. And if the organization took inspiration from Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., it also took cues from Coca-Cola, with its simple, powerful message and strong brand. Otpor's own logo was a stylized clenched fist -- an ironic, mocking expropriation of the symbol of the Serb Partisans in World War II, and of communist movements everywhere.

Otpor steered clear of the traditional opposition tactics of marches and rallies -- partly out of necessity, because the group didn't have enough people to pull them off. Instead of political parties' gravity and bombast, Otpor adopted the sensibility of a TV show its leaders had grown up watching: Monty Python's Flying Circus. Its daily work consisted of street theater and pranks that made the government look silly and won coverage from opposition media. Wit was perhaps not always achieved, but it was always the aim.

The most famous stunt involved an oil barrel painted with Milosevic's picture. Otpor rolled it down a busy street, asking people to insert a coin in a slot for the privilege of whacking Milosevic with a bat. This was Otpor's favorite kind of prank, a dilemma action: It left the regime damned either way. If the government had let the barrel roll, it would have looked weak. But when the police stepped in, the optics were no better: The Otpor members fled, and the opposition TV the next day showed pictures of the police "arresting" a barrel and loading it into the police van. The country sniggered at these pranks -- and signed up for Otpor.

Rather than trying to avoid arrests, Otpor decided to provoke them and use them to the movement's advantage. After a few months it became evident that while police would rough up Otpor members, torture was rare and few of them would even be kept overnight. When any Otpor member was arrested, the organization sent a noisy crowd to hang out on the street outside the police station. Detainees would emerge from the police station to find a pack of opposition journalists and a cheering crowd of friends. Young men competed to rack up the most arrests. If wearing Otpor's signature fist-emblazoned black T-shirt made you an insider in the revolution, getting arrested made you a rock star. People who once thought of themselves as victims learned to think of themselves as heroes.

Two years after its founding, Otpor's 11 members had become more than 70,000. "The signal thing they did that should never be lost is that they made it OK for Serbs to say publicly that the regime was not invincible, that many Serbs shared a sense that change could come," said James O'Brien, the Clinton administration's special envoy to the Balkans. By the time Milosevic ran for reelection as president of Yugoslavia in September 2000, Otpor's prolonged protest campaign -- and Milosevic's attempts to suppress it -- had eroded the president's popularity and emboldened and helped to unify the opposition. When Milosevic refused to concede defeat to opposition candidate Vojislav Kostunica, Otpor's example of disciplined nonviolence, along with its masses of activists, were crucial in convincing Serbia's security forces to defy Milosevic's orders to shoot at the protesters. On Oct. 7, the embattled president resigned.

The unthinkable had happened. For the young Serbs, the next step was figuring out how to export it.

Slobodan Djinovic

Within a few months of Milosevic's ouster, Otpor's leaders began to get calls from democracy activists in other countries eager to copy the movement's success. Slobodan Djinovic, one of Otpor's original organizers, began traveling to Belarus, meeting clandestinely with a student movement there. It was soon infiltrated, however, and eventually collapsed.

Djinovic had more success in Georgia, where a group of young people had founded a movement called Kmara! ("Enough!"). In 2002, Djinovic and other Otpor leaders began visiting, and hosting Kmara students in Serbia. After Eduard Shevardnadze, the former Soviet functionary who had served as Georgia's president since 1995, stole the country's November 2003 elections, a movement led by Kmara forced him out in what became known as the Rose Revolution. It was followed by the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, where former Otpor activists spent months advising the Pora ("It's Time") youth movement.

On a trip to South Africa to train Zimbabweans in 2003, Djinovic and Popovic decided to establish CANVAS. At the time, Popovic was a member of parliament, but he stepped down in 2004, preferring a career as an organizer and a revolutionary. Djinovic had founded Serbia's first wireless Internet service provider in 2000 and was well on his way to becoming a mogul. Today he is head of Serbia's largest private internet and phone company and funds about half of CANVAS's operating expenses and the costs for half the training workshops out of his own pocket. (CANVAS has four and a half staff employees. The trainers are veterans of successful democracy movements in five countries and are paid as contractors. CANVAS participates in some workshops financed by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the United Nations Development Program, an international NGO called Humanity in Action, and Freedom House, an American group which gets its money from the U.S. government. But CANVAS prefers to give Washington a wide berth, in part due to Otpor's experience. Like the entire opposition to Milosevic, Otpor took money from the U.S. government, and lied about it. When the real story came out after Milosevic fell, many Otpor members quit, feeling betrayed.)

Most of CANVAS's work is with democracy activists from the middlingly repressive countries that make up the majority of the world's dictatorships. All its successes have been; the Serbs have helped overthrow the low-hanging fruit of autocracy. Whatever one might say about Shevardnadze's Georgia, it wasn't North Korea. So last year I decided to watch Popovic and Djinovic work with activists from a country that would put their ideas to the severest test yet: Burma.

 

In 1962, a military coup led by Gen. Ne Win put an end to the democratic government that had ruled Burma since its independence 14 years earlier. In the intervening half-century there have only been a few brief moments when it was reasonable for the Burmese to hope for something better. Anti-government demonstrations erupted for months in 1988, but ended after soldiers killed thousands of protesters. Two years later, Burma held the first free elections since the coup. But when Aung San Suu Kyi's party, the National League for Democracy, won an overwhelming victory, the regime nullified the results.

Mass protest did not return until September 2007, when the government removed oil subsidies without warning and the price of some fuels rose by 500 percent. Buddhist monks protested the price hikes, only to be beaten by security forces. A monk in Rangoon named Ashin Kovida, a small, soft-spoken man of 24, was outraged. He sold his robes and used the money to make and photocopy a leaflet inviting the monks in Rangoon's monasteries to march. On Sept. 19, about 400 monks did, joined by students in what became known -- after one of the colors of the monks' robes -- as the Saffron Revolution.

Kovida poses with other "nonviolent" democracy activists

Kovida, who now lives in exile in California, told me he was inspired by Bringing Down a Dictator, a documentary about the fall of Milosevic that had been subtitled in Burmese and circulated clandestinely in the country. He thought the government would not dare to shoot monks. He was wrong. Dozens of people were killed, and thousands of monks and nuns were arrested; some of them were handed sentences of more than 60 years. Burma's opposition fell silent again; elections were held in November, 2010, but brought the country only token change.

There are still Burmese, however, willing to take risks for real democracy. Last year, 14 of them, most of them very young, gathered in a hotel conference room outside of Burma for a CANVAS workshop. They had been brought together by a veteran opposition activist who asked to be identified only by his nickname, K2. (The presence of a reporter and photographer was carefully negotiated to protect the participants' safety: I could not identify the Burmese or mention the date or location of the workshop.)

This was new ground for the Serbs -- CANVAS had worked with Burmese exiles, but these were people who lived inside the country. The Serbs worried about the fact that the students did not know each other. Mistrust could be fatal. Popovic once taught a group that included both opposition party youth and nongovernmental groups from Zimbabwe. They were all against the dictator, Robert Mugabe -- but they also hated each other. "Endless war," was how he characterized it. In a country like Burma, people feared those they did not know. The Serbs thought that this could be trouble.

And of course, Burma was not Ukraine. The less developed the democracy movement, the longer it takes for the gears to start turning. The countries whose activists had caught on the quickest, the Serbs said, were Georgia and Vietnam. The Burmese were more likely to respond like others from totalitarian countries had. "Belarus," said Djinovic, shaking his head. "They were extremely tough to motivate -- extremely passive. I couldn't find the spark in their eyes." And then there were the North Koreans: "They were great young students in a big hotel in Seoul," Popovic told me. "We worked for two days and had no idea how the hell we were doing. People didn't change the expression on their faces. They sat like monuments. It was awful."

With Africans, Latin Americans, and Georgians, the CANVAS trainers were loose and lively -- "Serb style," Popovic called it. With people from Asia, the Middle East and most of Eastern Europe, they tried to be more formal. But while the style needed adaptation, the curriculum stayed the same. It was developed for the first two ongoing conflicts where they had worked, Zimbabwe and Belarus -- places that differed in every possible way. Middle Eastern students, Djinovic said, sometimes argued that the strategies wouldn't work in the Islamic world. But CANVAS's only successes outside the former Soviet Union had come in Lebanon and the Maldives, both predominantly Muslim countries.

When Popovic asked the Burmese what they hoped to learn from the week, their answers focused on two issues: mobilizing people and overcoming fear. "We are afraid of what we are doing," said a tall man. "We have the 'there is nothing we can do' syndrome. We have never tasted freedom." One young woman pointed out that the government considers any meeting of more than five people to be illegal. "Nonviolent struggle is very risky," she said.

The Burmese were exhibiting the most formidable challenge facing CANVAS in countries without a history of effective opposition: the passivity, fatalism, and fear of their citizens. CANVAS's most useful lesson is how to dismantle this barrier. "At each workshop, someone comes to me and says, 'Our case is totally different,'" Djinovic told the Burmese. There was nervous laughter. But the Burmese had a point: Anyone demented enough to roll a barrel with Than Shwe's picture on it for the citizens of Rangoon to whack would be risking not a few hours in jail, but dozens of years. What could the Serbs possibly talk about?

The tactical blueprint for CANVAS

A lot, it turned out. Some of the students said they had thought nonviolence meant passivity -- morally superior, perhaps, but naive. Popovic framed the task in terms of Sun Tzu: "I want you to see nonviolent conflict as a form of warfare -- the only difference is you don't use arms," he told them. This was new. He argued that whether nonviolence was moral or not was irrelevant: It was strategically necessary. Violence, of course, is every dictator's home court. The Otpor founders also knew they could never win wide support with violence -- every democracy struggle eventually needs to capture the middle class and at least neutralize the security forces.

Over and over again, Djinovic and Popovic hammered at another myth: that nonviolent struggle is synonymous with amassing large concentrations of people. The Serbs cautioned that marches and demonstrations should be saved for when you finally have majority support. Marches are risky -- if your turnout is poor, the movement's credibility is destroyed. And at marches, people get arrested, beaten, and shot. The authorities will try to provoke violence. One bad march can destroy a movement. Here was a point that had people nodding. "Any gathering in Rangoon is lunacy," Djinovic said.

But if not marches, then what? The Serbs showed the participants excerpts from A Force More Powerful, a documentary series about nonviolent struggles: Gandhi's Salt March, the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, and the lunch-counter sit-ins and bus boycotts of the American civil rights movement. Popovic pointed out the planning involved in these actions, and made the group list the tactics they saw: leaflets, banners, sit-ins, boycotts, picketing, music. "South Africa and Burma have a similarity: zero free media," he said. "So how do you spread the message?"

"Songs," said a man with a mustache. "Prayers and funerals," said a middle-aged woman, the oldest in the group, a stern woman the others took to calling Auntie. Popovic pounced. "So what's interesting about using funerals?" "It's the only place people can meet," a young man said.

"Funerals are a dilemma for your opponent," said Popovic. In Zimbabwe, a gathering of five people was banned, but what if I have 5,000 people at a funeral? Whenever anyone related to the movement dies, they will gather and sing songs -- and the police will not interfere! It's a real problem to tear-gas a funeral."

Gene Sharp: receives love letters from the Pentagon

The next idea was one the Serbs had learned from the American academic Gene Sharp, the author of From Dictatorship to Democracy (a book originally published in 1993 in Thailand for Burmese dissidents), who has been called the Clausewitz of nonviolence. Popovic was first introduced to Sharp's ideas in the spring of 2000 by Robert Helvey, a former U.S. Army colonel who had served as defense attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Burma in the 1980s before becoming disillusioned with armed struggle. When the Otpor members met Helvey, the movement already had 20,000 active members and a formidable reputation. But the group had hit a wall -- the movement was growing, but its leaders couldn't see how Otpor could turn that growth into the fall of Milosevic.

Robert Helvey: this army colonel was the defense attache in the U.S.-backed destabilization campaign against the Burmese government, then utilizing a 'traditional' military strategy of arming and training local insurgents; a strategy which was largely-unsuccessful.  Helvey says he was later introduced to Gene Sharp and his "strategic nonviolent" approach...not intentionally but accidentally.  He says, "...I was up at Cambridge one day, I saw a little poster saying "Program for Nonviolent Sanctions," you know, room such and such. I didn't have anything to do that afternoon so I went up to the seminar on nonviolent sanctions. Primarily, I guess, being an army officer I was going to find out who these people are, you know, these pacifists and things like that — troublemakers. Just trying to get an understanding of it."  He claims to have been impressed with Gene Sharp from a strategic point-of-view.  Helvey later returned to Burma--as a 'civilian' of course--this time to help destabilize Burma using Gene Sharp's "nonviolent" methods; and even becoming the director of the Albert Einstein Institution for a number of years, where he provided direct assistance in the effort to overthrow a handful of governments on the U.S. foreign policy hit list (a task which has been 'outsourced' to Serbian 'veterans' Srdja Popovic and CANVAS).  But if you ever should dare to even SPECULATE that this professional soldier, military tactician, and destabilization expert is SECRETLY working for the CIA...well...Mr. Helvey's got some words for you.  

Helvey showed them how. He explained Sharp's idea that a regime stays in power through the obedience of the people it governs. The goal of a democracy movement should be to persuade people to withdraw their obedience. A government is like a building held up by pillars, Sharp explained. Otpor needed to pull Milosevic's pillars into the opposition camp.

Gene Sharp's "pillars": this way to the light

In fact, Otpor was already doing well with two important Milosevic pillars. One was old people: They had always been Milosevic's base of support, but the constant arrests of Otpor's 16-year-olds -- and the government's hysterical accusations that the students were terrorists -- were getting grandma angry. The other pillar was the police. From the beginning, Otpor had treated the police as allies-in-waiting. Otpor members delivered cookies and flowers to police stations (sometimes with a TV camera in tow). Instead of howling at police during confrontations, Otpor members would cheer them.

The Serbs recounted this to the Burmese, and added another step: the power graph, a Djinovic invention. He asked the students to list various groups with influence in society, and then chart each group's level of loyalty to the regime over time. The idea was to see which groups had fluctuated -- and what events in Burma's recent history provoked the change. From that they could glean clues about whom it was most profitable to woo.

The students put themselves in the shoes of Burma's police, workers, women, and other groups -- what did they all want? The lists they compiled were predictable in their self-interest: Students wanted private schools, businesspeople wanted a reliable banking system, farmers wanted crop subsidies. What was interesting was what the lists didn't include. "Where is democracy? Human rights?" Popovic said, pointing to the lists tacked to the wall. "People don't give a shit about these things. Normally your politicians talk about things that don't matter to people. Remember Gandhi's Salt March? The issue was not 'You Brits get out!' -- not officially. The issue was: 'We want to make salt.'"

 

Approaching midweek, the Serbs were worried. "They don't trust each other," Djinovic told me over lunch. The Burmese held a meeting on Tuesday night in K2's hotel room to air it all. They introduced themselves to each other, and set rules for the group. They figured out a common cover story to tell Burmese authorities. They ended up playing songs like "Dust in the Wind" on the guitar and singing until 3 a.m.

Things started to change the next day. Wednesday's lesson was about replacing tactics of concentration -- rallies, demonstrations, marches -- with tactics of dispersal, which are lower cost, lower pressure, and less dangerous. The Serbs talked about Chile's cacerolazos, or pot-banging sessions, which served to let people know that their neighbors, too, were against Pinochet. They explained the concept of dilemma actions, such as Otpor's stunt with the oil barrel. "Do a small thing and if it is successful, you have the confidence to do another one and another one," Popovic said. "You recruit people, train them, and keep them constantly active. You hit, proclaim victory -- and get the hell out. If it is successful, people will come to you. Participating in small successes, you build self-confidence. Nonviolent struggle changes the way people think of themselves."

The Burmese did not seem persuaded. "So we are all putting candles in our windows at a certain time," said a young man with glasses. "They might not be able to arrest 10,000 people, but they will pick one poor guy and arrest his whole family -- even his children."

Popovic agreed. "Yes, you guys have problems even if the tactic is low-risk -- if it is political," he said. "But what if the issue is the government is incapable of supplying people with electrical power?"

When the Burmese divided into small groups to invent their own dilemma actions, the first group took this advice to heart. It had decided to tackle the issue of garbage, which the Rangoon government had stopped collecting. The members proposed starting with a group of 20 young people to do the work, providing gloves and masks, and trying to recruit others to join in. Then they would go to the city government, submit a petition signed by influential people, and tell them: It's your problem.

"OK, good. You're developing parallel institutions," said Popovic. This was Adam Michnik's strategy for Solidarity in Poland: Don't tear down institutions -- build your own. "You did this to remove bodies after Cyclone Nargis" -- the 2008 disaster that killed more than 138,000 people in Burma -- "when the government would not. Now, what if the municipality doesn't care?"

"We'll dump the garbage in front of the mayor," said a tall man. Popovic laughed. "Or you could choose a lower-risk strategy -- take pictures of the garbage and present them to authorities," he said.

When the next group came to the front of the room, its members were smiling and, oddly, taking off their shoes. Their spokeswoman, a young woman in a pink shirt who was wriggling with excitement, proposed a "Barefoot Campaign," to commemorate the monks of the Saffron Revolution, who do not wear shoes. The idea was to start with 100 young people, contacted by email and social networks. They would do something simple: go barefoot in public spaces. "We can start with the pagodas," said Pink Shirt -- no one wears shoes in a pagoda anyway. And people could walk through paint, Pink Shirt said. "We can easily measure success -- if we see barefoot people and footprints everywhere."

"When the authorities respond with arrests, how will you respond?" Auntie asked. The group had thought through this. "For safety, people can carry a pair of broken sandals in their pocket to show the police," said a cherubic-faced young man. "Or you can say, 'I'm getting ready to go running.'"

The tall man halted their excitement. "If the authorities see you leaving footprints, they will know and arrest you."

"They won't know who it was if we do it at night," said the Cherub. "Let's do it!" He pumped his fist in the air. Everyone laughed.

But the footprints were a problem -- they could quite literally lead the police to their prey. Then a soft-spoken young woman in a gauze shirt spoke up. "There are lots of stray dogs and cats," she said. "We can put a dish of paint in front of where they live so they will walk through it." Cats and dogs as the foot soldiers of democracy! They looked at each other, awed by their own brilliance, and slapped hands all around.

Near the end of the week the group watched Burma VJ, a 2008 documentary by Danish director Anders Ostergaard about a group of clandestine Burmese video journalists, whose footage, smuggled out of the country, is often the only way the outside world knows what is happening in Burma. The film takes place during the Saffron Revolution; it is precious contraband in Burma, and most of the participants had seen it before. It is a document of hope and valor, a record of a few weeks many Burmese consider the high point of their lives. But after a week of CANVAS training, the Burmese were watching it with fresh eyes.

When the film ended, Djinovic walked to the front of the room. "So what did you think?" he said. The Cherub was wide-eyed. "This was not organized!" he said. Suddenly the Saffron Revolution looked very different. It was so brave, so inspiring -- and so improvised, foolish, and irresponsible. "People were going into the streets spontaneously, asking for something that is not achievable," Djinovic told them, perhaps not gentle enough as he razed their heroes. "Our advice," he said slowly, "is that you think about nonviolent struggle totally differently than you have seen in this movie."

Silence fell over the group.

"Then you know what you have to do," he said.

 

CANVAS has worked with activists from 50 countries. It cannot point to 50 revolutions.

The most prosaic reason is that often the people it trains aren't the ones in charge of a movement. Some groups, like Georgia's and Ukraine's dissidents, choose to model themselves on Otpor. In Iran, by contrast, though small groups of CANVAS trainees held successful actions, the leaders of the Green Revolution have not adopted Otpor's tactics.

The more profound reason, however, is that context matters. A very closed society, the kind that most desperately needs a strong democracy movement, is the place least able to grow one. By the end of the Burma workshop, Popovic and Djinovic were content; the students had understood the lessons. But what they could do with them was not clear. On the workshop's last day, I asked the members of the Barefoot Campaign group whether they would try to start one in Burma. The strategies were wonderful, valuable, fresh, they said -- but better for someone else. "I am not sure it's practical for me," Pink Shirt said.

The Serbs argue that a country's level of repression is not dispositive. Popovic told the Burmese that far more important than the government's brutality is their own level of skill and commitment; a well-organized and committed democracy movement can gradually win enough freedom to work. "Political space is never granted. It is always conquered," he said. It was easier to work in Serbia in 2000 than it had been in 1991 because the opposition had won important concessions over that time. "Serbia built those advantages," he said. For example, it forced Milosevic to respect local election results in 1996 that left municipal television stations in opposition hands. But could this apply to Burma? Winning political space there could take decades and there was no guarantee that the country would even move in the right direction.

Burma, however, is the extreme. Most authoritarian countries are closer to Milosevic's Serbia, or Mubarak's Egypt: autocratic governments that do permit some opposition media and political activity. Algeria, Angola, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Nicaragua, Russia, and Venezuela, to name a few, follow this model. And though the Serbs cannot carry revolution in their suitcases, their strategies can greatly increase the chance that when there is a moment that shakes a dictatorship, the opposition will be able to take advantage of it.

The Egyptian example shows how. The April 6 movement knew about Otpor and adopted the fist as its logo even before Mohamed Adel went to Belgrade. The course he took there was the same one the Burmese took. Last April, Serbian newspapers carried a front page photo of a protest in Egypt, with demonstrators waving the April 6 flag, complete with a familiar fist logo. "The Otpor fist threatening Mubarak?" the headline read. As images of demonstrators in Tahrir Square hoisting their children onto Egyptian Army tanks filtered out to the rest of the world last week, Popovic recalled that on Adel's power graph, the military loomed particularly large; it was crucial, he had realized, to pull out that pillar.

The Serbs never met Adel again, but their young Egyptian student kept emailing, occasionally pointing out mistakes in Arabic translations of CANVAS materials. He had gone home with copies of Bringing Down a Dictator subtitled in Arabic and continued to download books. He conducted miniature versions of the CANVAS workshop in Egypt, stressing unity, nonviolent discipline, the importance of clear goals, and keeping members engaged.

Just after the Jan. 25 protests began a 26-page pamphlet called "How to Protest Intelligently" -- authored anonymously, but widely attributed to the April 6 group -- began circulating in Cairo. It laid out the goals of the protests: taking over government buildings, winning over the police and Army, and protecting fellow protesters. It instructed people to carry roses, chant positive slogans, gather in their own neighborhoods, and persuade policemen to change sides by reminding them their own families could be among the protesters. It also gave practical advice on what demonstrators should wear and carry to protect themselves from tear gas and police batons. It suggested that they carry signs reading "Police and People Together Against the Regime."

The protests were a model of unity, tolerance, and nonviolent discipline. The different groups put aside their individual flags and symbols to show only the Egyptian flag and to speak, as much as possible, with one voice. Protesters swept the square clean and protected shops, detaining looters and making them give back the stolen goods. Coptic Christians in Tahrir Square formed ranks to protect the Muslims while they prayed; when the Christians celebrated Mass, the Muslims formed a ring around them. Together they embraced soldiers and faced the police with roses. They sang songs and wore silly hats. It had an authenticity that was uniquely Egyptian, but it was also textbook CANVAS.

April 6th Movement leaders: are these guys cheap whores or just dupes?  The crux of the matter is Machiavellian strategy: non-violence may be a moral imperative, but not according to Gene Sharp.  Only victory.  Only "democracy"--whatever that means.  We ask, what can honestly be expected of a foreign-backed "revolution" in Egypt?    A frontal assault upon national sovereignty?  More IMF privatization schemes?  Throwing more workers out of good-paying jobs?  Oh wait, who cares..I shook hands with Mohammed ElBaradei!

CANVAS has worked with dissidents from almost every country in the Middle East; the region contains one of CANVAS's biggest successes, Lebanon, and one of its most disappointing failures, Iran. Popovic wonders whether Iran could turn out differently next time: What would happen if the Green Movement were to organize not around election fraud, but staged a Salt March instead, focusing on unemployment, low wages, and corruption? Iran is like Tunisia and Egypt were: a young, relatively well-educated population and a corrupt authoritarian government dependent on fear to keep people in line. "Governments that rely for decades on fear become very inflexible," said Popovic. "The pillars of the regime support it out of fear. The moment the fear factor disappears and people are fearless with the police and hugging the military, you have lost your main pillars." Hosni Mubarak no doubt would have ruefully observed the same thing.

In Burma, it is hard to imagine what can vanquish that fear -- what can turn people from passive victims into daring heroes -- unless people like Pink Shirt do it themselves. In the Middle East, however, the fear is already crumbling, and the heroism is infecting country after country. This is a huge advantage. But for dictatorship to fall throughout the region, the protesters must catch more from Egypt than audacity.