The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (39 page)

Three hours later the rain wasn’t letting up. Gullies were overflowing on one side of his property as water raced down the hillside. Still sitting on Helvey’s back porch, I asked him if any of the groups he ever trained stood out. Was one outfit the most impressive? “The Serbs,” he replied. “They looked intelligent before they even said a word. They were focused. They kept their eye on me and what I was saying, and every now and then would mumble something to each other.”

In the spring of 2000, Helvey traveled to Budapest to meet with some of the members of Otpor, the democratic Serbian youth group. They had already had remarkable success challenging Slobodan Miloševic’s regime, but they feared they had reached a plateau and would not be able to maintain their momentum. Before the seminar began, Helvey asked to meet with a few of the Serbs, just to get a sense of them and where they stood as a movement. “I asked them to give me an idea of how they were structured,” Helvey recalls.

“We don’t have a structure,” one replied.

“Who is your leader?”

“We don’t have a leader,” answered another.

“Wait just a fucking minute,” said Helvey. “I didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday. You have a countrywide movement, the pillars of support around the Miloševic regime are collapsing, things are happening, demonstrations occur all over the country and they are synchronized, and you are telling me you don’t have an organization and you don’t have anyone running it.”

The young Serbs just smiled. “That’s what we tell everybody.”

Helvey knew right away he did not need to instruct them in tactics or how to establish a nonviolent movement; they had already come up with innovative methods, and they approached the task with the discipline and rigor of a military operation. The Serbs, he said, had all the pieces. They simply hadn’t figured out how to put them together, as well as how to plan for the final days of the regime. But he was certain when the seminar was finished that they would succeed. “Their minds were like sponges. Nobody should be surprised that they won. They are risk takers,” says Helvey. “I thought these guys have what it takes. They never rested. I would not want to be in opposition to those guys.”

One person in particular stood out. A twenty-seven-year-old named Srdja Popovic. “As soon as I saw him, I knew this guy is one of their leaders,” says Helvey. “He was so intense.” A creative and clever tactician, Srdja was in fact one of the original eleven leaders of Otpor (Resistance). Tall, lanky, and with a sly, mischievous smile, Popovic was the self-styled political commissar of the movement. His charisma and energy made him a natural for heading up the recruitment and training of new members, especially Serbian youth.
Srdja, like other former members of Otpor I met, exuded confidence and the savvy street smarts of a veteran activist.

Helvey was right to believe Srdja and his colleagues would win out. Months later, on October 5, 2000, the small band of youth activists helped lead a national movement that toppled Serbia’s brutal twentieth-century dictator. When in the final hours Miloševic called on his shock troops to open fire and disperse the crowds by any means necessary, the police put down their guns and let the Serbian people seize the parliament. What Miloševic hadn’t realized was that Popovic
and his compatriots had spent more than a year winning the regime’s police and security services over to their side. Few had predicted that Miloševic would fall, let alone that he would do so in a bloodless democratic coup.

As if on cue, a large gray tabby trots from the house onto the back porch and jumps on the table. He walks toward Helvey and lowers his head, looking for a scratch on the scruff of his neck. “In fact, my cat is named Srdja,” says Helvey, smiling. “And Srdja the cat will kill anything his size or smaller.”

Bob Helvey didn’t need to describe Srdja Popovic to me. I had met him a year earlier, in June 2009. The occasion was a six-day seminar on nonviolent strategy hosted by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. The center, funded by the former investment banker Peter Ackerman, held an annual institute in Boston that brought together democratic activists, civil society leaders, researchers, and others from around the world. More than forty people from thirty-five different countries, including Egypt, Malawi, Nigeria, Syria, Tibet, and Tunisia, came to hear experts, scholars, and veterans of nonviolent campaigns. But for many of these foot soldiers of democratic struggles, Popovic’s talk was the highlight. As one Nigerian explained, he and others had come because they wanted to hear “
how [Popovic] had done it and whether we could do it in our own countries, too.”

The night before he was to speak, Srdja and I met in a bar in Davis Square, near the Tufts University campus. For several days, the world had turned its attention to the streets of Tehran, where thousands of people, especially young Iranians, had come out to denounce the apparent theft of the presidential election. He had co-founded CANVAS six years earlier and now spent roughly a hundred days a year on the road, either conducting workshops or speaking to groups. CANVAS had trained seven opposition groups in Iran. In a preview of his lecture for the next day, I asked him what he made of the Iranian uprising, which people were now calling the Green Movement.

Popovic shook his head. “
It is going to be bloody,” he replied. It was too early to tell, but he was already worried that the Iranian opposition
was on the verge of making serious strategic mistakes. After unsettling the regime with their massive groundswell of support, the protesters should have “retreated from Tehran’s public squares and dispersed to Iran’s twenty largest cities,” engaging in “high-visibility, low-risk tactics” like graffiti, vigils, and boycotts. They had shown their size as a movement, but now they needed to prove that they were not only centered on Tehran. More important, they needed to keep the regime guessing. Popovic believes there is nothing more dangerous for a movement than to become predictable. Once a movement has put a regime on its heels, it is crucial to keep the initiative and not allow the government to settle in to plan its response. If the movement is going to sway the loyalties of key parts of the regime, it needs to continue to stay one step ahead, infecting the government’s backers with self-doubt while raising the confidence of the protesters and the public alike. He feared that some of the young Iranians CANVAS trained knew what to do but couldn’t implement it because too many of the country’s opposition groups were still being led by “graybeards.” Popovic, who majored in biology at the University of Belgrade, is fond of making analogies to the animal kingdom. “Movements are like sharks,” he explains. “They need to constantly move to stay alive. If the shark stops, the shark dies. Sharks can only swim in one direction—forward. Our movement [in Serbia] was successful by maintaining the offensive, constantly moving, and staying one step ahead of the regime.”

The next morning Popovic walked to the podium to address the assembled activists. The charisma and humor that made him an effective leader to thousands of Serbian youth—30 percent of Otpor’s members were teenagers, the movement’s average age was twenty-one—immediately showed. With members of the audience hanging on his every word, he began by telling them, “My organization sees [these struggles] as a form of warfare.” As such, he stressed the need for unity, planning, and nonviolent discipline. He talked about recruitment and the need to be on the level with new members. “You should be clear with them. There will be casualties. It is very fair to tell this to your people at the beginning,” he said. “People will be beat up. They will be arrested. They will have their friends and family hurt. They may be intentionally infected with HIV. In the Maldives, people were intentionally made drug addicts.”

But nothing the regime does is an excuse to break a movement’s commitment to nonviolence. Otpor stressed its nonviolent focus during a person’s recruitment. During the initiation—something it created to help establish discipline—the final thing a person heard was “Violence is the last sanctuary of the weak.” The danger that members could resort to violence, thereby giving the regime an excuse to crack down violently, was something always to guard against. Further, the moment a movement turns violent, it alienates the very members of the regime it hoped to make sympathetic to its cause. “You need to see what individuals or groups within your movement can turn violent,” Popovic cautioned. “You need to identify them, isolate them, talk to them, and either have them explain or kick them out.”

For the next day and a half that Srdja remained at the seminar, activists peppered him with questions inspired by their own fights. They would corner him in the hallways, share a smoke outside, or stay up late over drinks trying to glean whatever additional bit of experience and insight they could. They wanted to know how decentralized the group’s leadership should be. (“The top eleven activists never met in the same place.”) How effective was the regime’s intelligence on Otpor? (“When we saw our dossiers after the revolution, we had like two hundred pages each. They knew our movements. But there was no analysis. So, so what?”) What do you do when the regime brings hardened shock troops from a different part of the country to lead the crackdown? (“You need to create stronger bonds with the local police. We developed ties with the local police so they would warn us what streets to avoid. Every regime has a limited number of special units.”)

For the next two years, Popovic and I kept in touch. Every few months we would exchange an e-mail or talk on the phone to discuss events unfolding in one authoritarian country or another. Not long after Ben Ali and Mubarak had fallen, during the height of the Arab Spring, we met for breakfast in Washington, D.C. The events in Tunisia and Egypt had been good for CANVAS. Media outlets in the United States and Europe had run a slew of stories on his organization and the role it played helping activists promote democratic revolutions, especially in Egypt. The higher profile has, in turn, led to more requests for workshops.

The Arab Spring, however, has done more than crowd CANVAS’s calendar with future workshops. Popovic believes it has destroyed
more myths about nonviolent conflict than any of the revolutions before it. For starters, it proved, once and for all, that Arabs could do it. The idea that the Middle East could only be the home to dictators, that for some reason the people there were destined to be left behind as democracy advanced elsewhere, was proven wrong. And the fact that Tunisia and Egypt fell first—two of the United States’ staunchest allies in the Middle East—destroys the idea that nonviolent revolutions were spreading with the help of the CIA or the American government. CANVAS may have tried to help where it could, but the revolutions were successful, says Popovic, because they were homegrown. “These young Egyptians overstated what we taught them. I think it’s 100 percent their achievement,” he says. “There is no way that a million Egyptians would follow what a Serb told them, no matter how fancy a suitcase or laptop he has.”

But Popovic wouldn’t be a very good strategic thinker if he didn’t know an opportunity when he sees it. “We have this historical phenomenon which is shaping the world in front of our eyes. Now it’s the Middle East, before it was eastern Europe, tomorrow it may be in Africa or Asia,” says Popovic. He sees this moment as a possible pivot point, a chance when greater gains could be made. “This is not about toppling one more dictator,” he continues. “It is about transforming knowledge on a wide scale. There is a chance to leverage this knowledge.”

Popovic is positioning CANVAS to be a part of this effort to shape the future. He is building a curriculum in the strategy of nonviolent conflict and partnering with universities in the United States and Europe to teach it. As an obvious first step, he has already recruited Egyptian activists to serve as new trainers. “These guys are really bright,” he says, smiling. “They are ideal trainers for the Arab world.”

The beginning of a workshop can always be a little rocky. As anxious as activists may be to learn new ideas on how to counter a regime, they are reluctant to believe that they have been approaching the job the wrong way. That is the mood on the second floor of the hotel overlooking the Mediterranean.

The twenty Middle Eastern activists are asked to break up into small groups to draw up what the CANVAS trainers call their “vision for tomorrow”—their vision for the change they want their movement to create. It’s a simple enough idea: lay out your movement’s ostensible mission. But the Serbian instructors have put a twist on it. They have asked the activists to outline it in terms that five very different segments of society will find appealing. They need to express their goals for the future of their country in a way that will resonate with businessmen, religious scholars, teachers, students, and members of the media. “When Otpor became an organization credible in the eyes of the public, then our numbers grew,” says Aleksandar,
^*
one of the trainers, a heavyset Serb with an expertise in political organization. “And numbers are what we are always seeking.”

It proves a tough assignment for everyone. When they report back to the main group, most haven’t been able to find common denominators across five different strata of society. Instead, they want to explain why making common cause among so many disparate people in their country is next to impossible. One of the older activists says, “Well, it’s complicated. We are unique.” Another chimes in, “We are a bit different.” A chorus of the activists start explaining how there are many competing interests, divided opinions, different groups, and so on. The trainers look on and listen, as if they’re expecting these excuses. Finally, one of the female activists, clearly frustrated by the whole exercise, blurts out, “It’s impossible.”

Dragana, the other trainer, a striking blonde with a wry smile, says flatly, “You cannot change anything if you remain a minority. It’s as simple as that.”

“I don’t think you understand,” says one of the activists, a young man with tattoos up and down his forearms. “How willing should we be to degrade our politics to widen our struggle?”