[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."... *****