Paths to
Peace How
Serbian students brought dictator down without a shot fired
By PETER ACKERMAN
As President Bush moves to widen the war against terrorism, he has
warned the governments of Iraq, Iran and North Korea not to make weapons of
mass destruction available to terrorists -- or else, he implies, American
military action against them is likely. It is true that countries ruled by
dictators have incubated or aided terrorists. But it is not true that the only
way to take out such regimes is through U.S. military action.
A revealing new documentary television special, Bringing
Down A Dictator, shows how a nonviolent, student-led movement in Serbia
shattered the power base of the dictator Slobodan Milosevic, and how democratic
organizing ejected him from office. All this happened less than two years ago,
but most Americans are not even aware of the story.
Dictators require two conditions to stay in power: the fear and
acquiescence of the people they rule, and the willingness of police or security
forces to follow orders and crack down on opposition. But the strategic use of
nonviolent resistance can detach any dictator, however, ruthless, from both of
those components of his power.
In Serbia, young people who were angry about the stagnant,
hopeless society produced by Milosevic started Otpor (resistance, in
Serbian). They ridiculed the president with sidewalk birthday parties, showing
a cake representing Yugoslavia being carved up during Milosevics reign.
They plastered flat surfaces all over the country with stickers that stated,
Hes finished. Every Serb knew whom that meant -- and the
belief that Milosevic could not be opposed was dissolved.
Otpor mobilized thousands of civilians in scores of Serbian
cities. Citizens finally realized that they are not objects, but subjects
of politics, said activist Stanko Lazendic. They discovered within
themselves the ability and willingness to stop being submissive. And when the
leaders of the movement were arrested, friends and family members went down to
the police stations and stood silently outside and showed the men in uniform
that the opposition had deep roots, that it wasnt just disaffected
students but whole communities that stood against the dictator.
Eroding loyalty to Milosevic
Yet Milosevics foes did not assail the police or treat them
as the enemy. We couldnt use force on someone who had three times
more weapons than we did, said Lazendic. We knew what had happened
in China, in Tiananmen. Instead Milosevics foes got
under the officers skins and under their uniforms and tried
to reach them somewhere deep to say, Come on guys, we are together. This
is our country, said Srdja Popovic, an Otpor leader.
The result: The loyalty of the police and security services to the
dictator was eroded from within. One police general told Velimir Ilic, an
oppositionist mayor: Please defeat Milosevic already, even I feel sick of
him. In the final days, when Milosevic tried to hold onto power after
failing to sabotage an election, and hundreds of thousands of Serbs marched on
the capital, Belgrade, he ordered the police to blockade the roads. But the
police knew that any kind of using force against these people would be
self-destruction, and they would be losers together with Milosevic, said
Teofli Panic, a journalist. So they did not shoot. They disobeyed orders. They
stood aside.
Within days Milosevic had fallen; within a few months, he was
standing in an international courtroom in The Hague, hearing his indictment for
war crimes. A man who had rained terror on the heads of Croats, Bosnians,
Kosovars and his fellow Serbs -- whom some had called the Butcher of the
Balkans -- had been brought to the bar of world justice without a shot
being fired.
Bombing prolonged his survival
Some American policymakers still believe that the months of NATO
bombing of Serbia one year before, when Milosevic perpetrated ethnic
cleansing in Kosovo, weakened his regime, paving the way for his
downfall. But few Serbs buy that. It helped him to survive for more than
a year, said Srdja Popovic. The civilian opposition felt it could not
operate against the government while it was under bombardment from abroad.
It was like Iraq, said Zoran Djindjic, now prime minister of
Serbia. NATO insisted that it was aid for the Serbian democratic forces
to bomb Serbia and to bomb bridges and to bomb buses and to bomb
factories, Djindjic recalled. It was stupid.
The intelligence of the Serbian peoples strategy for ridding
their country of Milosevic relied on a different understanding of power. A
dictator can survive external attack, because his military and his people rally
around the only available symbol of national survival. But no dictator can
survive when he no longer has the consent or submission of his people. And
massive civilian opposition can be roused with the shrewd use of strikes,
boycotts, civil disobedience and other forms of nonviolent resistance -- all of
which can be quietly assisted, even funded from abroad, as happened in
Serbia.
Dictators, including those who help or harbor terrorists, can be
brought down -- by the hands of their own people.
Peter Ackerman is a scholar and teacher in the area of
strategic nonviolence. He is co-author, with Christopher Kruegler, of
Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: The Dynamics of People Power in the
Twentieth Century.
Peace history
- 1980: Solidarity founded in Poland; repressed under martial law
in 1981; widely declared dead even by Western correspondents. In 1989 it wins
every available seat in Parliament and governs the nation; its victory comes
without a single violent act despite the killing of 100 of its members.
- 1982: 750,000 people gather in New York City for the largest
disarmament demonstration in U.S. history.
Resources
The Albert Einstein Institution 427 Newbury Street Boston
MA 02115 (617) 247-4882 www.aeinstein.org
Bringing Down a Dictator may be ordered from Films
for the Humanities and Sciences P.O. Box 2053 Princeton NJ
08543-2053 (800) 257-5126
National Catholic Reporter, April 26,
2002
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