Revolution in the Arab World - Observation of a lost soul Blog

foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • revolution makers
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 Milos-
131