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

foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • revolution makers
evic 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.
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 Coopera-
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