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

foreign policy • revolution in the arab world • revolution makers
same. It was developed for the first two ongoing conflicts where they had
worked, Zimbabwe and Belarus—places that differed in every possible way.
Middle Eastern students, Djinovic said, sometimes argued that the strategies
wouldn’t work in the Islamic world. But CANVAS’s only successes outside
the former Soviet Union had come in Lebanon and the Maldives, both
predominantly Muslim countries.
When Popovic asked the Burmese what they hoped to learn from the
week, their answers focused on two issues: mobilizing people and overcoming
fear. “We are afraid of what we are doing,” said a tall man. “We
have the ‘there is nothing we can do’ syndrome. We have never tasted freedom.”
One young woman pointed out that the government considers any
meeting of more than five people to be illegal. “Nonviolent struggle is very
risky,” she said.
The Burmese were exhibiting the most formidable challenge facing
CANVAS in countries without a history of effective opposition: the passivity,
fatalism, and fear of their citizens. CANVAS’s most useful lesson is how
to dismantle this barrier. “At each workshop, someone comes to me and
says, ‘Our case is totally different,’” Djinovic told the Burmese. There was
nervous laughter. But the Burmese had a point: Anyone demented enough
to roll a barrel with Than Shwe’s picture on it for the citizens of Rangoon to
whack would be risking not a few hours in jail, but dozens of years. What
could the Serbs possibly talk about
A lot, it turned out. Some of the students said they had thought nonviolence
meant passivity—morally superior, perhaps, but naive. Popovic
framed the task in terms of Sun Tzu: “I want you to see nonviolent conflict
as a form of warfare—the only difference is you don’t use arms,” he told
them. This was new. He argued that whether nonviolence was moral or not
was irrelevant: It was strategically necessary. Violence, of course, is every
dictator’s home court. The Otpor founders also knew they could never win
wide support with violence—every democracy struggle eventually needs to
capture the middle class and at least neutralize the security forces.
Over and over again, Djinovic and Popovic hammered at another myth:
that nonviolent struggle is synonymous with amassing large concentrations
of people. The Serbs cautioned that marches and demonstrations should
be saved for when you finally have majority support. Marches are risky—if
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