The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (37 page)

The CANVAS trainers have seen this dynamic within a movement countless times. They are happy if the seminar proves to be a
provocation for the group, if it gives them “
the critical distance to view their own struggle,” as one of the trainers explains to me. What they will not do is draft them a plan or blueprint to oust a dictator. They follow two simple and strict rules: they will only work with groups with no history of violence, and they refuse to tell them what to do. “I don’t want that responsibility,” says one of the Serbian trainers. “I wasn’t born and raised there, so I can’t decide for them.”

What they will do is teach them how to think strategically. They will offer them tips. They will point out common mistakes and pitfalls that have tripped up others. They will draw on their own experience to discuss real-life examples of how to shift the loyalties of the police, how to diminish a dictator’s authority, and how to ultimately make a regime turn against itself. “We are not here with a bagful of magic tricks to say do this, this, and this,” one of the Serbs says at the beginning of the workshop. “It’s a struggle using nonviolent methods. It’s like a form of warfare, only you won’t be using guns.”

When people rise up against a dictator, the world watches. And one audience has a particularly keen interest in how uprisings are resolved: other dictators. On Christmas Day 1989, the Romanian people summarily executed President Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife hours after the brutal Communist regime crumbled.
Zaire’s strongman, President Mobutu Sese Seko, is said to have been horrified when he saw the image of his Romanian friend’s corpse on CNN. At the same time, in distant Beijing,
the Chinese leadership beefed up security around the capital, lest anyone there draw inspiration from the events in Bucharest. In 2005, after a wave of democratic movements toppled regimes in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan,
Vladimir Putin and Hu Jintao are said to have huddled on the sidelines of a summit to discuss the danger of “color revolutions.” And for nearly twenty years without a hitch,
Arab interior ministers—the men charged with repressing domestic dissent—met annually to compare notes.

The causes and fallout of the Arab Spring, without question, have become the newest preoccupation for authoritarian regimes. The Chinese Communist Party moved quickly to ban mention of key words
like “Mubarak,” “Ben Ali,” and “jasmine”—a reference to Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution—from the Internet. This censorship was followed by a wide-scale crackdown against dissidents, regime critics, and human rights defenders that many believe was a preemptive measure to prevent political unrest there. It is reasonable to assume that the quick fall of Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak frightened other Arab autocrats, making the bloody crackdowns against regime opponents in Libya, Yemen, and Syria more likely. Some of the region’s dictators were not content to wait for trouble to appear within their borders.
Saudi Arabia sent its own troops to help quash the rebellion in Bahrain and later gifted Egypt’s military council with $4 billion to help make its work easier.

Dictators, however, are not the only ones who draw lessons and assistance from the struggles of others. In the twenty-first century, democratic movements are increasingly becoming careful students of what makes a revolution a success or a failure. In Venezuela, groups have closely studied how the opposition succeeded in ousting Chile’s Augusto Pinochet. In Egypt, a year before removing Mubarak, activists had already begun to borrow tactics from Iran’s Green Movement. In almost every country I visited, people challenging an authoritarian regime were deeply familiar with Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement in Poland from the 1980s.

In a globalized world, some learning occurs simply because information is so readily available.
Take, for example, Girifna, a nonviolent democratic movement in Sudan that seeks to end the repressive rule of Omar al-Bashir. It has a Facebook page. Its name—which translates to “We are fed up”—is similar to that of groups in Georgia, Ukraine, and Egypt, which also chose names that literally said “enough.” Much like the organizations active in the “color revolutions,” Girifna chose a color to help brand its movement. (It’s orange.)

Recently,
the Sudanese movement produced a parody of a soap commercial in which a young man uses a bar of soap labeled “Girifna” to clean a T-shirt with Bashir’s face on it. As the young man washes the shirt by hand, a voice-over says, “If you are disgusted, don’t worry, there is Girifna soap bar. It’s not going to be easy after twenty years with no political change. You will have to scrub and scrub … squeeze and squeeze … but you will like the result.” With that, the young man
lifts the T-shirt from the bowl, and Bashir’s face is no more. It’s just a sparkling white T-shirt.

What is striking isn’t simply the ad’s content; it’s that it is a direct knockoff of a parody produced in Serbia ten years earlier. In it, a Serbian housewife throws a T-shirt with Miloševic’s face on it into a washing machine, producing the same result. (“For ten years, I have been trying to remove this stain,” she says, referring to Miloševic. “Believe me, I have tried everything.”) I asked a member of Otpor, which was behind the creation of the original commercial, if the group had helped Girifna make its mock advertisement. “
We had no idea,” he told me. The Sudanese group had found it online and created their own version.

The hunger for this type of information is too great for the Internet and YouTube to satisfy. Groups do not simply wish to copy the look and feel of successful democratic movements; they want to understand the strategy and tactics that underpinned those efforts. So, in response, a network of organizations and highly trained individuals has sprung up to help those who have launched their own struggles against dictators and authoritarian regimes. Indeed, this is precisely how Srdja Popovic, one of the leaders of Serbia’s Otpor movement, explains the decision to found CANVAS.

In 2003, he was in Cape Town meeting with Zimbabweans who had sought his help in their campaign against Robert Mugabe. When he met them, Popovic was amazed by the extent to which they were already familiar with Otpor’s experience. They called themselves Zwakana (Enough Is Enough) and had incorporated Otpor’s slogans into their movement. Earlier, a group in Belarus had reached out to Slobodan Djinovic, one of Otpor’s leaders and a co-founder of CANVAS. This was followed by requests from activists in Georgia and Ukraine. But the trip to South Africa was the epiphany for Popovic. “For
me, it was an eye-opener,” he says. “My God! I mean, if the people in rural Zimbabwe are inspired by what we have done in Belgrade, there is something bigger we don’t see. The market [for these ideas] was coming to us. And the interesting thing is the market keeps coming to us.”

When we see tens of thousands of people on the streets in a foreign capital demanding greater freedoms or an end to a repressive
regime, it is tempting to accept the narrative that we are witnessing a spontaneous act. That there was simply a hidden, unexpected spark that led people to pour out into the squares and demand rights that had been denied for too long. That, in fact, is seldom the case. Revolutions, if they are to be successful, require planning, preparation, and an intelligent grasp of how to anticipate and outwit a repressive regime that thinks of little beyond preserving its own power. When the tide turns, events may indeed move fast. But there is usually a movement or organization that put months or years of dangerous (often tedious) work into making that day possible. The work that CANVAS and others do defies one of the central myths of revolution. “
There is no such thing as a spontaneous revolution. Spontaneity will only get you killed,” says Popovic. “The more you plan, the bigger your chance for success.”

And if there is a single animating idea behind the type of revolution that these groups teach, it is this: strategic nonviolence. It is not because these movements are made up of pacifists; they are not. Rather, peaceful democratic movements are most often motivated by pragmatism. Activists see the logic, and they like the odds. According to a recent study,
between 1900 and 2006 more than 50 percent of nonviolent movements succeeded, compared with roughly 25 percent of violent insurgencies. When activists look squarely at the choice of toppling dictators with bullets or ballots, they see a greater chance for success by nonviolent means. They understand that a dictatorship’s greatest monopoly is the use of force. So, rather than confront the regime on the ground that favors it, they shift the battlefield to arenas where their size, strength, and wit can serve them best. There are no guarantees for those who take up the fight. But if they look around, they will find people willing to give them—and their revolution—a helping hand.

Colonel Robert Helvey didn’t have anything to do. It was 1987, and he was closing in on nearly thirty years in the U.S. Army. The service had rewarded him by sending him to Harvard University to spend a year there as an army senior fellow. It was a sabbatical year, a
time for study and self-improvement. Helvey wasn’t unaccustomed to a university setting. He had spent time as an instructor at the Naval War College and had served as the dean of the U.S. Army Defense Intelligence School. But the pace of life on the Harvard campus was unfamiliar. It was leisurely compared with what he knew. So on this day, like many others, he walked across Harvard Yard looking for something to do—an event, a lecture, a speaker’s series—something.

He found it, posted on a door. “Program on Nonviolent Sanctions—2
PM,”
the flyer read. Helvey wasn’t exactly sure what “nonviolent sanctions” meant, but he had a hunch. Pacifists and peaceniks. “
I had never had experience with [the program], but I knew I didn’t like them because of my Vietnam experience,” says Helvey. “They were just rude as hell, sons of bitches with long hair and rings in their nose, all that shit.”

Helvey, a gruff, straightforward native of West Virginia, had first served as a military adviser in Vietnam in the early 1960s. He returned again with the First Cavalry Division in 1967 and saw the thick of the fighting.
His leadership and courage while serving as captain in Company A of the Second Battalion, Twelfth Cavalry are credited with saving hundreds of his fellow soldiers.
One of the officers who served alongside him described him as a “natural.” For the valor he showed in combat, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the country’s second-highest military decoration. (
His citation describes his bravery while outnumbered and outgunned by North Vietnamese soldiers. Under heavy fire, he led his men through an “enemy trench line, fighting off the North Vietnamese at ranges as close as three feet.” Even after he was shot in the leg, he refused medical treatment until his soldiers were safe.) He didn’t have much time for people who criticized a military they didn’t understand, but he was curious. So he decided to attend the talk. “I figured this would be an opportunity to confirm my prejudices,” he told me.

It was a chance encounter that changed everything for this professional soldier. He remembers taking a seat in the seminar room. “And this little guy gets up and says almost in a whisper, ‘Hello, my name is Gene Sharp, and I’m here to talk about nonviolent sanctions. It’s all about power, either denying it to others or seizing it. That’s what it’s all about.’

“And that got me. Because that’s what I do for a living,” Helvey remembers. “When the government wants something done, they will turn to the military and we’ll get it for them or we’ll protect it from somebody else trying to get it.”

Afterward, Helvey went up to introduce himself to Sharp, and they soon got together for lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club. “That started a long friendship,” says Helvey. “I was fascinated listening to him talk, and I think he was interested in learning about my experiences.”

It was also the beginning of Helvey’s education in the strategy of nonviolent conflict. Gene Sharp, a little-known academic, had given most of his life to studying how people could “deny” power to or “seize” it from dictatorships through nonviolent campaigns. He had written works on the strategic genius of Mahatma Gandhi, examining how he had used civil resistance against British colonial rule. His most pioneering contribution,
The Politics of Nonviolent Action
, a three-volume work that ran nearly a thousand pages, offered a comprehensive examination of nonviolent strategy. Other books followed. Helvey threw himself into studying Sharp’s work—all of it. “I didn’t have much else to do, so I read just about everything Gene had written,” says Helvey. As he did, he and Sharp would meet for lunch, often at the faculty club, for what amounted to his own private tutorial on nonviolent strategy.

One of the reasons for Helvey’s intense interest in dictatorships was his last posting, the one he had filled just before turning up on Harvard’s campus. Helvey had spent two years in Burma as the U.S. military’s defense attaché. It made a strong impression on him. “People, when I went to talk to them, would sometimes cover their mouth so that if somebody was watching them, they couldn’t read their lips. Sometimes people would just turn their backs. They wanted to avoid having to answer to someone why they were talking to this American clown,” recalls Helvey. “I thought this is terrifying. Everybody seemed to be aware that somebody is watching them. The government had this omnipresence of surveillance.” Helvey developed an intellectual curiosity in how the Burmese junta was able to command people through fear. “What is it that causes people to obey a regime that is treating them so badly, that is so corrupt? That’s where Gene’s work—why do people obey?—really comes in.”

Colonel Helvey retired from the U.S Army in 1992. Months later, he was back in Burma. He had given a presentation on nonviolent strategy in Washington, D.C., and members of the Karen National Union, a pro-democracy Burmese opposition group, had attended his talk. They invited Helvey to return to Burma to give his presentation to General Bo Mya, the legendary leader of the Burmese resistance. After having spent years studying and absorbing Sharp’s ideas, Helvey was eager to put them to work in the field. When he heard the presentation, General Bo Mya was persuaded and asked Helvey to set up a pilot program training opposition officials in quick, three-day courses.