ROGER COHEN
Who Really Brought Down Milosevic?
The New York Times Magazine (26 Nov 2000)

[...] But other American help was as important as money. Calingaert's organization arranged for a seminar at the luxurious Budapest Hilton from March 31 to April 3. There a retired United States Army colonel, Robert Helvey, instructed more than 20 Otpor leaders in techniques of nonviolent resistance. This session appears to have been significant. It also suggests a link between the American-influenced opposition base in Budapest and the events in Vladicin Han.

It was Aca Radic, one of the students tortured in Vladicin Han, who founded the Otpor branch there. His motives were similar to Davorin Popovic's. "I just felt, enough of tolerance," he says. "Enough of patience." So this good-looking young man -- like Davorin, a student of physical education -- made his way up to Belgrade in December 1999. At the Otpor office there, he was closely questioned and then given flyers, leaflets, sprays, posters, Otpor T-shirts and $130 and a cell phone. "I was happy," Radic said, "I felt like a revolutionary going home to spread the word."

The man who gave him this insurrectionary material was Srdja Popovic. Lean and trenchant, Srdja calls himself -- half jokingly -- the "ideological commissar" of Otpor. He combines a Leninist intensity with the skills of a Washington lobbyist. (His favorite word is "networking.") It was he who coordinated the training of Otpor's 70,000 members in 130 branches, including the one that opened in Vladicin Han.

These training methods were heavily influenced by Helvey. Gathered in a conference room of the Budapest Hilton ("We thought it was stupid to organize a revolution in a luxury hotel," Srdja says, "but the Americans chose that place"), the Otpor activists listened as Helvey dissected what he called the "pillars of support" of the regime. These naturally included the police, the army and the news media, but also the more intangible force of Milosevic's "authority." That is, his capacity to give orders and be obeyed.

Find nonviolent ways to undermine authority, Helvey suggested. Look at Myanmar. There, the opposition National League for Democracy took a farmer's hat as its symbol; so everyone started to wear farmer's hats. The regime tried to make the hats illegal, but such repression merely provoked outrage.

The same thing would happen in Serbia with Otpor's T-shirts adorned with the fist symbol. "We focused on breaking Milosevic's authority, on ways to communicate to dissatisfied people that they are the majority and that the regime could only dig itself into a deeper hole through repression," Srdja recalls. "We learned that fear is a powerful but vulnerable weapon because it disappears far faster than you can recreate it."

Helvey stressed the sources of momentum in a nonviolent movement. "There is an enormous price -- domestic and international -- paid today for using force against a nonviolent movement," he says. "The battle is asymmetrical. The dictator still may hold the externalities of power, but he is steadily undermined." This process has been dubbed "political ju-jitsu" by Gene Sharp, an American writer who is close to Helvey and who emerged as a sort of guru to Otpor leaders. His book "From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation," became a samizdat passed around Otpor branches in the last months of Milosevic's rule. In it, Sharp writes, "The stark brutality of the regime against the clearly nonviolent actionists politically rebounds against the dictators' position, causing dissension in their own ranks as well as fomenting support for the resisters among the general population, the regime's usual supporters and third parties."

Srdja is often to be found in Belgrade with heavily underlined copies of Sharp's work, parts of which were translated into Serbian as the "Otpor User Manual." Not for nothing were Otpor's activities drawn from Sharp's list of 198 "methods of nonviolent action." In an interview, Sharp says: "My key principle is not ethical. It has nothing to do with pacifism. It is based on an analysis of power in a dictatorship and how to break it by withdrawing the obedience of citizens and the key institutions of society."

According to Srdja, Otpor simply represents the "ideology of nonviolent individual resistance." It was developed, he says, "because we finally understood that nobody from Mars was going to come and remove Milosevic." Organization was intense. Throughout Serbia, activists were trained in how to play hide-and-seek with the police, how to respond to interrogation, how to develop a message in posters and pamphleteering, how to transfer fear from the population into the regime itself and how to identify and begin to infiltrate Helvey's "pillars of support" in the police and elsewhere.

Just how effective that infiltration was became clear to Srdja 12 days before Milosevic's July 27 call for a presidential election. Otpor received advance word of Milosevic's intentions in secret e-mailed messages from anonymous dissenters within the regime. As a result, Otpor already had more than 60 tons of electoral propaganda ready on July 27. Some of it went to Vladicin Han, where Aca Radic and his friends went out every night to plaster slogans. When he was arrested and beaten seven weeks later, Radic had a last message to communicate to the police: "I was silent as they beat me, determined not to react, trying to look Stojimenovic in the eye to show him I was not afraid and convey one thing: You can hit us and beat us, but our time will come as well." [...]

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