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Revolution, Inc.
December 3, 2004
BOB GARFIELD:
Much of the power of the Ukrainian demonstrations has been rooted in how well they play for the camera. Hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets in spontaneous outrage sends a compelling message. But how spontaneous were those rallies really?
For months now, Ukrainian activists have been carefully stage managing the spontaneity with the help of uprising consultants, veterans of the Serbian street protests that finally undid Slobodan Milosevic. They've spent the last few years exporting their expertise to popular uprisings in Belarus and Georgia, the seed money for which has come in part from the United States government which spent 40 million dollars to fund the Serbian revolt.
Ivan Marovic was a founder of Otpor, the Serbian political student group, and he's been consulting in places like Ukraine ever since. Ivan, welcome to the show.
IVAN MAROVIC:
Nice to be here.
BOB GARFIELD:
Tell me first how Otpor did it in Serbia, and then tell me how you've exported the creation of a whole brand of protest to these other countries.
IVAN MAROVIC:
Otpor was actually the fourth attempt that I was involved in, and the other three were pretty much big failures. As a student activist and organizer, I was trying to lead my colleagues to find a way how to reach broader audience. Our inspiration came from multinational companies and things like Coca-Cola and - or Levi's.
What we needed was a simple message. What we needed was a simple logo, so people could recognize it after one second. So that's why we picked a name Otpor -- which means resistance, and also we picked a clenched fist. Our slogan was: Gotov je, which means "He is finished." And that was the most simple way to tell to the people that if they vote against Milosevic, he will be finished.
It showed the good way of attracting one portion of the society which doesn't respond to classical political messages, and this is exactly what we were trying to pass to our friends and colleagues in Georgia and Ukraine, which is some sort of a package, but also the content of that package has to be carefully developed, because a package cannot do the job for itself.
BOB GARFIELD:
Well, there are striking similarities between the Ukrainian disputed election and the one in Belgrade that marked the beginning of the end for Milosevic, but obviously the details were very different, and the sloganeering was different as well. What logo and slogan was embraced by your colleagues in Ukraine?
IVAN MAROVIC:
What they did is that they made a slogan pora, which means "It's high time." And their logo is actually the ticking clock, which symbolically means that the clock is ticking for Kuchmar and for his regime and the oligarchs that are controlling Ukraine at the moment. And that is different from Otpor's clenched fist, which was more a result of ten years of civil war and economic sanctions and totally different situation.
BOB GARFIELD:
I want to ask you about the potential down side of the underlying reality that the populace is being manipulated by the pro-democracy forces in approximately the same way it had been for decades manipulated by the sitting government. Is there no chance for backlash when the people realize that they have been, I don't know, toyed with?
IVAN MAROVIC:
This is not a manipulation. You can fool some people for some time, but they're in the street for ten days now, and they don't seem fooled. They seem that they're fighting for what they want, and what they want to fight for is their right to vote.
BOB GARFIELD:
Now the United States has a long and often very sorry history of interfering in the affairs of sovereign governments. Is there no risk that you will be perceived as an agent of Washington, wherever you consult?
IVAN MAROVIC:
I wouldn't think that branding or training that I and my colleagues did were the most important. We maybe helped them, like maybe one percent. Maybe foreign funding helped them five percent. But 95 percent or 99 percent was thanks to their effort and their readiness to fight for their cause. It's up to them to seek funding.
The only thing that we need to know before we start trainings is whether the groups we are working with are fighting for democracy, human rights and better society in their countries, and that they use non-violent methods.
BOB GARFIELD:
I think it's easy to dismiss branding as just the very essence of superficiality in the, you know, the commercial culture and so forth, but one thing we learn here is that brands are not nothing -- that they are actually the convergence of recognition and meaning. No?
IVAN MAROVIC:
Yes. In the 20th Century, branding was done by connecting a movement to the leader, so everybody remembers Lech Walesa or, or Nelson Mandela or Mahatma Ghandi. In Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine, branding was done not connecting to leaders. Leaders could have been blackmailed or bribed or even maybe killed. You can't do that with brands or ideas.
BOB GARFIELD:
So where next? Uzbekistan comes to mind. Zimbabwe. Is your phone ringing off the hook with pleas for help from around the world?
IVAN MAROVIC:
It does ring every now and then, and if they are asking for help, we are willing to help and to share our experience with them.
BOB GARFIELD:
At the moment, you're in the United States creating a video game for the next generation of activists. Tell me about it.
IVAN MAROVIC:
This game, I think the working title is A Force More Powerful, is a game where a player will be able to organize a mass movement against a dictatorship. It's going to be a violent game with prosecutions, with arrests, with kidnapping. The only person that will not be allowed to be violent is the player.
BOB GARFIELD:
Well, Ivan, thank you very much.
IVAN MAROVIC:
Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD:
Ivan Marovic is a trainer for The Center for Non-Violent Resistance in Belgrade. He spoke to us from Washington.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Coming up, how America talks, or doesn't, in perilous times, and a peek at the record of our upcoming attorney general.
BOB GARFIELD:
This is On the Media from NPR.
copyright 2004 WNYC Radio
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