It's Unity, Stupid!

CHAPTER VII It’s Unity, Stupid! f you’ve gotten to this point in the book, I’m going to as- Isume that you care about more than just my world-famous Serbian humor and that you’re genuinely interested in the cir- cumstances by which ordinary people can do extraordinary things and change their community, their country, and the world. The next chapters, then, will be less about the what of nonviolent action and more about the how, the principles without which no movement can survive. 152 Blueprint for Revolution To begin this section of the book, let’s go to Belarus. There are few better places I can think of to start in. This lovely country, right next to Russia, somehow missed the fall of the Berlin Wall and is today still living the Soviet dream. Now, let’s go back in time and pretend it’s 2010, on the eve of Be- larus’s presidential elections. Since 1994 the country has been under the thumb of a ruthless and corrupt despot named Alexander Lukashenko, who lords over the last dictatorship in Europe. A man of many talents, the tall and mustachioed Lukashenko is a big fan of hockey, cross- country skiing, and torture. He’s also read every page in the tyrant handbook: just a few years after he was first elected, he had already managed to dismantle the parliament, beef up the secret police, and build a regime considered oppressive even in a region where many still remember Stalin fondly. Sick of what their beloved president had become, the people of Belarus rebelled. In 2006, they demonstrated by the tens of thousands, launching the stylishly named Jeans Revolution, because in Belarus denim still represents the promise of West- ern democracy and affluence. It was a noble attempt at bringing down a dictator, but it failed—Lukashenko’s goons were too entrenched, the protest movement was too disorganized, and that year’s election saw another landslide for the despot. Unbroken, the opposition continued its efforts, and by the time the 2010 elections rolled around, pro- democracy activists in Belarus had managed to generate enough pressure, at home and abroad, to force Lukashenko into something vaguely re- It’s Unity, Stupid! 153 sembling a fair vote. More than 90 percent of the eligible pop- ulation went to the ballot box and most Belarusians were certain that Lukashenko was facing imminent defeat. So what happened next? Here’s how election night in Minsk would have looked if life were a Hollywood movie. In his dark and gloomy head- quarters, the dictator limply concedes defeat as his henchmen make preparations to flee the country rather than face the criminal investigations that the new democratically elected government is almost certain to launch against them. Across town, in some cheerful banquet hall packed with rowdy sup- porters, the new president, a smart, normal, inspiring person, gives an uplifting speech about change and hope and promise. Happy hour goes on for days in every bar in town. Interna- tional credit ratings spike. Anderson Cooper flies in to inter- view the heroes of the peaceful revolution. But election night in Minsk was nothing like that. Instead, it looked a lot like that famous bit from Monty Python’s Life of Brian, in which a handful of Judeans are sitting in the am- phitheater, busy not talking to one another because each one represents his own splinter political sect. Nine candidates ran against Lukashenko in 2010, representing the Social Demo- cratic Party and the Christian Democratic Party, the Modern- ization Union and the United Civil Party and the Belarusian People’s Front. Confused? So were the Belarusians. The opposition’s candidates were all fine men—they included a law- yer, a poet, and an economist— but there were too many of 154 Blueprint for Revolution them to choose from. Each received a small portion of the vote, and much of the opposition’s energy went into fighting one another over minute differences rather than uniting against their common opponent. By the time all of the votes were counted, Lukashenko could boast of having won a major victory in a more or less free election. It was the worst outcome imaginable for the opposition. This was something I’d seen previously. In Serbia, before we had Otpor! to unite behind, elections under Miloševic´ fol- lowed this exact pattern. The people who study this type of thing call it “atomization.” Miloševic´ would garner a sizable number of votes, steal a few thousand more, and then just wait for the splintered opposition to squander any chance of getting anything accomplished by fighting among themselves. By bickering, we were doing the dictator’s work for him. Which is why from the very start of Otpor! we fought two parallel battles— one to topple the dictatorship, and a second to unite the feuding political parties under a single umbrella. We intentionally baked the struggle for unity into our anti- Miloševic´ casserole, and it worked. Unity is a tricky thing, though. It’s not only one of the most important elements of successful nonviolent action but also the hardest to achieve, and for several good reasons. The first has to do with the nature of oppressive regimes. In Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt— as in many dictatorships— any gathering of more than five people was considered illegal, which made the foundation of a civic society virtually impossible. By at- It’s Unity, Stupid! 155 omizing Egyptian society into tiny fragments, Mubarak fol- lowed the age- old dictatorial principle of divide and conquer. Like so many other autocrats, he knew that unity depends on building coalitions, and coalitions depend on people’s ability to get together, share their views, and work out their differences. When this very opportunity is rendered illegal, an orga- nized and well- oiled opposition is unlikely. Unity, however, is a difficult concept for another, far more fundamental reason: the innate tendency, which almost all people share to some degree, that leads us to the conviction that we know better than anyone else. I’m the first to admit being guilty of this kind of folly. When you’re very young and very passionate— and many activists are— and you find your- self working together with other young and passionate people, it is likely that at some point you will look up at your buddy sitting next to you and wonder how you ever got in- volved with such a moron. This is because movements are crucibles, hot and crowded and designed to melt even the toughest of metals. Even today, my friends from Otpor! still like to rib each other about things they said more than a de- cade ago in moments of anger, and many of those quarrels— which now look so silly and negligible to us—easily could have ended in some of us quitting the group and vowing to start a “more pure” competing movement. But there’s more. The problem of unity is made even thornier because there are so many different types of unity out there. In Serbia, for example, we needed to get nineteen 156 Blueprint for Revolution different opposition parties to work together, and every one of them hated the others. For us, the trick was winning through political unity. In a sense we were lucky, because when facing the challenge of achieving political unity you can always fall back on the time-worn traditions of horse- trading and cutting backroom deals. But imagine the activists during the struggle for civil rights in the United States and South Africa who needed to forge racial unity between whites and blacks. That’s tough. Similarly, the gay rights movement needed to create cultural unity between homo- sexuals and straight people, and God bless those poor souls in places like Egypt and Syria who are today trying to create a spirit of religious unity in the fight against violent sectari- anism in the Middle East. Elsewhere, in cities from Rio to New York and from Tel Aviv to Moscow, you can find people desperately trying to create social unity by demonstrat- ing that the desires of people living in cosmopolitan urban centers aren’t that far removed from the hopes and wishes of rural citizens who live far from the centers of power. Doing that isn’t easy. But there’s no reason to get depressed, because bringing together even the most disparate groups is possible if you ap- proach the problem correctly. And that involves realizing that within these big strategic unities are smaller tactical unities, which is where we begin. The first step involves understanding the nature of compromise. Asked a long time ago to define democracy, the It’s Unity, Stupid! 157 writer E. B. White said that it was the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people are right more than half the time. He wasn’t kidding, but he left out one key component, namely, that for such a system to work, a great degree of give-and- take is necessary. And compromise, sad to say, isn’t sexy. No one has ever marched or protested or gathered at the town’s square just to yell, “I don’t entirely agree with your views, but in the interest of moving forward I’m willing to reconsider and amend my own.” On the other hand, going all out with your own ideas and pet messages is a mistake. Just ask the members of FEMEN. Started in 2008 by a young Ukrainian economist troubled by the thriving sex trade that subjected so many women in her country and elsewhere to a life of misery and violence, the activist group soon came up with the very effective tactic of having young women wearing skimpy clothes stage demon- strations.

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