The MENA uprisings of this year have brought Otpor!, the nonviolent youth-led movement that overthrew Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, back into the spotlight, with many drawing comparisons to Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement. Indeed, images of the iconic black flag and white clenched fist, so visible in Serbia in 2000, were raised throughout Tahrir Square this year as protesters successfully organized to unseat the regime of President Hosni Mubarak.
The Otpor! movement derived many of its tactics from Boston academic Gene Sharp, the man now known as the godfather of nonviolent resistance. The Egyptians adopted several of these, including nonviolent response to violent crackdown, mockery, and identifying how to effectively infiltrate the pillars of power. Most notably, they successfully engaged the army, which ultimately refused to crackdown on the demonstrators.
Interestingly, however, we have seen little commentary on the use of Otpor! tactics by the Green Movement in Iran. This is certainly not because organizers there were unfamiliar with the movement or didn’t feel that it was applicable to them. Quite the contrary – Iranian organizers met with Otpor! veterans to gain insight into their tactics. The primary difference here is political climate.
The Milosevic and Mubarak regimes were undeniably reprehensible (genocide and ethnic cleansing certainly don’t engender respect). But they simply didn’t respond to their opposition movements in the same way that Iran did. Iranian protesters were brutalized, murdered, raped, and tortured. While this took place in Serbia and Egypt as well, it was nowhere near as widespread and systematic as it was in Iran. The Ahmadinejad regime and the Revolutionary Guard were determined to put a cruel end to the demonstrations.
So, can Otpor! tactics actually work in Iran, given this commitment to violent repression?
Let’s explore the pessimistic view first: it is unlikely that widespread protests and mass demonstrations in Iran will work in the same way that they did Serbia and Egypt, for the above-mentioned reasons. There is no reason to believe that the Revolutionary Guard will rein in its violence against the protesters, and in order to carry out a sustained demonstration, ordinary Iranians would have to be willing to face down bullets, torture chambers and rapists for an untold amount of time. This is obviously not an attractive option. It’s hard to imagine more people on the streets of Tehran than we saw in 2009, and yet the regime was able to defeat them.
On the other hand, however, while Sharp’s tactics were broadly developed, they were not meant to be a one-size-fits-all prescription for demonstrators across the globe. Outside of mass demonstrations, Sharp also recommends identifying and exploiting a regime’s weaknesses to bring about its downfall.
Given Ahmadinejad’s penchant for violent suppression, the following are several potential weaknesses that protesters might exploit:
- The internal power struggle between Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Khamenei is preventing the regime from forming a united front. As a result, policy development has proven difficult, and any policy created leaves a large fraction of government officials dissatisfied and at times infuriated. If effectively leveraged, this could leave the door for some officials to take a more lenient approach in responding to a grassroots uprising.
- More than 60% of the Iranian population is under the age of 30. Ultimately, the regime will be forced to find a way to appease this demographic, as well as the growing unemployment rate plaguing them (now at nearly 15% overall).
- Scientific advancement is a central focus of the regime. Today, more than 65% of Iranians in university today are women, ultimately placing them in a stronger position to demand more rights. Given that women will be the majority of the population poised to make developments in this area, the regime will have to decide how to balance their desire to suppress with the necessity of advancement.
- Finally, the regime strongly relies on the support of those receiving government assistance to provide basic needs. These subsidies have largely ceased, eroding support among this once reliable base.
While the Ahmadinejad regime was successful in terrorizing its opposition into submission in 2009, it will be hard pressed to silence the voices of a movement committed to change, particularly given should movement leaders work to exploit these weaknesses. Undoubtedly, there are many working to expose them as we write and it’s a safe (and hopeful) bet that we haven’t heard the last of the Green Movement.
The CGA at NYU ethnic conflicts learning community is part of the MSGA Program in the Center for Global Affairs at New York University, taught by Professor Colette Mazzucelli, who is a member of atlantic-community.org.
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August 25, 2011
George Dekermenji
While there remains similarities between Iran leadership and the tyrannical leadership of Milosevic, Mubarak (and now Qaddafi) there remains key structural differences between their governments and the one in Iran that has lead to their collapse.
External influences:
- Milosevic was situated in Europe surrounded by enough European powers in addition to the United States that could and did in fact that attempt to influence and keep the regime's brutality in check, or to face severe consequences.
-Mubarak and Qaddafi have similar stories only over varying degrees of time. Mubarak was a dictator that kept his people in check, but because of the strategic relationship with the United States and the flow of immigration of Egyptians to the United States the people of Egypt were exposed to a lifestyle that they began to demand for themselves. However, Qaddafi over the last 3-4 years has improved relations with the United States dramatically. In that time he has made concessions that has improved the flow of communication in his nation away from centralized, and government controlled lines, to third parties and access to satellite communication. Just like Mubarak in Egypt, Qaddafi was forced to address newly created expectations against the promises his regime has made and the regime's inability to execute those promises. Coupled with the fact that NATO and the United Nations both exerted huge amounts of external influence over Libya and in the case of NATO they assisted militarily over the Qaddafi regime.
Compare this directly with Iran and you will find that the government has employed a method of import substitution in their communications sector, where it is completely governmentally administered and are therefore able to shut down external communications in a way that the previously mentioned dictators could not do. Also, while the government has talked about fixing the unemployment rate they still have the ability to buy off the necessary votes in order to win at least the majority.
Government structure:
Milosevic, Qaddafi, and Mubarak all suffered from similar plagues of government structure, they were clearly dictatorships regardless of all attempts to disguise their regimes as pseudo democracies.
Iran, no matter how much we want to say it is not a democracy, has 1 legitimate branch of government that is elected democratically, even though the pool of challengers is selected by the religious establishment. Iran can get away with this limitation because there is a popular consensus that Iran's national identity is tied with Shiism being part and parcel of the government structure. Unless there is a radical change in the Iranian population's thinking about the separation of the religious institutions and the political and governmental institutions we will not see a change in Iran's regime. I'm hard pressed to put the Iranian struggles with the rest of theater revolutions, however their struggles are one in the same. One of the motives for the Arab revolutions is representation and without actual representation I personally believe that Iran cannot reform because every movement needs a vocal party that can continuously get out the opposition party's message and there is no such ability in Iran currently. (this is illustrated through Syria because Syria's opposition party is having a hard time communicating in order to organize their one resistance.)
I look forward to hearing reading your response Dr. Mazzucelli