A RAINBOW OF REVOLUTIONS
Jan 19th 2006

The Economist

If outsiders make such a mess of getting rid of despots, why not
encourage the locals to have a go?

THE Iranian government is annoying. Despite its denials, it seems
determined to make a nuclear bomb. It is neither persuaded by
diplomacy, nor cowed by the threat of sanctions, nor worried by the
possibility of attack. And in truth outsiders are pretty powerless. But
don't worry: their easiest option--to wait--may not be such a bad one.
With luck, it is only a matter of time before decent, sensible Iranians
rise up and overthrow the religious zealots and incompetent populists
who rule them. As frequent protests show, discontent is widespread:
women publicly campaigned for their rights during the presidential
campaign last June, Tehran's bus drivers struck last month. The old are
fed up, and feel betrayed. The young want jobs and fun. In fact, Iran
is ready for revolution. Surely it will be the next country to see a
magnificently non-violent, colour-coded, do-it-yourself regime change?

It is certainly a beguiling thought. Iraq has proved a sobering
experience for those who thought a small war was all that was needed to
replace an unpopular tyranny cheaply and painlessly with a friendly
democracy. The removal of Saddam Hussein has certainly not been the
exemplary exercise that would, some Americans believed, serve as a
model across the ripe-for-reform Middle East. Meanwhile, however, the
world has marvelled at the way one stinker after another has been
almost elegantly thrown out of office--most recently in Georgia,
Ukraine and Kirgizstan--with scarcely any trouble or expense on the
part of outsiders. How nice if the Iranians would now oblige, too.


People power has actually been around for a while. The 20th century was
so horribly bloody that it has been easy to overlook the potency of
peaceful boycotts, strikes, civil disobedience and public protests in
many of the greatest upheavals of the past hundred years. In their
book, "A Force More Powerful", Peter Ackerman and Jack Duvall chronicle
some of those events: the popular uprising in Russia in 1905, Mohandas
Gandhi's campaign for Indian independence, the Danes' resistance to the
Nazis, Martin Luther King's civil-rights campaign in America,
Solidarity's triumph in Poland, the noisy clattering of pots and pans
in Chile in 1983 that sounded the beginning of the end for Augusto
Pinochet, the demonstrations that eventually drove Ferdinand Marcos of
the Philippines from office in 1986, the first Palestinian INTIFADA,
the Tiananmen protests in 1989, and others. Few of these brought about
an instant change of regime, but all of them proved seminal: that is,
they planted the seeds of change.

The secret of people power's success is simple: a tyranny can cut off
one head or even 1,000, but 10,000 or 100,000 is much more
difficult--and becoming more so with time. Stalin and Mao got away with
it, because nobody dared risk a world war by taking them on, and Pol
Pot and the Rwandan GeNOCIDAIRES got away with it because nobody cared
enough to stop them. But the last Soviet dinosaurs shied away from it,
and even Erich Honecker's East German thugs decided not to use force to
stop the mass migration of their citizens through Hungary to the West,
thus ensuring the collapse of European communism. In East Germany,
small civil-rights, environmentalist and women's groups that had
quietly been incubating in the Lutheran church suddenly and confidently
emerged. Then came mass rallies in East Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig and
other cities, from which arose the cry, "We are the people!" It was all
too much, even for an apparently ruthless and monolithic system of
control.

That communism could be thus brought down, gloriously and bloodlessly,
sent shivers of fear through the world's despots, and of exhilaration
through their subjects. The implacable white South Africans who
sustained fortress apartheid now realised that they could not hold out
indefinitely: more than ever, the use of force, their traditional
response to peaceful boycotts, rent strikes, demonstrations and the
country's range of civil movements, made them look desperate, and
robbed them of any claim to be respectable, still less democratic. By
February 1990, Nelson Mandela was out of prison, and by 1994 the
rascals had been thrown out in a democratic election. People power had
not alone been responsible for changing the regime, nor had it all been
done non-violently: the main movement, the African National Congress,
had a guerrilla army. But non-violent action had surely played a large
part in ending apartheid.

Though the ground was rocky and the plant has proved weak,
democratisation moved through Africa in the 1990s like feathergrass.
Such countries as Benin, Cape Verde, Ethiopia, the Gambia, Ghana,
Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda and
Zambia all got rid of dictators, moved to a multi-party system or
cleaned up their act in other pro-democracy ways, and several were
moved to do so only after strikes, demonstrations and other, usually
peaceful protests. Something similar happened in countries as far
afield as Bangladesh, Guatemala, Indonesia, Mexico, Nepal, Nicaragua,
Peru, South Korea and Taiwan.

In Europe, once the most closely controlled satellites of the Soviet
Union had been set on a democratic course, Yugoslavia was the next
place to be weaned off authoritarianism, and Slobodan Milosevic the
next big casualty of popular action. The great demagogue of the
Balkans, who had risen to power by putting the fear of St Vitus into
the Serb masses, was in October 2000 brought down by the same masses as
they turned against him. After 13 years in which he had impoverished
his people and led them to defeat in two wars, he tried to ignore the
election victory of his opponent. That brought half a million or more
Serbs on to the streets of Belgrade, and quite a lot of them storming
through the doors of the Yugoslav parliament. Crucially, elements
within the police and armed forces changed sides.

THE ROSE REVIVES...
The ripples from that upheaval were soon felt as far away as Cote
d'Ivoire, where in 2000 street protesters, openly invoking the example
of Yugoslavia, drove General Robert Guei from the presidency that he
had seized a year earlier. Bigger tyrannies were soon to totter.
Georgia's authoritarian government fell in 2003 in a "rose" revolution
brought about, at least in part, by three weeks of protests with tens
of thousands on the streets. The next year Ukraine's post-Soviet regime
came to a similar dramatic end in an "orange" revolution involving
thousands of Ukrainians camped patiently in the December snow.

Then, in March 2005, came the collapse of Lebanon's puppet government
after nearly 1m demonstrators had defied a ban on protest against the
Syrian masters who pulled its strings. By the end of April, Syria's
troops were out and a 29-year military involvement was over. By that
time Kirgizstan's unpopular president of 15 years had also been put to
flight, after a month of demonstrations that culminated in an
exhilarating surge through several government buildings. After that
"tulip" revolution, all eyes were on the other Central Asian
nasties--in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and especially
Uzbekistan, whose president, Islam Karimov, was soon to tell his troops
to shoot hundreds of civilians after an uprising that he blamed on
Islamist terrorists. But perhaps Iran's rulers should have been just as
worried: in Iran, the tulip is the symbol of martyrdom.

Don't bank on their early departure. Don't even assume that popular
revolutions are always for the good. Some can be bad from the start. In
Bolivia, for example, mass uprisings have tended to look rather like
mob rule. A country with a long tradition of coups (nearly 200 between
1825 and 1980), it has struggled to adopt the democratic habit, running
through five presidents in the past five years (a sixth is sworn in on
Sunday). One, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, was driven from office in
2003, just 15 months after his election, by violent clashes over his
plan to sell natural gas to the United States via Chile. "Gas wars",
mostly in the form of protests by indigenous Indians, returned last
year, forcing out another president, Carlos Mesa. Bolivia does now have
a ruler, Evo Morales, who has been properly elected in a fair election,
so the nationalist, left-wing policies of the protesters have won a
retrospective endorsement (see article[1]). But that hardly excuses the
earlier uprisings.

Many more popular overthrows that at first seemed splendid have turned
out badly. To their credit, the Philippines and Indonesia have
confounded critics, but optimists have been disappointed in several
African countries, and Nepal looks awful. Perhaps the most
disillusioned revolutionaries, though, are the orange-clad Ukrainians,
who last September saw their former hero, Viktor Yushchenko, sack his
government amid feuds, splits and charges of corruption, and last week
saw their parliament sack its successor. A poll taken in November by
Freedom House, an American lobby group, said 60% of Ukrainians,
including 44% of those who supported the 2004 protests, thought the
country was heading in the wrong direction.

More worrying for some of those Americans who believe that democracy
will serve the United States' interests is the possibility that it will
be destabilising, or result in the election of hostile governments. It
is clear that elections often return to power the people who previously
held it undemocratically. That is how virtually all the Central Asian
autocrats managed to hold on to office after the Soviet Union broke up
in 1991, and the pattern has been slow to change: the tulip-waving
demonstrators who denounced President Askar Akaev in Kirgizstan last
March are now ruled by his former comrades.

...THE HAZARDS, TOO
Elections are not necessarily free, of course, and even free elections,
on their own, do not constitute a democratic system. "As a rule,
'electocracy' should not be confused with democracy," rightly avers
Richard Haass, head of policy planning in the State Department in
2001-03, in his book "The Opportunity". But even free elections in a
truly democratic system might well, in some places, produce an Islamist
government.

Is that a risk worth taking? The dissident Mr Haass counsels caution.
"It is neither desirable nor practical to make democracy promotion a
foreign-policy doctrine," he says. Too many "pressing threats" get in
the way of beautifying the way other countries govern themselves. And
America's record seems to bear him out, especially when the war on
terror or western energy supplies enter the picture. Central Asia is
close to Afghanistan, so the United States maintains a base in
Kirgizstan and had one in Uzbekistan too, until it was thrown out last
July. Uzbekistan is also one of the countries to which it has
"rendered" terrorist suspects. Similarly, in the interests of energy
security, it has supported Ilham Aliev, the incumbent despot in
Azerbaijan, welcoming the pipeline that now runs through his country.
And the politics of oil might also make it difficult to support people
power in Saudi Arabia, just as the politics of the entire Middle East
has stopped America pressing the democratic case too hard in Egypt.

Still, George Bush often says, as in his inaugural address last year,
that "it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the
growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and
culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." And
the promotion of democracy is now an official objective of countries
like Britain, Canada, Germany and the Netherlands. So can people power
become an instrument of foreign policy?

Several organisations believe so. America has groups such as the
National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican
Institute, the Middle East Partnership Initiative and the National
Democratic Institute, all financed by the government. Britain has the
Westminster Foundation, also government-backed, and so on. These are
not specifically charged with promoting people power, but they
sometimes do, as, for instance, in Kirgizstan. The trouble is that, try
as they may to present themselves as neutral agents removed from
government--the National Endowment for Democracy often describes its
activities as "technical assistance"--they are usually seen as arms of
the CIA or its equivalent. Genuinely independent NGOs, which were
active in the Georgian upheaval and several others, are often similarly
tarred.

Even so, it is tempting to think that outsiders can help. It is clear
that a successful popular change of regime--one, that is, that results
in a reasonably democratic and enduringly free system--is much more
likely to emerge if it has certain characteristics. What is needed,
according to an analysis by Freedom House of 67 overthrown
dictatorships, is "broad-based, non-violent civic resistance--which
employs tactics such as boycotts, mass protests, blockades, strikes and
civil disobedience to delegitimate authoritarian rulers and erode their
sources of support, including the loyalty of armed defenders." Such
people power can be decisive. And if it is a significant feature of the
change of regime, the emergence of a free society is much more likely
than in a top-down change of power brought about by elites or others
close to power. Moreover, the most important factor in contributing to
the emergence of a freer society is the presence of strong and cohesive
non-violent civic coalitions.

So, if outsiders can encourage any of these features, they may succeed
not just in spreading democracy but in state-building. Accordingly,
Freedom House suggests donors should support local NGOs, and offer
training in coalition-building and non-violent resistance. It and
others advocate efforts to help the local media, with training or money
for computers, mobile phones or even a printing press: such assistance
proved crucial in Kirgizstan.

The International Centre on Nonviolent Conflict, based in Washington,
DC, is perhaps more involved in the promotion of peaceful people power
than any other organisation. Financed entirely by its own officers,
members and employees, it neither takes money from governments nor
works with them. It aims to do good by spreading the word. One method
is to distribute videos of a documentary series of "A Force More
Powerful", which shows how non-violent resistance can be used to effect
change. The videos, translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, Persian,
Russian and Spanish, have gone to over 60 countries, greatly
displeasing the authorities in Cuba, Iran and Zimbabwe, among others.

The centre will not help anyone directly to overthrow a government. It
does, however, run workshops for activists seeking the peaceful
promotion of democracy or human rights. These often draw on the
experience of those who have successfully used non-violence: a group of
Serbs, for example, now travel the world telling the story of Mr
Milosevic's downfall and thus giving confidence to those who want to be
rid of their own local tyrant. The centre has also developed a
conflict-simulation game that shows the effect of different
tactics--strikes, demos, boycotts, etc--which can be tailored to
particular circumstances.

ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL
Success has many fathers, and when people power turns out well many
will claim the credit. Reasonably enough: the pressure of foreign
governments, the activities of outside NGOs, moral support, financial
help, the foreign press, the use of e-mails and so on have all
contributed to the downfall of various dictators. But all the evidence
is that people power, if it is to bring about a lasting change that
increases freedom, must bubble up from below. It must be indigenous,
broad-based and, ideally, non-violent. In practice, that means it must
be organised, and led by people who could be plausible politicians
after the revolt. And they must be on the spot: exiles carry little
weight if they have sat out the struggle at a safe distance--a truth
well understood by the Cubans, who fear a United States-shunning
dissident like Oswaldo Paya far more than any ranter in Miami.

Countries with few local NGOs, civic groups, trade unions, churches,
student organisations or other independent sources of influence are
unlikely to produce the necessary leaders. And if they do, the sensible
autocrat will squelch them as soon as possible. That is what happens in
Iran, where opponents of the regime, especially students, are given no
chance to organise, and where television is always censored and
newspapers often closed.

Yet people power still worries the world's authoritarians. The Chinese
sent 10,000 policemen to a southern town last week to crush a
demonstration that involved barely half as many participants. Thousands
of similar protests have erupted across China recently, and the
country's chief press regulator, Shi Zongyuan, unblushingly admitted in
November: "When I think of the colour revolutions, I feel afraid."
Russia, too, is concerned: NGOs, says the head of its security service,
are plotting to destabilise the country. A new law now restricts
domestic ones and gives the government power to close down their
foreign counterparts. Russia also harasses the American-backed agencies
promoting democracy in Central Asia.

Plenty of other governments, from Belarus to Myanmar to Zimbabwe, are
frightened. They are probably right to be. It may take years to
develop, and it may not always turn out quite as is hoped, but people
power is catching: the more often it works, the more often it will be
used.

Back to EARI in the News