Egyptian revolutionaries arranged — via Facebook — protests and strikes for April 6, 2008, but these efforts failed. Then the revolutionaries attended Revolution U, the Center for Applied Non-Violent Action, with its “professors” who had learned their craft running Otpor, the Serbian resistance movement:
But Otpor’s founders realized that young people would participate in politics — if it made them feel heroic and cool, part of something big. It was postmodern revolution. “Our product is a lifestyle,” Marovic explained to me. “The movement isn’t about the issues. It’s about my identity. We’re trying to make politics sexy.” Traditional politicians saw their job as making speeches and their followers’ job as listening to them; Otpor chose to have collective leadership, and no speeches at all. And if the organization took inspiration from Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., it also took cues from Coca-Cola, with its simple, powerful message and strong brand. Otpor’s own logo was a stylized clenched fist — an ironic, mocking expropriation of the symbol of the Serb Partisans in World War II, and of communist movements everywhere.
Otpor steered clear of the traditional opposition tactics of marches and rallies — partly out of necessity, because the group didn’t have enough people to pull them off. Instead of political parties’ gravity and bombast, Otpor adopted the sensibility of a TV show its leaders had grown up watching: Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Its daily work consisted of street theater and pranks that made the government look silly and won coverage from opposition media. Wit was perhaps not always achieved, but it was always the aim.
The most famous stunt involved an oil barrel painted with Milosevic’s picture. Otpor rolled it down a busy street, asking people to insert a coin in a slot for the privilege of whacking Milosevic with a bat. This was Otpor’s favorite kind of prank, a dilemma action: It left the regime damned either way. If the government had let the barrel roll, it would have looked weak. But when the police stepped in, the optics were no better: The Otpor members fled, and the opposition TV the next day showed pictures of the police “arresting” a barrel and loading it into the police van. The country sniggered at these pranks — and signed up for Otpor.
Rather than trying to avoid arrests, Otpor decided to provoke them and use them to the movement’s advantage. After a few months it became evident that while police would rough up Otpor members, torture was rare and few of them would even be kept overnight. When any Otpor member was arrested, the organization sent a noisy crowd to hang out on the street outside the police station. Detainees would emerge from the police station to find a pack of opposition journalists and a cheering crowd of friends. Young men competed to rack up the most arrests. If wearing Otpor’s signature fist-emblazoned black T-shirt made you an insider in the revolution, getting arrested made you a rock star. People who once thought of themselves as victims learned to think of themselves as heroes.
Two years after its founding, Otpor’s 11 members had become more than 70,000. “The signal thing they did that should never be lost is that they made it OK for Serbs to say publicly that the regime was not invincible, that many Serbs shared a sense that change could come,” said James O’Brien, the Clinton administration’s special envoy to the Balkans. By the time Milosevic ran for reelection as president of Yugoslavia in September 2000, Otpor’s prolonged protest campaign — and Milosevic’s attempts to suppress it — had eroded the president’s popularity and emboldened and helped to unify the opposition. When Milosevic refused to concede defeat to opposition candidate Vojislav Kostunica, Otpor’s example of disciplined nonviolence, along with its masses of activists, were crucial in convincing Serbia’s security forces to defy Milosevic’s orders to shoot at the protesters. On Oct. 7, the embattled president resigned.
The unthinkable had happened. For the young Serbs, the next step was figuring out how to export it.