Cruise Missiles or Clenched Fists- what got rid of Milosevic

international | miscellaneous | opinion/analysis Tuesday September 07, 2004 11:50 by Dave Lordan - swp dlordan at hotmail dot com

Account of meeting with former OTPOR leader in Belgrade

Former Serbian Dictator Slobadan Milosevic is currently on trial in The Hague for war crimes committed by the Yugoslav Army during the Balkan wars of the 1990’s. Few in the mainstream media seem to recall Operation Merciful Angel, NATO’s 78 day bombardment of Serbia in the spring of 1999, which failed to dislodge Milosevic or do to any significant damage to the JNA. More than 1500 people were killed during the bombing, many of them civilians, and if anything the bombardment strengthened Milosevic as fear of the bombs and a possible subsequent occupation united people behind the state and drove the opposition further underground. The bombing caused a major refugee crisis as thousands of Serbs and Kosovan Albanians fled in opposite directions to the presumed safety of ethnic strongholds. Kosovo then became, after Bosnia (which is ruled over by the failed British Liberal, Viceroy Paddy Ashdown), the second NATO colony in the Balkans. Unlike neighbours Croatia and Slovenia, Serbia is still remains outside the neo-liberal club of nations. Economic marginalisation means all Serb’s are made to suffer for Milosevic’s crimes . The poverty is worse among the expelled Serbs and Kosovan’s living in refugee camps or in border areas making periodic eruptions of ethnic violence inevitable

Whatever about holes in the memory when it comes to Merciful Angel there seems to be total wipe-out when it comes to recalling what actually got rid of Milosevic and his police state. The answer is good old-fashioned people power. On the morning of October the 5th 2000 tens of thousands of people began to gather in Central Belgrade calling for the resignation of Milosevic and the disbanding of the hated secret police. By nightfall they had surrounded and occupied the parliament and won their demands. What the most powerful weapons systems in the world failed to achieve in nearly three months people power achieved in the space of a day.

While in Belgrade recently I had the good fortune to meet up with one of the leaders of OTPOR, the organisation that claims the main credit for organising The October uprising. Below I recount what I learned from this chance meeting about the development of OTPOR before and after the fall of Milosevic. It is not a conclusive account of the Serbian uprising nor is it a description of the contemporary state of play in Serbian politics. It is simply an attempt to describe the rise and fall of OTPOR in the terms in which it was described to me by one of its leading members. Since it is the testimony of only one activist, albeit a principal one, it is necessarily incomplete. There are plenty of longer and more specific articles to be found on Serbia and the Balkans in general on activist websites. (see for example http://www.angelfire.com/wa/noentry/ArticleDb/ISJ/serbia.htm)

I was met Dragan through a serbian friend who introduced him as - ‘one of leaders of great Serbian resistance‘,. Dragan turned out to be one of the founding members of the ten strong organising committee of OTPOR.

Like most people in the west I had the impression by what I had read in both the mainstream and alternative press that the October uprising was a more or less spontaneous outbreak of mass anger that swept to victory by dint of the overwhelming power and momentum of numbers. I learned different from Dragan. According to him, the date of October 5th 2000 had been secretly named as a date for a general uprising two years in advance.

OTPOR was established in the aftermath of mass protests in the winter of 96/97, which, after brutal police repression, ultimately failed to dislodge Milosevic. The ten founding members constituted themselves as a secret organising committee whose remit was to build and train a mass organisation among young people, students, workers and the armed forces, with the ultimate aim of smashing the Milosevic regime within as short a span as possible. The OTPOR founders were not a politically homogenous group but they were all equally committed to using the methods of Non-Violent Direct Action. Dragan explained that "what OTPOR meant by this was the use of large numbers of people- essentially a majority of the population, or a large minority passively supported by the majority- to paralyse the economic and social life of the country and force the government to cave in". He mentions general strikes and the nationwide road blockades practiced by the Argentinian Piqueteros as two examples of OTPOR style NVDA.

In the police state conditions of Serbia, where cops and soldiers had long been used to viciously repress the first sign of mass opposition, guaranteeing the support or at very least the passivity of the armed forces was absolutely fundamental to winning . This support could only be achieved by having the support of an overwhelming number of the population so that the rank and file of the army could be persuaded that by attacking the movement they could be shooting at their own families and friends . "We put a really big effort into preparatory work in the army leading up October. Countless leaflets were distributed in army barracks. We had to have patience you know but this eventually started to work, so when Milosevic ordered soldiers to Belgrade to put down the uprising there were two responses among rank and file soldiers. One was ‘yes I am going to Belgrade but I am not taking my gun and I am joining the people‘. The second was ‘I am going to Belgrade and I am taking my gun and I’m joining the people‘."

At its height OTPOR had eighty thousand members. Now there are only a few hundred. OTPOR plans to disband in the very near future. I think there are two relevant questions arising from this incredibly rapid ballooning and then equally rapid bursting of the OTPOR membership. How did it grow so large, so quickly? Secondly, why did it collapse so completely in the aftermath of leading the most successful mass uprising on the European continent since the overthrow of Ceaucescu in neighbouring Romania a decade previously?

Dragan describes their organisation building method as ‘the RTA circle. Recruit, Train, Act‘.

Firstly their was open recruitment, or as open as semi-underground conditions allowed. Membership was based on simple commitment to active opposition to the regime; there were no other ideological requirements. Joining OTPOR then did not mean declaring yourself in favour of any particular ideological position, as a Trotskyist or anarchist or whatever. We also went out of our way to unite everybody, and I mean everybody who was opposed to Milosevic under the one roof. We had everybody from far left to people who wanted to bring back Serbian monarchy’

‘It was common for groups of young people from particular colleges or localities to join up together. We would then give them an appointment to come along to a weeklong training course. Training took place in the evening and consisted in education on the rules, structures and goals of OTPOR and in the methods of NVDA. As soon as training was over this apprentice group had to plan and carry out its first action within a week. This did not have to be a large action, usually it would be small demonstration outside the office of a local politician, or just spraying graffiti on a prominent landmark or building’ In this way the bright red clenched fist which was OTPOR’s trademark came to be recognised all over Serbia as a symbol of the spreading resistance.

The leadership of OTPOR felt that, as Oscar Wilde put it, nothing worth learning can be taught. They decided to step back a certain distance from the actions of their membership. ‘We did not tell new members what they had to do to fight Milosevic but instead we assisted them in planning and carrying out actions they themselves decided were appropriate. We give them all the resources they need but they must do the action themselves. The only rules were that the action had of course to be directed against the regime and it had to be publicly visible or leave a publicly visible mark‘.

By giving new members their head, by showing them that it was through their actions that things would change in Serbia, they ensured a sense of pride and self-esteem was attached to belonging to OTPOR. At a local level OTPOR members felt a true measure of democratic control over their actions within the organisation.

It should also be said that he rapid ‘blooding ‘ of new members is characteristic of more paramilitary style organizations.

This style of building put immediate responsibility to act into the hands of new members, thereby generating a rapidly mushrooming core of emboldened activists with the self-confidence to act on their own initiative and to encourage and organise others beyond them who wished to join in. Having formed, trained, and overseen the first actions of a fledgling branch, field organisers could move on to the next set of new members reasonably confident that they had left behind a viable and lasting cell of enthusiastic activists who had the ability to survive and grow. Throwing new members in at the deep end also meant that particularly talented organisers could be spotted immediately and moved quickly into positions of greater responsibility within OTPOR .

However, in other ways the ten-person leadership retained tight control over OTPOR. They held the reins of what Dragan calls ‘lines of communication‘, by which I think he meant the OTPOR apparatus or organisational staff. "This was particularly important so that there could be a quick and effective response if there were arrests or other kinds of repression". It also of course meant that the leadership had a picture of what was going on in the organisation as a whole and that they could therefore ensure a measure of stewardship over it, heading off factionalisation or pushing for particular positions favoured by them.

Large co-ordinated actions like national demonstrations, as well as strategic decisions as to where OTPOR should focus its efforts and what form precisely the coming uprising would take, were discussed widely among members. As far as I could gather the leadership entered these debates, after having reached a consensus they, with a united position. Probably the apparatus was instructed to argue the leadership position also. When the discussion had finished and a majority declared itself for one particular position, then all members had a responsibility to carry out the policy or action without further dissension. "During the period of discussion everyone had rights, but afterwards when action was to be taken they had only responsibilities". Dragan also informs me that the original ten-person leadership committee was never put up for election.

But with Milosevic gone the complete elevation of technique over ideology began to tell in the immediate factionalisation of OTPOR. What was the purpose of OTPOR in a post Milosevic Serbia, a Serbia with a vibrant and uncensored media, as Serbia where you could express your political opinion freely without fear of being arrested or being disappeared, a Serbia where it seemed change could be brought about through merely voting. Should they push for a more radical reform of society than the mild improvements being offered by the new American backed political elite under Kostunica? If so should they form a political party? If so should it be a revolutionary party? What did revolution mean? A hundred strategic questions that had never been properly debated within the swelling ranks of OTPOR when it was on the rise now broke to the surface at the very moment of its zenith.

Having decided previously that these questions were irrelevant to the problem of overthrowing Milosevic the leadership had, among themselves, agreed to disagree on them. As a result no strong argument was made from the top of OTPOR to follow one path or another. Much of the membership lapsed into passivity or just got back to the humdrum tasks of normal living.

Among the remainder two trends emerged. Many joined the ranks of the multiple political parties that bloomed like so much cherry -blossom in the Serbian spring. Among these politicos a sizable proportion opted for entry into the Democratic Party, a moderate electoralist organization which includes neo-liberals in its leadership .

The more technically and organisationally inclined, including Dragan himself, refused to throw their lot in with any particular party. Instead they set about passing on their rich experience of organising a mass movement in a dictatorship. For this purpose Dragan and others run a kind of international NVDA hub from a centre in Belgrade. "Recently we have helped Georgian’s to organise against Shevernadze, last month I travelled to Turkey, we get requests for advice and training from many groups of activists who face a situation like ours under Milosevic"

It is clear that this NVDA centre is involved in highly laudable work, engaging with social movements which are on the margins of western radical consciousness and passing on to them the highly valuable lessons learnt from their own struggles. . But since their mission is solely to give technical advice and not to advance any political theory other than the efficacy of NVDA is there not a danger that they might not end up as some kind of consultancy, not only for those who are challenging power, but also for those who hold it?

Andre’s latest- and maybe strangest- clients are a group of Titoists who hold local government power in a Bosnian mining village. Dragan says ‘it is the last village in the whole of the ex Yugoslavia which still has a bust of Tito in the town square. These are real old style communists and most of them are like over seventy’ Dragan is advising them on how to win the next local election.

Dragan’s next big project is literary. He wants to right a book on the rise and fall of OTPOR. I think it is a book every activist would benefit from reading.