Egypt, Serbia, Georgia… The History of US Sponsored “Democratization”

Eric Walberg
Global Research
Thursday, March 3, 2011

There is a Russian proverb: only a fool learns from his own mistakes. As Georgia’s foreign minister visits his Egyptian counterpart, there are lessons for Egypt in similar revolutions in eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union.

Central to Egypt’s revolution was a tiny group of Serbian activists Otpor (resistance), who adapted nonviolent tactics of in the late 1990s and successfully forced Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic to resign in 2000.

Egyptian youth in the 6 April Youth Movement even adopted their clenched fist symbol, bringing Otpor once again into world headlines and TV screens.

It was the 2008 strike El-Mahalla El-Kubra to protest high food prices and low wages that brought about this unforeseen Serbian-Egyptian alliance. A group of tech-savvy young Cairenes decided to start a Facebook group to organise solidarity actions around the country, attracting a surprising 70,000 supporters. The results of the strike were mixed, with police attacking strikers and killing two demonstrators, and solidarity protests quickly dispersed.

Determined to build on their networking success, writes Tina Rosenberg in Foreign Policy magazine, Mohamed Adel, a 20-year-old blogger and 6 April activist, went to Belgrade in 2009 and took a week-long course in the strategies of nonviolent revolution with Otpor veterans, who had established the Center for Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) in 2003 for just such activists. He learned how to translate “Internetworking” into street protests, and passed on his skills to others in the 6 April Youth Movement and Kefaya (Enough).

The rest is history. A relatively peaceful overthrow of the Egyptian regime has made Egyptian youth the darlings of the world — Egyptian-American scientist Faruq El-Baz even suggested they be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The nonviolent revolutionary tactics made famous by Otpor and used to such remarkable success by Egyptians are an outgrowth of soft power strategies developed most famously by Mohandas Gandhi in the anticolonial struggle in the 1920-30s, and also by the US government during the Cold War to undermine the socialist bloc; in both cases, where direct military action against the enemy was not feasible.

Most directly relevant in the case of Otpor is Reagan’s National Endowment for Democracy (NED, 1983), which was instrumental in bringing about the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, funding all opposition groups left and right intent on undermining the socialist regimes. Warren Christopher, president Bill Clinton’s first secretary of state, argued, “By enlisting international and regional institutions in the work, the US can leverage our own limited resources and avoid the appearance of trying to dominate others.”

NED’s first president, Allen Weinstein, admitted that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

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