I took the liberty of culling the following article from the washingtonpost
in order to share with you what I think is very instructive for all people
undergoing oppression. I believe we can learn from such experiences of
ordinary people and effect much needed change in our societies. We clearly
have a dictator like Milosevic. We have workers that can paralyze the
country. We have students. We have intellectuals and politicians. After
reading the article, you will realize that we have almost all the
ingredients necessary for mass agitation. We are lacking leaders with a
clear vision for the future. Leaders that can articulate to the masses back
home that what Yaya did to our children on April 10 and 11 is worse than
stealing election votes.
KB
________________________________________________________________________
LAZAREVAC, Yugoslavia. Oct. 8 –– In his dungarees, white T-shirt, red
Converse sneakers and orange baseball cap, Aleksandar Karic, 36, looks every
bit a Midwestern farmer--not the unlikely and celebrated Serbian rebel he
has become.
But the sudden and almost bloodless uprising that swept over Serbia this
autumn was swollen by unlikely heroes. Like the uprisings in neighboring
Eastern European countries 11 years ago, the riptide of change that forced
Slobodan Milosevic from power was propelled by a populist coalition of
workers, students and intellectuals.
Two weeks ago, Karic was a coal miner, fed up with the politics of his
country and, in equal measure, certain that the election of Sept. 24 was the
moment to break an authoritarian regime. Karic, 36, shared his longtime
disillusionment and his growing sense of destiny with Nenad Petrovic, 27, a
student, and Srbijanka Turajlic, 54, an intellectual dissident who was
expelled from her professorship at Belgrade University 18 months ago.
Together, they are representative of the face of Yugoslavia's "October
Revolution"--the men and women who went on strike, created and plastered the
symbols of resistance on walls, and finally gathered by the hundreds of
thousands last week to storm and take the pillars of power in the capital.
They were galvanized by the belief that their candidate for president,
constitutional lawyer Vojislav Kostunica, had won the election and that
Milosevic was planning to steal it. That fear, following 10 years of lost
wars, economic devastation and international isolation, was the tipping
point that turned this country's famous resentments inward on its own
leadership.
Aleksandar Karic's revolt began five days after the election, at 6:30 p.m.
on a Friday, when a committee of workers at the Kolubara mine complex near
this town 30 miles southwest of Belgrade signed strike papers and sent word
to the mine's command center to shut down operations.
"It was weird," said Aleksander Karic, 36, who had joined the democratic
opposition in Serbia in February and spent days before the strike talking up
the need for action. "I felt weird. What will happen? But I also felt
thrilled."
The strike threatened to cripple Yugoslavia's electricity supply, and the
police arrived within hours. But the challenge was spreading. Earlier that
night, employees at the local radio station, long in the control of
Milosevic loyalists, revolted and declared they would report the news
independently. It was a critical decision. The leaders of the official
union, once a tool of Milosevic, read the mood of the rank and file and
backed the strike.
"Our strength was a gift from God," said Karic, a longtime anti-communist
who was never in the union leadership. "We were reconciled to this fight.
After 10 years of dictatorship, our stomachs were empty and our spirits were
ready. We were ripe for the fight."
The radio station reported that the police had arrived at the mine, and at 2
a.m., townspeople began to stream out to offer support. That pattern would
be repeated five days later, when tens of thousands of people from around
Serbia came to resist a final police attempt to break the strike. On that
first night, the police ranks broke, as they would again, allowing the
friends and families through. Some people waded across the river by the mine
to get around police lines.
An amateur actor in local productions, Karic has a open personality. "I love
the limelight," he said. He worked the crowds and massaged the doubters. He
hid at the mine when the authorities ordered his arrest along with 10 other
named subversives. And, always, he believed in victory.
"The man is a hero," said miner Marko Milicenic, 30.
When the authorities, running out of options, offered to double the wages of
workers, Karic laughed at them. Out loud. In their faces. "This is not about
money," he said. "It's about votes."
For Nenad Petrovic, a 27-year-old taking classes at a Belgrade graphic arts
school with little chance of earning a good salary, the revolt was a
godsend.
"Everybody was lost," he said, because jobs were so scarce. "Then I found a
hundred people who all had the same ambition."
Two women in the Otpor student resistance movement had approached Petrovic
last year to design an easily recognizable icon. He recalled reading of a
clan in the "Lord of the Rings" fantasy trilogy that used a fist as its
symbol, plastering it on shields, swords and gates.
So Petrovic drew a simple, raised, clenched fist, framed in black and white,
and transformed it into a stencil so members of the movement could use it to
daub the fist in black-and-white ink on the walls of government buildings.
It was an immediate sensation after its published debut in the Daily
Telegraph newspaper last Nov. 2. The regime fined the newspaper and closed
it.
Within weeks, the fist started popping up everywhere, on police stations,
ministry buildings, shops, sidewalks and posters, serving as an eye-catching
call for unity in defiance of authority. The regime immediately understood
its subversive power. This spring, policemen jailed or beat more than 2,000
people for wearing the fist on T-shirts or painting it in public places in
the dark of night, according to the Belgrade-based Human Rights Law Center.
"I don't think it mattered what the fist looked like as much as the fact
that there were so many of them," Petrovic said. He also helped design a
bumper sticker that Otpor members plastered across photographs of Milosevic
throughout the country. It said, Gotov je, or "he's finished." Two million
stickers were printed and packed for transport in boxes topped with
literature of the ruling Socialist Party to fool any curious police.
The fist and the bumper sticker lay, in a way, at the center of the youthful
dissident movement's campaign to unseat Milosevic's regime by turning one of
its favorite tools against it: mass-media propaganda. The targets of the
campaign included both the government and the opposition--a grouping of
parties and leaders that many students complained were too grasping,
egotistical and duplicitous to win election.
Petrovic's work, like that of other marketing experts who lent their skills
to the effort, benefited from funds supplied by Serbian expatriates and
foreign governments, but the dissidents resented the regime's claim that
Serbia's enemies were buying their services. They say they used the foreign
funds to give expression to home-grown anger and frustration.
For example, Dragan Djokovic, 43, helped design and produce a postcard
featuring the faces of 16 children with a simple caption reading, "Greetings
from the Future of Serbia." He arranged for 100,000 copies to be distributed
in the capital and nearby towns as a subtle encouragement for voters to look
to a different future.
Djokovic, a former editor of Danas, an independent newspaper repeatedly
fined or closed by the Milosevic government, also helped conceive a broader
public relations campaign called "Info-Strike." The idea was to air the
opinions of average citizens of Serbia on bus stop billboards in Belgrade,
Nis and Novi Sad; in advertising space in major newspapers; and on 70
independent radio and television stations.
Those featured in the print ads often urged that the nation be run "by
normal people" and expressed embarrassment at the economic deprivations that
forced them to stand in line for bread and milk. At the bottom was an
astonishingly democratic notion: "Call us--speak--and we will publish." The
ads reached roughly two-thirds of Serbia's citizens.
Djokovic said, "people in Yugoslavia hadn't had a chance to make a picture,
to say something important to them. . . . People were frightened of the
consequences if they said their opinions in public. Our message was: There's
no reason to be afraid."
To execute the campaign, Djokovic turned to well-known Belgrade satirist
Voja Zanetic, 38, who had helped write a series of popular plays savaging
Milosevic's delusions of greatness. One portrayed him as a lunatic
pretending to be Napoleon; another depicted him as an Indian chief gripped
from time to time by fevers, a "Mr. Hyde and more Hyde," as Djokovic said.
Zanetic, who had helped design the defiant bull's-eye signs plastered
everywhere in Serbia during last year's NATO bombing campaign, said he was
eager to join the new effort. "I'm fighting for the chance to be like Art
Buchwald, to write about the funny things in everyday life instead of wars
and things like that," he said.
He said the dissidents' aim was to rebut interviews broadcast by the regime
on state-run television in which average citizens expressed their supposedly
fervent support for Milosevic's policies. "We didn't want to put experts
on," Zanetic said. "We are fed up with experts. The people won this
revolution."
Dissident intellectual Srbijanka Turajlic knew the uprising was going well
when she was tear-gassed. Standing in a large crowd in front of the
parliament building on Thursday, it was neither her first demonstration
against the regime nor her first gassing. She had protested in 1991, 1992
and 1996. But before, when the gas began to spread and the police drew their
batons, the crowds ran away.
This time they ran, but only to catch their breath. Then they turned,
swarming again toward the parliament building
"There was a sense, a collective sense, that it has to be finished this
day," said Turajlic. "You could feel that this crowd was going to finish
things."
From the rooftops, people shouted running commentaries on what was happening
at the head of the crowd. Turajlic, like everyone else, tried to push
forward. It was pointless; the crowd was too thick and vast.
And then a man emerged from the parliament building carrying a chair--the
merest token, but a symbol that some critical line had been breached. The
assault began in earnest and parliament and the state-controlled radio and
television building were in flames.
For days before, Turajlic had been organizing student protests and a strike
by university protesters. And she and others from the university worked
closely with political parties of the democratic opposition. That too was
new.
"In the past, we had not coordinated, but this time we were good soldiers,"
she said. "It was a fight for votes. And all of Serbia was involved. Not
just Belgrade. Not just students or intellectuals."
Like most of the crowd, Turajlic stayed through the night well into Friday
morning, but even when she went home exhausted, she felt only a battle had
been won.
Uncertainty--was the battle won or lost?--settled over the city.
"I was still very afraid of a Milosevic counterattack," she said. "Until I
saw Milosevic on television, congratulating Kostunica, I wasn't sure it was
over.
"In some ways, I still feel I can't be sure it's over."
WashingtonPost
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at
http://profiles.msn.com.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L
Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html
You may also send subscription requests to [log in to unmask]
if you have problems accessing the web interface and remember to write your full name and e-mail address.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
