Overcoming despair and apathy to win democracy

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Waging Nonviolence is once again teaming up with Choose Democracy to provide resources on how to stem the rising authoritarian tide. This is the first in a series of interviews with experienced organizers and movement thinkers on ways to defend and expand democracy.

The Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic had already been in power for a decade, when a small group of university students began organizing what would become a successful nonviolent revolution in 2000. Calling themselves Otpor! (“Resistance!” in English), they began by developing their strategy and agreeing to not only rely on nonviolent tactics but to train others, making that a hallmark of their struggle. 

Knowing they couldn’t count on fairness from the government-controlled mass media, they focused on widely-felt weaknesses of the regime that could be dramatized by creative tactics and spread by word-of-mouth. They also issued a kind of manifesto — through their trainings — that defined their analysis of the problem, their vision of objectives and their commitment to nonviolent direct action. Because their goal required a mass movement, they networked with organizations less radical than they were. That choice to go beyond “political correctness” to relate to other interest groups paid off by giving them the numbers needed for boycotts, strikes and eventually strategic general strikes.  

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Since Serbia didn’t have its own tradition of mass nonviolent struggle to draw upon, Otpor! accepted training from international experts in nonviolent struggle. After Otpor’s victory, Ivan Marovic — one of the movement’s original leaders — continued strengthening his training skills and began making himself available to pro-democracy groups around the world.  

For the past two decades, Ivan has been designing learning programs on civil resistance and movement-building, while supporting the development of training organizations such as the African Coaching Network. He authored a training guide “The Path of Most Resistance” and is currently the executive director of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict.

With the biggest election year in history underway — and threats to democracy facing the United States and many other countries — I decided to ask Ivan about the many practical lessons he learned from Otpor’s success. Here, in Ivan’s own words, is the story of bringing down a dictator. 

In the United States at present, civil liberties are pretty strongly supported in the courts and society, although challenges and rollbacks certainly exist. What was that situation like for you, when you were starting your campaign?

I was coming of age in a country that was already deteriorating on all levels. There were certain liberties and standards and rights that were being stripped away on a daily basis. So, my feeling growing up was one of deterioration. Milosevic was trying to solidify his power from the very first moment, but especially towards the end. That’s when it became most threatening, and no longer subtle. 

At the very beginning, the thing that prompted us [to start protesting] were two laws that were passed by the government: one stripped away the autonomy of the university, the other made it impossible for the media to operate. That was the moment where we decided to push back. What we realized later, however, is that we had to go beyond just pushing back and reacting to these things. We needed to start building a positive platform, rather than just pushing against these dictatorial tendencies.

Was hope a factor for you? Did hope operate as a motivation for some part of your movement?

When we started, society was largely in a state of despair and apathy. And that is why we decided to use hope as one of our major forms of messaging. People were like, “How can you be hopeful? It looks like things are getting worse by the day.” But we didn’t care how people reacted to the message of hope, or that they reacted with skepticism. What we were focused on was whether people had a need for hope — and they did. They desperately wanted to hope. They were skeptical because they didn’t want to get hurt or disappointed. Cynicism and apathy were at the surface, but below that was actually a common desire to live in a normal country. That’s why one of our slogans was “We want Serbia to be a normal country.” It was silly because just wanting things to be normal was kind of outrageous. But this is why persistence is important. If you give up at the very first moment where you share the message of hope — and people react with skepticism — you actually lose the opportunity to uncover something that is behind that first barrier.

How big was your group when you started out? And how long did it take for the group to grow from the point of being small to realizing a mass movement was really possible?

The group that started this conversation was rather small — the initial number was a dozen people. And then, within weeks, we expanded that conversation towards several dozen, maybe 50 people. Then we tapped into our networks, and we managed to expand within a couple of months to a few hundred. That is where we exhausted our networks, and we realized that we needed to build new connections to bring in people who were not part of our social circles. That transformation — from a group of a few hundred to a group of thousands and thousands, and then tens of thousands — took us a whole year to figure out. We had to flip the way we used actions and tactics to maximize recruitment.

What do you mean? What did that look like?

We were spending so much energy just getting people into the street day after day, that we said, “We’re not going to recruit people to do actions, we’re going to do actions to recruit people.” Whether it was a street demonstration, or a picket or a sit-in, the first question we asked ourselves was: “How are we going to do this action so that we bring new people into the movement?” That changed the way we did things. We realized that shouting slogans, heckling politicians and things like that are too much of a hassle without new recruitment. We started doing more activities — actions and tactics that got people interested in joining the movement.

For example?

Instead of organizing a protest in the city center, in front of a government building where nobody’s around, we would organize those same protests at the outskirts of the city, in and around green markets or shopping centers. We spoke to people rather than shout at institutions where the doors were shut. The locations where we did street activities changed. Instead of shouting slogans, we would do something more interesting and engaging. This is how we discovered street theater, which helped us bring something interactive to ordinary bystanders. It exposed them to things that spark conversations, and those conversations would result in recruitment. 

I’ll give you an example: There was a solar eclipse that was happening at the time, and we put a big cardboard telescope in the middle of the street and invited people to observe the eclipse through the telescope. When they looked through the cardboard telescope, which was our own little contraption, they would see Milosevic’s head falling like a shooting star. They would laugh and then other people would want to see, and that would start the conversation. But the thing is, that action wasn’t aimed at the dictator or the members of the regime. It was aimed at the public. 

We wanted the public to be involved, to be engaged and to have some sort of a cathartic moment where they reflected not just on the problems they’re facing but on their role in perpetuating those problems. Our thing wasn’t: “The regime is bad, we’re good, support the movement.” It wasn’t that simple. Our message was: “How did we, as citizens, contribute to this problem through our action — or inaction, more precisely — and what we can do in the future to change that?” That was our invitation to those same people to join the movement because that was the way out of apathy. The way out of hopelessness is through coming together, working together and building that alternative together as a society, as a people. 

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Who were your first recruits? 

First were students, and that was natural because we were students. But then we expanded to people who were in their final year of high school, who were facing bleak prospects, and also young unemployed people, who just finished university and had no future after school. We became a youth movement — not just a student movement. 

Interestingly, the next group that joined was retired people, because they also felt marginalized. This was very important because retired people have a much better understanding of their own neighborhoods than young people do. They know who’s who and hang out with each other. So we got really good geographic spread when the retired people started joining. People who were in their prime — in their 30s, 40s and 50s — were actually the last join. So the movement was growing on the margins before it finally took over the most important part of the society.

All this is happening in the context of a dictatorship — so there were bound to be people who were worried about the risk of joining the movement. How did you handle that problem?

This was happening not just in a dictatorship, but in a dictatorship that was solidifying every day. It was getting worse and worse, and it wasn’t just any dictatorship — it was using nationalism as its main ideology. This is why Serbia, in the 90s, was involved in four wars — first with Slovenia, then with Croatia, then with Bosnia and then finally with Kosovo. Nationalism was the selling point among the regime supporters. So our movement was seen not just as a nuisance or a gadfly, but as an enemy within. 

Fortunately for us, they underestimated us as young people. They actually didn’t believe that somebody in their early 20s was a real threat. So when we were starting — in that first phase before we became strong enough — the regime was focused on more mainstream dissidents and opponents. For instance, the president before Milosevic got assassinated. Then the leader of the biggest opposition party survived two assassination attempts and was hiding in another country. Then the editor of the biggest opposition newspaper at the time was assassinated on Easter Sunday on his doorstep. People were being arrested and some were disappeared or killed. But those were people who were already identified as a potential enemy problem. 

We — as young student organizers — were flying under the radar. They didn’t see us coming, and we were lucky that they didn’t because in those first days, weeks or months, we still didn’t understand how to protect ourselves. Later, we learned and were able to respond and create a backfire to that repression.

What did that look like?

During our second year, it wasn’t a few hundred people anymore. It was thousands, tens of thousands — and [that’s when the regime] realized we were a threat. So one day, they organized this hasty press conference and declared Otpor!, our movement, a terrorist organization modeled after the Red Brigades, even though we never used violence. We were strictly nonviolent. We were never associated with any violent incident. But they needed the pretext to launch a crackdown, which came as a huge wave of arrests — hundreds and hundreds of our activists overnight. 

The problem for the regime was that the local police were doing the arresting. It’s not some special unit. If you have to do a sweep and arrest everybody around the country, you have to rely on the local police. And so the local police are arresting people who — when they get arrested — don’t fight back. This is something we practiced as a response. [We had our people say] “We respect what you’re doing. We’re not going to fight back. We understand that it’s not your choice to arrest us. You were forced by the regime, and you would rather go after criminals, not after students. We understand and we don’t hold a grudge.” 

That little sentence that was shared with the police officer during an arrest had a devastating effect on them. Their morale was in shatters. They didn’t know what was going on because they never encountered this before. [They were used to arresting people who] would fight back. So all of a sudden the police officers started calling in sick. They didn’t want to come to work. The regime freaked out, but we we didn’t know that at the time. We’d just been declared a terrorist organization. We thought “We’re done. It’s over for us.” 

When did you first become aware that the regime’s repression was empowering the movement? 

A year later, after Milosevic fell, we actually got access to the internal communication and learned that things were falling apart. People didn’t want to participate in [the repression]. But they weren’t [openly] refusing. They weren’t saying “no.” They were just calling in sick, and the regime realized that they had a crisis of legitimacy among their ranks, the repression was backfiring. 

Milosevic was much smarter in the early stages of his rule because he was relying on apathy and despair, not fear. When he started using crackdowns and repression, he shifted from spreading apathy towards spreading fear. But fear is not a very good ally for a dictator because if the repression backfires, then poof, fear disappears. All of a sudden you have a brave population that is fighting back. This is what we got towards the end. 

As the repression backfired, people became more courageous, because they realized, “Oh, my God, that gun that was pointed at me, was empty.” And then they all came out. But, again, I have to give this caveat: The only reason why this worked was because there was no crackdown in the first phase of our struggle. If they identified the threat earlier, and rounded us up when we were still a few dozen people, it would have been much easier for them.

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Did you have any ways as organizers that you intentionally tried to increase morale and encourage them to see through the government’s response — so that they understood they would get through this?

Even beyond the repression, we thought of a movement as a place where people can find themselves — and find themselves within a community. You join the movement because of the goal the movement is fighting for, but you stay in the movement because of other people. So when it comes to repression, we really wanted the movement to be there for people — whether for an arrest or intimidation, whatever pressures people were feeling. 

For instance, we had a protocol for arrests, which we called Plan B. We would initiate it as soon as we heard somebody was arrested. It was a buddy system, where everybody had a buddy to check in on them regularly. If you failed to reach your buddy that meant something happened — maybe that person was arrested and there were witnesses who saw it. Plan B was aimed at generating support for people who were arrested as soon as possible.

How did Plan B work in practice? 

Plan B said that as soon as you hear somebody’s arrested, you find out what police station they are in, and you start calling that police station right away. So everybody’s calling just to let those guys know that we know they are holding the arrested person. The second thing is to immediately call the lawyers and send them directly to the police station to demand to see the arrested person. Create that first line of pressure, and then immediately organize a secondary protest in front of the police station, involving community members that are well known. In smaller towns, you would go for local doctors, lawyers, people who are well known in that community — and try to get them in front of the police station. 

One time when I was arrested, they put me in solitary confinement for a couple of hours. Then, when they took me out to be questioned, I heard people outside the closed window. I knew that these were my people and that actually helped. If you’ve been arrested and you know that other parts of the movement are supporting you, that gives you such a boost of confidence and ability to cope with the crisis. 

We also would have a regular training, similar to what Rev. James Lawson was doing to prepare people for lunch counter sit-ins in Nashville. This was so they could see what they would encounter when attacked. We had people who had already been arrested — who knew what the police did — and had them play the role of the police. They would round up new recruits and actually take them through the whole process of what happens when you get arrested. That way, when they did get arrested, they already knew what was going to happen. That kind of preparation, together with the support I described, created a situation where people were much more capable of dealing with the dangers of arrest.

As you know, in our country, there’s a cultural expectation that people will use violence when they’re threatened. So were you also training people to remain nonviolent, despite the fact that they might be provoked?

We’re from the Balkans, so of course violence is a default reaction. This was [particularly the case] during the war in the Balkans. There were a lot of younger men — especially [within the] police and military — who had direct experience from the war. So using violence could really put you in a dangerous situation because there were people who participated in ethnic cleansing in the police force or paramilitary groups. We wanted to explain to our people that, “This is no joke. It’s the population that’s going to save us, so we have to make sure the population is on our side.” That meant we had to remain nonviolent. That was a discussion we had with people joining the movement on the very first day.

As we were building the movement, in those early stages, when we were only a few dozen people, we went and talked to our professors who all participated in the 1968 protests. We wanted to learn how to organize because they had the know-how, and we got really good insight from them. But we actually realized that we should talk to the generation before them — the generation that was organizing during the Second World War against the German occupiers. These were people who were painting stuff on the wall, like “Germans go home,” “Down with the Nazi Party.” For that, they would be severely punished, sent to concentration camps, some of them shot. 

Those people would tell us, “When we organized our underground cells and somebody said they wanted to join us, we would tell them, ‘You see that police station over there? Go and write an antifascist slogan on it.’ Ninety percent of them would turn around and never come back.” Then we asked, “Why did you do that? You just ruined the chance of recruiting more people? You could have been much bigger.” And they told us, “The worst thing that can happen to you is growing too quickly with people who are not ready.” That’s when we realized we had to put the filter at the very beginning. We don’t want to be dealing with elements in the movement that are going in a different direction. That’s why, when we recruited people, the very first conversation was: “Do you accept nonviolent civil resistance as a method of political struggle? Because if you don’t, there are plenty of opportunities for you elsewhere. But in this movement, this is how we do it.” 

By putting that up front, we actually created the filter that enabled us later on to maintain nonviolent discipline. People who joined the movement understood why the nonviolent method was the winning method, [and that couldn’t have happened without putting] that conversation at the very beginning. We learned that from our grandparents. They weren’t using nonviolence — because their struggle was different — but they were using a filter at the very beginning to make sure that only the best, most committed and ready joined the struggle.

What size would you say the movement was at its largest as a percent of your population?

The population of Serbia at the time was around 6.5 million people. We were growing steadily, and when we got to 20,000 members the thing started accelerating. Over the next couple months we grew from 20,000 to 80,000. But it was never centralized. People were joining the movement in their local chapters in the last couple of months, and we never had a full count of who was there. So 80,000 is an estimate. The last real count was 20,000. 

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As I mentioned, in the beginning, it was usually young people. Then we started getting people who were professionals, people who had either small shops or were taxi drivers, or were self-employed in one way or another. It felt safer for them to join. Then the next group were people who were working in large publicly-owned or run institutions, like teachers and medical workers. Then, finally, in the last couple of weeks, we got the workers, especially in large companies and entities like mines and electrical production — people who were actually running the industries. When they decided to join the strike that was already taking place, that was when we realized the game was over. The regime had no option but to step down, and they stepped down without a single shot fired, which people at the time said would never happen.

As you know, it’s common in social movements, as anywhere else, for there to be competition for leadership within a movement. Did such competition show up in your movement? And if so, how did you handle that?

We were really cautious about leadership questions when we were building the movement. From our previous experiences, we knew that when you would organize a protest, a leader would oftentimes emerge. That person might be elected by the people who were protesting — because he looked cool — or the media would show up, and they would elect the leader for you. Then that leader would have ambition, which would be more important than the protests or the other people. Then everybody gets disappointed because this guy is now suddenly pursuing a political career. That leader would feed on the energy of the collective and benefit from that, and people would be rightfully pissed. It’s like “Am I just a springboard for somebody to launch their political career?” Or those same leaders, because they are more visible, would be blackmailed, intimidated, arrested or killed. So it was also dangerous to be a leader.

When we were building a movement, we didn’t want to have leaders, but we knew we couldn’t say there aren’t leaders because, remember, the media will pick them if you don’t. You have to be really intentional about it, and that means collective leadership, federated leadership — or leadership on every level, so that there is leadership emerging on the regional and local levels. There are many leaders happening, there is a rotation, and that rotation is encouraged by the movement, so that no single person emerges as the sole leader over a long period of time. This was one of the things we promoted from the very beginning by saying, “We need collective leadership, because this is what happened in the past and we want to avoid that.”

So you baked that approach to leadership into the nature of the movement that you built. It was part of the culture of the movement, and as you recruited people, you were teaching them.

Exactly. Part of the movement’s DNA was: What does it mean to be leaderless? That doesn’t mean we don’t have leadership, that means we just don’t have individual leaders. But we do have leadership and this is how it works, this is how you become part of that leadership, and this is how you stop being part of that leadership, but then reappear again. 

One of the important things underlying this was a conversation — within the movement, especially among the original leadership who launched it — about motivation. What is the motivation for people to join the movement? Are you in this for money? If you’re in this for money, the problem with money is that, the more I get, the less you will get. If you’re in this for celebrity status, there is only a limited number of minutes in prime time, and the more minutes in primetime I get, the less you will get. If you’re in it for power, the more power you get, the less power somebody else is going to get. So they’re all zero sum games. But there is one thing we can all share and that’s glory — that’s participating in something bigger than us individually. If we build something big, everybody who participates in the building of that something will share the glory of the success. After that, you can go back and pursue your personal ambition. 

This was the understanding we had at the very beginning, when we were building the movement. In that original cohort, we needed to have that understanding amongst ourselves because then we could trust each other that — a few months in — nobody would be saying “Okay, I’m going to pursue a political career.” It’s not that people didn’t do that. We still had people who would fall off to pursue a political career, but because of that understanding, it didn’t hurt us. We were able to say “Okay, too bad, you could have participated in a glorious effort, but you decided to sacrifice it for a petty political career.” 

I remember, towards the end, I had a feeling that the movement was running itself. There was no need for me to do anything because the movement was now bigger than any of us individually. That was the moment where, I was like, “Wow, that’s a glorious thing we were talking about. Now, it’s finally happening.”

Tell me if I’m correct: You and the others in the leadership group that launched this movement spent a lot of time designing the culture of the movement in such a way that it would keep repeating. So, you didn’t need to be coming up with major cultural innovations a year or two down the road, because you’d already thought of so many parts of the design.

Exactly. This is what we call frontloading. You cannot have a meaningful discussion in a movement of tens of thousands of people. On top of that, there’s the problem of repression and surveillance. You have to be decentralized. So how do you achieve that democracy? The way we solved that problem was by having all those discussions and decisions at the beginning, when people are first joining the movement. They have to say “Yes, I agree with the fact that we are using a nonviolent method” and “We don’t have leaders” and “This is how we approach the problem of leadership and culture.” Another thing was, “We’re not going to pursue a political career.” These are all the things that we designed. So when people joined the movement, they had to accept those principles — and when they accepted those principles, they kind of voted for them by joining. 

Beyond those principles, there’s local autonomy. So we’re not going to tell you how best to run the movement in your own town. You know that best. As long as you stick to the principles that you accepted when you joined, you’re free to do whatever you feel is best. There weren’t people individually saying, “Okay, I think this is better,” and then doing something completely crazy, because they would work as a collective. They would keep each other accountable or in check. It is actually peer pressure, but peer pressure from their equals, from people in their own community.

Looking back, are there any mistakes you made that you would like to warn us about?

The biggest mistake we made was that we didn’t prepare for the transition. We didn’t prepare for demobilization. Part of that is natural — people just had enough of such an intense personal involvement in politics. They wanted to take some time off. But the remnants of the regime were licking their wounds and re-strategizing. They actually started fighting back because, when you have those regressive forces, they never disappear. They would sow the seeds of doubt and discord. They would undermine the enthusiasm of the people and promote apathy. It didn’t kick in right away. It took years for it to build up, and people would be like, “Oh, you know, was it all worthless? Look at all these things that went wrong and look at these things we could have done better.” But without a mechanism to address that, the only thing that came out of that questioning was disappointment and apathy. 

We should have been thinking about how to use the positive energy that came with removing a dictatorial regime towards building new institutions and creating new political platforms that could unleash enthusiasm and participation in a meaningful way. We could have created a better movement for that period of time. We didn’t do that. So what happened was the movement demobilized. The institutions that were taken over by the new political elites tried to do the transition through the institutional framework, but with little or not enough public participation. 

The problem with democracy is that it has to have a population that is mobilized and participating. If you leave it to the institutions, you get declining participation, which is what we had over the years. We had 70-80 percent voter turnout when we brought down the regime. It slid to less than 50 percent voter turnout. People stopped voting. They stopped participating in so many different ways. In the same way we prepared for the stage of the dictatorship, we should have prepared for this second stage.

As we prepare for the 2024 elections in the U.S., what do you think is going to hold activists back? What could be a problem for us?

It’s not specific to the U.S. but there is a sense that “It can’t happen here” or “What we have is already compromised, it’s not good enough. Or all politicians are the same.” This is how you get apathy and cynicism. 

Remember four years ago, whatever the Trump administration was doing, whether it was the Muslim ban or when they botched COVID and talked about injecting bleach while people were dying in droves or spraying tear gas on protesters in Lafayette Park so that Trump could hold the Bible upside down in front of the church? Those things really irritated people and motivated people. Part of the mobilization of 2020 was done by Trump. He partially mobilized the people who were fighting against him through his actions. I don’t know if that is the case now. So understanding that part of the strength of the pro-democracy movement wasn’t actually a result of the movement’s actions — but actually a result of the actions of the opponent — would be a really good starting point. 

How do we engage with people to bring them in so that it’s a relatively clear proposition to people that they need to participate in the election? How do we create mobilizations so that we don’t have to rely on a mobilization created by the other side? That’s something I’m thinking about lately.