Thanks to my colleague JohnO I get to read this FP article
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/02/16/revolution_u?sms_ss=email&at_xt=4d5ef64e97c4ebf6%2C0
"The Serbian capital is home to the Center for Applied NonViolent Action and Strategies, or CANVAS, an organization run by young Serbs who had cut their teeth in the late 1990s student uprising against Slobodan Milosevic. After ousting him, they embarked on the ambitious project of figuring out how to translate their success to other countries. "
My take:
Oh really?
U.S. Advice Guided Milosevic Opposition
Political Consultants Helped Yugoslav Opposition
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A18395-2000Dec3?language=printer
Who really brought down Milosevic?
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE6D81F3BF935A15752C1A9669C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=4
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Just how much money backed this objective is not clear. The United States Agency for International Development says that $25 million was appropriated just this year. Several hundred thousand dollars were given directly to Otpor for ''demonstration-support material, like T-shirts and stickers,'' says Donald L. Pressley, the assistant administrator. Otpor leaders intimate they also received a lot of covert aid -- a subject on which there is no comment in Washington.
At the
International Republican Institute, another nongovernmental Washington group financed partly by A.I.D., an official named Daniel Calingaert says he met Otpor leaders ''7 to 10 times'' in Hungary and Montenegro, beginning in October 1999. Some of the $1.8 million the institute spent in Serbia in the last year was ''provided direct to Otpor,'' he says. By this fall, Otpor was no ramshackle students' group; it was a well-oiled movement backed by several million dollars from the United States.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/nov/26/ukraine.usa
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while the gains of the orange-bedecked "chestnut revolution" are Ukraine's, the campaign is an American creation
, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple
unsavoury regimes.
Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box.
Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze.
Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organised a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman, Alexander Lukashenko.
That one failed. "There will be no Kostunica in Belarus," the Belarus president declared, referring to the victory in Belgrade. But experience gained in Serbia, Georgia and Belarus has been invaluable in plotting to beat the regime of Leonid Kuchma in Kiev.
The operation - engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience - is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people's elections. In the centre of Belgrade, there is a dingy office staffed by computer-literate youngsters who call themselves the Centre for Non-violent Resistance.
If you want to know how to beat a regime that controls the mass media, the judges, the courts, the security apparatus and the voting stations, the young Belgrade activists are for hire.
(...)The Democratic party's National Democratic Institute, the Republican party's International Republican Institute, the US state department and USAid are the main agencies involved in these grassroots campaigns as well as the Freedom House NGO and billionaire George Soros's open society institute.
US pollsters and professional consultants are hired to organise focus groups and use psephological data to plot strategy.
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Leaving aside the issue of the qualities -or lack thereof- of the respective governments overthrowed, I´d love to go to the US of A and start a "grassroots" spray-painting and civil disobedience campaign against the government of the US of A.... then see how far do I get before getting thrown into jail... ;)
FC
