Time of the Rebels: Youth Resistance Movements and 21st Century Revolutions - Couverture souple

Collin, Matthew

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 185242964X ISBN 13 : 9781852429645

Editeur : Serpent's Tail, 2007

Synopsis

At the start of the 21st century, a wave of revolution moved across the former Communist east. Uprisings in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine swept aside unpopular undemocratic governments. At the heart of these revolutions was a new kind of youth movement. Groups like Otpor, Kmara and Pora staged spectacular and dramatic protests, using humour, satire and the power of popular culture to undermine the authorities. The Time of the Rebels is the inspiring story of those movements ? participants tell how they created popular resistance movements, defying threats, violence and mass arrests in an attempt to change their countries and the world. Using first-hand accounts and eyewitness reportage, the book also tells how in other countries, such as Belarus and Azerbaijan, fierce clampdowns by the authorities thwarted similar attempts to stage revolutions.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Matthew Collin is the author of the critically-acclaimed books Altered State, This is Serbia Calling, The Time of the Rebels and Pop Grenade. He has worked as a correspondent for the BBC and Al Jazeera, and as the editor of The Big Issue, i-D magazine and the Time Out website. He has also written for many newspapers and magazines, including the Guardian, Observer, Wall Street Journal, The Face, Mixmag and Mojo. He is now researching a new book for Serpent's Tail about electronic dance music culture around the world.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

The Time of the Rebels by Matthew Collin

Leadtext: It was twenty minutes past eight in the evening and the city was already in darkness when one of the leaders of the youth resistance sent a text message to my mobile phone.

The temperature was eight degrees below zero and I was standing in October Square in the centre of the Belarussian capital, Minsk, where thousands of people had gathered on the frozen grey stones for another tense night of protest against the country's indomitable president, Alexander Lukashenko. A late winter breeze was chilling the bones, and my Belarussian friends were stamping their feet in time to the heavy rhythms thrashing out of the sound system in an attempt to keep themselves warm and raise their spirits high enough to beat back the fears about what might happen next, at least for as long as they could manage it.



"City Hall. Near pyramid of glass near trees. In 15 mins," read the text message. I knew he wouldn't wait if I was even a few minutes late; he had said as much earlier. There were too many armed police on the streets that night to hang around for long, especially for someone who was under surveillance: he truly believed that he was a wanted man.



As he emerged from the gloom into the frosty silence of the deserted park, I recognised him immediately, even though he wasn't wearing any opposition badges or stickers; this would have been far too risky for someone involved in organising protests which the authorities had warned could be prosecuted as terrorist acts. He was a tall, dark youth in his early twenties, and he was extremely edgy, gabbling nervously about some of his comrades who had gone missing a couple of days beforehand, presumably detained by the police after the night's demonstration had ended. Nobody knew where they were being held; the police were saying nothing; their parents were frantic with worry. Such stories were not so unusual, that week in Minsk.



He led me on a long, twisting route through the city's snow-covered backstreets, sometimes doubling back, sometimes changing direction abruptly as if to confuse anyone following him, flitting in and out of bars and restaurants, scanning the tables for plainclothes state security officers or off-duty policemen enjoying an evening refreshment. When we finally found a café where he felt secure enough to talk quietly, he demanded to see my passport to check that I was who I said I was. He was apologetic, but insisted that it was necessary: in this country, not everyone is who they seem, he said. At the time, I thought him a little paranoid, but as it turned out, they were out to get him. A few days after we met, he was arrested by the secret police.



Minsk was the final destination on a series of journeys through turbulent times, through days of chaos and uncertainty and nights of hope and wonder, and this young Belarussian was just the latest of many who had committed themselves to the cause of peaceful resistance. At the start of the twenty-first century, a wave of revolution began to sweep across former Communist states, from Serbia to Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. Dramatic images filled the television screens of the world: fresh-faced youths marching proudly under brightly-coloured banners; rows of hardy tents pitched on grand boulevards, flying flags of justice and freedom; revellers chanting and dancing amidst gusts of tear gas and the fierce crack of plastic bullets; crowds of jubilant insurgents bursting into parliament buildings, the police unable to hold them back... At first these fairytale uprisings looked like a sequel to the 'velvet revolutions' which hastened the fall of Communism across eastern Europe at the end of the nineteen-eighties: 'people power' revolts which challenged the might of an authoritarian state not with weapons, but with the pure force of righteousness. They sang to soldiers, laid flowers upon riot shields, met repression with defiant humour. Freedom can't be stopped, they declared.



But although they targeted the old functionaries who had held on to power since the fall of Communism, this was not simply 1989 revisited; at the heart of all these revolutions was a new kind of youth movement, a product of its own time and place. Otpor in Serbia set the template which the others were to follow: a tiny faction of disaffected students which grew into a subversive network spanning the entire country. Otpor had one simple goal: complete democratic transformation. Its activists had learned from the liberation movements of 1989, but their methods were resolutely modern: the marketing techniques of the advertising industry, the new technologies of the internet and the mobile telephone, the graphic possibilities of desktop publishing, the seductive signs and symbols of popular culture. This was politics with a smart logo and a pulsing beat. It made regime change fun.



There were also echoes of 1968, the last mass outbreak of student unrest in Europe, when hundreds of thousands of young people took to the streets of Paris, Berlin, London and other cities to protest against the Vietnam War and demand socialist liberation. But this time, the fight was for liberal democracy and the values of 'the West', at least as they were imagined: free speech and free markets. The new student revolutionaries didn't consider themselves militants or radicals, but noble dissidents and genuine patriots. Otpor's members had seen other former Communist countries move towards the promised land of the European Union while their own, Yugoslavia, regressed into isolation and armed conflict. They wanted, they said, to reverse the decline, to 'become part of the world' again, to 'live a normal life'.



My first direct contact with Otpor came in January 2000, when one of its leading members, a literature student, visited the apartment where I was staying in Belgrade. We talked about rock music and the nature of betrayal that day, and about the fury she was feeling about Serbian bands who were collaborating with record companies which had links to the government of Slobodan Milosevic. It was a time for taking sides, she said, and they had chosen the path of darkness, sold out their own generation - her generation - for some small ugly reward. "They are giving an alibi to the corrupt," she insisted... She said she didn't join Otpor when it started because she thought it would be just another pointless political project - she hated politicians and their sordid posturing - but she quickly realised that this was something very different; that it had an enthusiasm and a sense of purpose which the Serbian opposition had lacked for years.



Over the coming months, as the fall of Milosevic approached, I got to know more of the Otpor activists, and came to appreciate the sheer imaginative daring which put them one step of the authorities. They were great storytellers, too, with a powerful sense of the absurd. One of them recalled an incident when their office was raided, and one policeman - lacking anything else to seize - tried to confiscate a pair of her trousers, as if they were some kind of subversive talisman. It was this sort of everyday idiocy which kept them in fine spirits and nourished their sense of destiny. The authorities were serious, but the Otpor youths were just laughing at them, like the whole thing was just a ludicrous movie spooling ever faster towards the final credits.



Every few years, an idea comes along which connects with a generation in a deep and powerful way, setting off reactions which could never, even with the best of foresight, have been predicted. Otpor was like a viral explosive which detonated in the consciousness of like-minded youths; a thrilling flash of revelation which set them dreaming and scheming. The Serbian youth movement was followed by Kmara in Georgia and then Pora in Ukraine, both using similar logos, T-shirts, stunts and pranks, as the virus spread into the former Soviet Union. I already knew about Pora when I arrived in snow-covered Kiev during what would become known as the Orange Revolution - like the others, they had an English-language website - so I headed straight for their office, a dusty basement near the foreign ministry, cluttered with posters, stickers and half-finished cups of coffee, with muffled rock music playing from a computer somewhere in the background, like a scruffy student common room. It could almost have been Otpor's old office on Knez Mihailova street in central Belgrade. A short walk away, thousands of Pora activists were camping out on the city's main street - until victory, they insisted. It was clear that after the revolutions in Serbia and Georgia, the emergence of Pora was more than a coincidence: a new phenomenon had emerged.



After the Orange Revolution, I spent the next year tracing the story through the region, meeting hundreds of brave and determined young people. They were bound together not just by their audacious struggles for democracy, but by their commitment to the philosophy of non-violent resistance. It was, they explained, all about targeting and undermining what they called the 'pillars of the regime'. They believed that authoritarian governments were not impregnable monoliths but a series of vulnerable institutions which depended on individuals who could be convinced or shamed into defecting. "Even a dictator can't collect taxes on his own," one of the Serbs told me. "He can't deliver the mail, he can't even milk a cow: someone has to obey his orders or the whole thing shuts down. The task is to convince them to disobey. When they change sides, the government starts to fall." The other decisive factor they all spoke about was the need for meticulous strategic planning: "It won't happen without a strategy, without structure, without unity," a young Georgian explained. "You need... well, it's like Lenin said, it's all about organisation, organisation, organisation."



Around the same time, the international media became entranced by this new phenomenon. Most press commentators fell into one of two camps; those who took the slogans at face value - the 'brightest and the best' versus the dinosaur dictators; a Hollywood morality show with a happy ending - and those who thought the young rebels were part of some kind of global conspiracy directed by George W Bush and a crack squad of neo-conservative svengalis; puppet soldiers in the battle for power, influence and energy resources in the former Soviet Union -¬ a continuation of Cold War shadowplay by other means. As the bitter propaganda war shifted from state to state, Western politicians feted the youths as wholesome avatars of freedom, while their own governments sought to portray them as puppets of the Bush administration, advancing Washington's liberal capitalist agenda abroad: treacherous hirelings or, at the very least, credulous dupes. Such accusations reached feverish highs when President Bush began to speak of promoting the spread of democracy throughout the world.



Although it became evident that the truth was more complex and nuanced than both these viewpoints allowed, there were uncomfortable questions which all these youth movements had to face: who was paying the bill, who was giving the orders, and who stood to gain? Most of them received money directly or indirectly from Western governments, and those that didn't would have liked some. But they all argued that change could not be imposed from outside; a dictat from the White House could not mobilise the masses in a country far away. The revolution has to begin here, they insisted, at home. Neither were they unequivocably pro-American. Some had ideological differences with Washington's military adventures, particularly in Yugoslavia and Iraq, as they clashed with the sacred creed of peaceful, indigenous resistance.



Youth movements like Otpor, Kmara and Pora were not traditional political campaigns, at least not in the sense of party politics; there were no candidates or policy programmes, not at first anyway. Their desires were more abstract and universal: free speech, human rights, fair elections. They declared themselves non-partisan - nobody trusts these politicians with their bad suits and their opportunist promises, they reasoned - although they maintained strong links with the more progressive opposition leaders and, once the crisis in their countries reached its critical stage, they all supported opposition parties against the authorities. But by distancing themselves from the orthodoxies of traditional politics and focusing on one simple mission - the end of the old order - they were able to unite a wide range of people, sometimes with opposing political opinions, creating a motley coalition of the discontented... It is also, perhaps, why most of them couldn't manage to retain their unity or their mass support after they had achieved their goal.



Like the students of 1968, the young people who started these movements were mostly middle-class, well-educated and well-travelled, unlike many of their compatriots. They came from the digital generation and understood the motivational power of new media and rock music. They had good connections with veterans of previous lost struggles for liberty and with international foundations dedicated to promoting democracy and Western values, which in turn supplied them with resources and training.



Beyond their righteous certainties, there were also contradictions. They said they had no leaders but were extremely well-regimented; they said they were non-partisan but effectively aided the political opposition; they said they were completely open but were often wary of saying exactly where their finances came from. They had good reasons for blurring the facts, they believed, but at the height of their struggles, these contradictions left them vulnerable to attack.



In a globalised world of instantaneous digital communication, their ideas have continued to ripple outwards. After the revolutions in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine, youth movements based on the strategies and iconography of Otpor, Kmara and Pora have appeared in the most unlikely places: the Middle East, Africa, and all across the former Soviet Union. Wherever there were grievances about democracy, there were youths with colourful T-shirts and protest websites preaching the philosophies of non-violent resistance. An informal network also began to emerge, with veterans of these twenty-first century uprisings travelling the world, sharing their experiences and expertise with like-minded young people in other countries: a new revolutionary international.



But success had its drawbacks: their tactics no longer had the element of surprise which once gave them the edge, and their revolutions convinced other former Soviet countries to reinforce their defences against internal subversion. Many would spend time in jail. And amidst the spectacular victories, there were sobering failures. Sometimes the state proved too strong, sometimes the opposition too weak or too compromised. Sometimes the people themselves were not ready or willing. As even the most hardcore evangelists for non-violent resistance admit, the time and the conditions have to be right. Strategy, solidarity, money; none of these is enough on its own.



I was not looking for deep political analysis when I set out on this journey through spectacular times. I was searching for stories; the illumination of the personal and the minutiae of lives lived in the intoxication of the moment. I wanted to know how they felt, what they saw; about the jokes they told and the songs they sang, about their doubts and fears. Sometimes this approach met with incomprehension, particularly from those who believed it was enough to repeat the 'official history' of their movement, the party line, in the dessicated jargon favoured by international democracy foundations; with drab phrases like 'capacity building' and 'informational-educational work' stripping their narratives of all their passionate energy. But others got it instantly. For them, it had been an almost spiritual experience; it had transformed them. It had been, in the phrase they so often used, a 'revolution of the mind'.



It is important not to exaggerate the contribution these youth movements made to the political changes in their countries. They didn't act alone. The successful ones, at least, were part of a mosaic of interconnected groups which shared the same broad mission. While the youth acted as daredevil instigators, civil-rights groups, independent media and election monitors had more sober, less telegenic but equally crucial roles to play, while the opposition was led by politicians, and brought politicians to power. But this is not a book about politicians; their stories will be told elsewhere. Neither does it set out to analyse the achievements, failures, crises and disappointments which followed these twenty-first century revolutions. This is the story of a remarkable group of young people who, against the odds, decided to stand up and fight for what they believed in. Being young, and full of innocent optimism, they could sometimes be naïve, but there is no doubting their sincerity or their courage. Despite the threat of violence, imprisonment or worse, they dared to take action - whatever the personal cost - to change their own world.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Serpent's Tail
• Date d'édition: 2007
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 185242964X
• ISBN 13: 9781852429645
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 224
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible