Thousands March in Egyptian Capital Calling for President’s Ouster

[Magda Hassan]

http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/8...ce-protest

The New Republic
February 17, 2011

The Godfather of Middle Eastern Protest
Ezra Deutsch-Feldman

With the sudden success of nonviolent revolution in Egypt, attention has turned to the seemingly ubiquitous influence of Peter Ackerman, a former investment banker who became something of an intellectual godfather to the Middle Eastern protest movements. His group, the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, produced instructional videos for leaders of nonviolent revolutions, held conferences where would-be revolutionaries could meet and swap tactics, and even financed a video game meant to help organizers plan and practice grassroots uprisings. In 2005, our current editor-at-large Franklin Foer profiled Ackerman for TNR:

The State Department has begun paying attention to Ackerman for a good reason: His tactics are suited to the current political climate. The wars against Saddam Hussein and the Taliban have exhausted the U.S. appetite for forcible regime change. At the same time, the goal of promoting democracy in the Middle East and Central Asia remains. To be sure, there is a slew of NGOs that advise and finance democratic activists, but they specialize in working with movements as they approach full bloom especially as elections near. In places like Iran, however, there are few vibrant movements to foster. That's where Ackerman has found his niche.

Of all Ackerman's whiz-bang ideas, he's most enamored with the development of a video game named after A Force More Powerful that allows players to practice their dictator-toppling skills virtually. On a winter morning, I went to a suburban Baltimore office park to play a beta version. Ackerman has spent $3 million outsourcing the project to a company called BreakAway Games, which helped produce the popular Civilization series. Its offices were creepily quiet.

To provide insights into the mind of the dictator, Ackerman sent Otpor veterans to consult with BreakAway, and you could see their influence in the game's Serb flair. The opening screen showed a map of a generic Balkan country with towns named after Darko Milicic and other Serbian NBA players. I clicked on a town, providing an overhead view of buildings and streets. A message informed me that a student leader of my movement had been imprisoned. My immediate task, the game told me, was to free him.

More recently Ackerman has stepped up his involvement. He worked with Bob Helvey to train Iranian-Americans, many of whom worked for Reza Pahlavi, the son of the deposed shah.

Azar Nafisi has introduced him to the Iranian human rights community. And the ICNC has made some preliminary contacts with the referendum movement he most broad-based and promising of the opposition coalitions, uniting monarchists, communists, and Islamists behind a simple demand for a vote on the regime's future. According to his friends, Ackerman and his circle have begun to kick around creative ideas for challenging the mullahs. What if every Iranian withdrew money from the ATMs at once, overwhelming the country's financial system? What if they boycotted state-run industries?

Ultimately, he envisions events unfolding as they did in Serbia, with a small, well-trained, nonviolent vanguard introducing the idea of resistance to the masses.

When the Rose Revolution began in the fall of 2003, there was little reason to hope for a happy ending. Twelve years earlier, the former Soviet Republic of Georgia had stepped from communism into civil war. The old Communist eminence Eduard Shevardnadze may have brought greater stability when he took over the government in 1992, but his corrupt rule also generated huge new pools of ill will among the populace. Some of this disgust manifested itself in small, peaceful street protests. But it was also expressed in aborted mutinies and failed assassination attempts on the despot, meaning that, over the post-Soviet era, the peaceful and the violent commingled, leading to bloody crackdowns.

As the Rose Revolutionaries, a group of liberal dissidents, prepared to campaign against Shevardnadze, their leaders vowed to introduce a new culture of resistance better suited to a nation that had lost patience with the cycle of uprising and repression.

The movement would tolerate no guns. Its leaders studied the methods of American civil rights activists and dog-eared the writings of Harvard University researcher Gene Sharp, a theorist of nonviolent struggle.

For a time, this strategy nurtured a fledgling movement with a few hundred adherents. But, as the movement grew, its grip on its followers became more tenuous. Demonstrations swelled into large, angry throngs that had no knowledge of the Nashville sit-ins and zero familiarity with Sharp. Once again, the threat of violence loomed. "Our revolution happened so quickly. Everything became spontaneous," one of the movement's leaders, Giorgi Meladze, told me. "That's where the film came in."
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