Do-It-Yourself Regime Change
LAKE, ELI J.
Do-It-Yourself Regime Change It worked in Serbia. Could it work in Iraq? BY ELI J. LAKE ON OCTOBER 20, Saddam Hussein blinked. In the face of an American president's resolve to disarm him, the...
...When residents of Belgrade stormed the parliament in October, the police refused to put down the riot...
...At the recent seminar, Ackerman showed a video he produced entitled Bringing Down a Dictator...
...Had the police and military been confronted with violent demonstrators in the spring, they would have been more hostile to the demonstrators in October, or so goes the theory, and less willing to break their ties to the government...
...easy this war is going to be" to win...
...Between 1997 and 2000, the U.S...
...About a month before the demonstrations in Baghdad, Peter Ackerman, a former investment banker and the founder of the International center for Nonviolent Conflict, held a one-day seminar with 50 Iraqi exiles in the Netherlands to discuss how grassroots anger can be used to bring Saddam's government down...
...The demonstrations in Baghdad and Erbil have placed the Iraqi government in a precarious position...
...The object was to persuade Iraqis to register a protest by submitting blank white pieces of paper instead of marked ballots...
...Zayer says that in the last month he and others have conducted small seminars in other Arab countries for the purpose of training Iraqis to organize...
...To this end, Zayer and others ran a "Say No to Saddam" campaign before the presidential "referendum" in September...
...The kind of massacre it would take to restore fear in his citizenry would compromise Saddam's effort to charm the international community on the eve of a new vote in the U.N...
...It is a hint of how Eli J. Lake covers the State Department for United Press International...
...But the State Department has at least played an advisory role in Ackerman's recent activities, which include three meetings with Kurds in the last year...
...There is anger at the grass-roots level," one U.S...
...government poured approximately $22 million in covert and public funding into political resistance movements in Serbia...
...A proponent of regime change in Iraq who does not oppose the use of military force to secure that end, Ackerman believes that Iraq may be ripe for revolution without an American shot being fired...
...Last week the tyrant kicked out most of the international media from his capital, a step many in the Bush administration fear may presage a crackdown...
...Security Council...
...These mothers who congregated are as much of a threat to Saddam as the mothers of the disappeared were in Argentina," he says...
...There is a strategic purpose to nonviolent tactics...
...And he added, "We do believe that the tactics of nonviolence and confrontation in Serbia can be repeated in Iraq very easily, and we are trying to go for it...
...These demonstrations show there is increasing pressure on the regime...
...This is a hint of things to come...
...He conducted similar training seminars for Otpor, the student movement in Serbia that helped end the reign of Slobodan Milosevic...
...As one U.S...
...And Saddam Hussein may be getting the message...
...The international community has ignored Saddam's cruelties before—but this time, it might see them as justifying the overthrow of his regime...
...On October 29, thousands of families in Erbil, a city in the north managed largely by the Kurdistan Democratic party, demonstrated in front of the United Nations mission to publicize the plight of their missing kin...
...No such program on anything like that scale exists for Iraq...
...For a man who has survived his army's defeat in Kuwait, the uprisings and international sanctions that followed, and a series of attempted coups and rebellions in the last decade, Saddam Hussein seems to have made an uncharacteristic mistake on October 20...
...official said last week, "If there is another demonstration and nothing happens, then it's time to set your stopwatch...
...While conceding that the demonstrations following the release of prisoners were probably spontaneous, he confidently predicted in a phone interview Wednesday, "You will see more of these demonstrations in the future...
...It chronicles the opposition movement in Serbia and shows how the Otpor campaign in the spring of 2000 paved the way for the demonstrations that followed a few months later...
...Two days later, a crowd of 200 people, most of them women, stormed the Ministry of Information in Baghdad demanding to know the whereabouts of relatives who had not been released...
...Exempted from his amnesty were prisoners deemed American or Zionist spies...
...The outcome of the vote, according to the Iraqi government, was 100 percent in favor of the ruler, but Zayer says his contacts persuade him that several hundred thousand submitted blank protest votes...
...Shortly after the seminar in the Netherlands, the Iraqi exiles who had participated began calling their contacts in Iraq, according to one of the seminar's organizers, Ismael Zayer, who writes for the London-based Arabic newspaper al-Hayat...
...The tyrant's act of mercy may have emboldened his subjects...
...official said Wednesday...
...The same day, a larger crowd with similar questions pressed officials at a secret police detention center outside the city...
...government concur...
...As Kanan Makiya, author of Republic of Fear, a history of the Iraqi Baath party, said Wednesday, Saddam's amnesty decree "suggests the first cracks are appearing in the authority of the regime...
...When you remain nonviolent," says Ackerman, "those ties wither and erode...
...It will be inevitable the regime is going to fall...
...Ackerman has experience with this sort of thing...
...military intervention—military training for Iraqi exiles, for example, or an effort to identify potential high-level defectors in the Iraqi army (the CIA established two field offices in northern Iraq last month largely for this purpose...
...In the face of an American president's resolve to disarm him, the Iraqi dictator opened the gates of his jails and freed his nation's thieves, rapists, and murderers...
...Most of the American initiatives to topple Saddam are aimed at supporting U.S...
...Some Saddam watchers in the U.S...
...There are some outside the government who believe last month's demonstrations may actually be key to toppling the Iraqi regime...
Vol. 8 • November 2002 • No. 9
