Street Spirit

INTRODUCTION

It is always easy to find explanations for why it is futile to take action, and why those who seek change are misguided dreamers. The US Ambassador to Egypt was by no means alone when in December 2008 – in a secret cable, later revealed by WikiLeaks – she informed her colleagues in Washington that those in Egypt who hoped non-violent protest might unseat the corrupt and brutal government of President Hosni Mubarak by 2011 were ‘highly unrealistic’.

Two years later, a now historic Facebook post served as an indirect riposte to Ambassador Margaret Scobey and her dismissive conclusion. On 18 January 2011, Asmaa Mahfouz, one of the leaders of the 6 April Youth Movement that the ambassador had been so unimpressed by, sat down in her apartment and recorded a message to her fellow Egyptians.

Mahfouz spoke for four passionate, uninterrupted minutes. ‘I’m making this video message to give you one simple message,’ she declared. ‘We want to go down to Tahrir Square on 25 January ... We’ll go down and demand our rights, our fundamental human rights.’

Mahfouz addressed head-on the perception that change in Mubarak’s Egypt was unachievable. ‘Whoever says it is not worth it because there will only be a handful of people, I want to tell him, “You are the reason for this”,’ the twenty-six-year-old said. ‘Sitting at home and just watching us on the news or Facebook leads to our humiliation.’

On Facebook and YouTube, Mahfouz’s video went viral – and Egyptians did not sit at home. On 25 January and in the days that followed, millions poured on to the streets of Cairo and across Egypt. President Mubarak, who had held so tightly to power for thirty years, resigned after eighteen days of protests.

In the years since then, the news from Egypt has often seemed bleak. In President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s Egypt, those who speak up for basic rights again face threats to life and liberty. But Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif, remembering back to what she calls Egypt’s ‘eighteen golden days’, has argued that the story is not yet over.

There is a core, a resolute core that does not lose sight of the aims of the revolution – bread, freedom, social justice – and what those bring of human dignity; that knows … that the people – even if they digress onto a side street – will return to insist on their original path and their essential aims.

Hossam Bahgat, a human rights activist, describes the regime as ‘brutal, and at the same time shaky’. In short, the ending is not yet written.

Tahrir Square, Cairo, 11 February 2011. After eighteen days of protests, finally the announcement: ‘In these difficult circumstances … President Hosni Mubarak has decided to leave the position of the presidency.’

There was nothing unusual about Ambassador Scobey’s unwillingness to believe that non-violent protest could unseat a powerful, unloved leader. The reluctance by self-described ‘realists’ to accept the possibilities of change has been a constant throughout history. But again and again, the realists have been trumped by those who challenge existing realities. The courage of those who seek a better and more just world has regularly defied certainties that seem set in stone.

Nobel Prize-winning author Czesław Miłosz identified one reason why sceptics sometimes get it wrong. ‘Our natural tendency to place the possible in the past,’ he wrote, ‘means that we often overlook the acts of our contemporaries, who defy the presumably unmovable order of things – and thus achieve what has at first seemed impossible.’

It was when I was living in Miłosz’s native Poland in 1980 that I first saw the ‘unmovable order of things’ turned upside down. When strikes began in the Polish shipyards in August of that year, the economic demands quickly escalated to include the creation of a free trade union. Western commentators insisted that such demands were unachievable within the context of the Soviet-imposed system, in place since 1945.

In London, The Times echoed the consensus when it concluded that the Polish authorities ‘clearly’ could not agree to the demand for free trade unions. This was obvious because ‘the Russians would not agree’. The paper drew comfort from its view that the ‘romantic and volatile Pole of tradition’ was now ‘less in evidence’. Put differently, the paper hoped Poles would be sensible enough to demand only what the authorities were already prepared to give. It didn’t turn out that way.

Fears of a violent crackdown were well grounded. The Russian leader, Leonid Brezhnev, was known for invading countries that stepped out of line, under what came to be known as the Brezhnev Doctrine. He had sent tanks into Czechoslovakia in 1968, and into Afghanistan in 1979. Omens for peaceful change were poor.

Against expectations, however, the Communist authorities backed down in the face of the strikers’ demands, which were supported by millions across the country. Radio and television programmes were interrupted for a live broadcast of the surrender. Across Poland, viewers watched in cheerful disbelief as the strike leader, Lech Wałęsa, shook hands and sat as an equal beside the country’s deputy prime minister. The government agreed to the strikers’ twenty-one demands – including legalization of free trade unions, and freedom of speech and the media.

In effect (though everybody avoided saying so), the Solidarity trade union became a legalized informal opposition, at a time when a tolerated opposition within the Soviet bloc seemed about as thinkable as multi-party elections might be in North Korea today. That signing ceremony in the Gdańsk shipyards on 31 August 1980 was a pinch-yourself moment, paving the way for many changes yet to come.

The mood seemed short-lived. Sixteen months after Solidarity’s victory, tanks rolled on to the streets of Poland. Martial law was declared in December 1981. Solidarity was banned and its leaders arrested. The sceptics could claim they had been right all along.

But, despite all the arrests and deaths, things never quite went back to square one. Poles’ ‘unreal’ hopes remained. In 1985, from inside his jail cell, dissident Adam Michnik wrote of what he had witnessed when released under an amnesty the previous year. His experience had ‘exceeded not just my expectations but even my dreams’. This was, he said, ‘the barren twilight’ of the totalitarian world. He wrote, with a confidence that would no doubt have persuaded most Western politicians to label him as a naïve dreamer: ‘I am not afraid of the generals’ fire. There is no greatness about them: lies and force are their weapons … I am sure that we shall win. Sooner or later, but I think sooner, we shall leave the prisons and come out of the underground on to the bright square of freedom.’

Michnik was right about ‘sooner or later, but I think sooner’. Solidarity, supposedly dead and buried, was re-legalized less than four years later. Solidarity candidates stood for parliament in June 1989.

Too often, political leaders seem reluctant to believe that citizens have much of a role to play when it comes to bringing about major changes in the world.

As I travelled through Eastern Europe during the dramatic summer and autumn of 1989, it was striking to note that Western politicians and Communist rulers shared one thing in common: both sides found it impossible to imagine that the essentials would ever really change. Above all, they thought real change could only come from powerful politicians like themselves – including and most obviously from inside the Kremlin.

The Berlin Wall – that ugly and conspicuous symbol of the Cold War, which sliced a continent in two – was treated as an obstacle to be negotiated, not removed. President Reagan had in 1987 called on Mikhail Gorbachev, the reformist Soviet leader appointed two years earlier, to ‘tear down this wall’. But it was a soundbite, not a prescription for change. Neither Reagan nor Gorbachev actually expected the Wall to fall.

In East Germany, however – as in Poland – popular courage helped make the impossible inevitable. In the summer and autumn of 1989, tens of thousands of people flooded out of East Germany via the newly opened Hungarian border. The exodus caused one set of problems for the East German government. But the biggest pressures came not from those who left, but from those who stayed behind.

In that respect, one day marked a turning point. On the evening of 9 October 1989, in the southern city of Leipzig, I witnessed a series of extraordinary events – or rather, an extraordinary series of non-events. The unique drama of that day consisted, above all, of one thing: that nothing happened.

The backdrop was threatening. The East German authorities had hoped they could stop the growing weekly protests in Leipzig literally dead. They announced their plans with a published warning. A letter to the local paper declared a willingness to stop ‘counter-revolutionary actions’ (otherwise known as peaceful protests). This would happen, if need be, ‘with weapons in our hands’. The warning came just four months after the massacre in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, which the East German authorities had publicly praised. The meaning of the threat was clear to all.

The authorities put Leipzig into lockdown ahead of 9 October. Foreign journalists in East Berlin (where we had been attending East Germany’s self-congratulatory fortieth birthday celebrations, attended by Gorbachev himself) were forbidden to travel to the city. The secret police, the Stasi, threw out reporters who had already arrived. All looked set for the endgame. Guns and ammunition were issued. Hospital wards were cleared. Before the evening protest began, I counted sixteen trucks filled with armed state militias in one side street alone.

Two thousand of us crammed into the medieval Church of St Nicholas for the prayers for peace that preceded the Monday protests. Tens of thousands more gathered outside. Cries of ‘We are the people!’ echoed in through the tall Gothic windows.

Everyone going on the march that evening knew they were risking their lives. Earlier that day, I had witnessed one of the protest leaders trying to forbid his daughter to go on the march. He was allowed to die, ran the implied logic, she was not. I had identified a small alleyway just off the main square where I reckoned it would be safe to hide, if or when the shooting started. But that didn’t reduce my fear. All in the vast crowd presumably shared the same feeling of dread, as they walked across Karl Marx Square chanting ‘Keine Gewalt!’ – ‘No violence!’

But then – nothing happened. There was no shooting. There were not even the beatings or arrests that had become standard fare. Gradually, it became clear: there would be no attack tonight. Unbelievably, there would be no violence of any kind. Instead, the huge crowds walked unhindered – past the railway station, up past the secret police headquarters, and back down to Karl Marx Square. A mood of dazed euphoria began to take over. People smiled, laughed and offered flowers to militias. The protest ended around 8 p.m., and with it the unchallenged power of the East German state.

The authorities had calculated that threats of lethal force would persuade people to stay at home. In fact, many more people came out that evening than ever before. As one woman told me later, describing the moment when she realized that the regime had backed down, ‘I felt as if I could fly. It was the most fantastic day I have ever known.’

The events of that day came to be known as ‘the miracle of Leipzig’. The Stasi interrogated me and threw me out of the city, once they realized I had witnessed and reported on this historic day. But that did nothing to diminish my sense of privilege for having been there.

From 9 October onwards, changes in East Germany went into fast-forward, in what the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuściński, describing the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79, had called a final ‘zigzag towards the precipice’. In an article for the Independent a few weeks after Leipzig, I described how the regime had been forced to make more and more concessions. I drew what seemed the obvious conclusion, if one took seriously the implications of the courage of Leipzig and all that had happened since then: ‘The removal of the Wall is not just a possibility. It is one of the few logical options left.’ The Berlin Wall broke open the day after those words were published – on 9 November, a month to the day after the ‘miracle of Leipzig’.

And yet, despite everything that had happened in previous weeks and months, the fall of the Berlin Wall took politicians by surprise. They were startled because it never occurred to them that citizens could achieve so much by themselves. That reluctance to take individual courage seriously remains relevant today.

‘It is up to all of us to try – and those that say individuals are not capable of changing anything are only looking for excuses.’

VÁCLAV HAVEL

The Leipzig factor – a quietly unstoppable force, against an apparently immovable object – gave reality to the theories of Václav Havel, Czech dissident and playwright, who later became his country’s president.

In his 1978 essay ‘Power of the Powerless’ – written in the depths of the Cold War, where there seemed to be no light at the end of the tunnel – Havel talks of choosing to ‘live in truth’. He muses on the possibilities of change, in a context where it seems nothing can change. He gives the example of a hypothetical greengrocer who defies the authorities by refusing to put the propaganda slogans in the window that were delivered to him ‘along with the onions and the carrots’.

Let us now imagine that one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans merely to ingratiate himself … In this revolt the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie. He rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game … His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth …

He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth.

The greengrocer’s small act of resistance gets him in trouble, and nothing appears to change. But, Havel asked, what if an entire country were to defy the authorities, along with the greengrocer? For his belief in the possibilities of change, Havel was mocked. As he put it later, he was seen as ‘a Czech Don Quixote, tilting at unassailable windmills’. Eleven years later, though, Havel was proved right – in his own country and elsewhere.

Ten days before the fall of the Berlin Wall, I met with Havel in Prague. He spoke of his country as ‘a pressure cooker, waiting to explode’. Just three weeks later, the cooker exploded, in what came to be known as the ‘Velvet Revolution’. As in Leipzig six weeks earlier, official violence – against peaceful protesters whose only crime was to demand basic freedoms for their country – persuaded more people, not fewer, to go out on the streets. One man later described his feelings when he decided to resist for the first time: ‘As I lay on the ground and police beat me, I felt free.’

The traditional final rhyming couplet in Czech fairy tales goes, ‘The bell is ringing – and the story is over.’ In Prague, hundreds of thousands went out on Wenceslas Square every afternoon, jangling little bells and keys to tell the country’s rulers that their time was now over. After just a week of protests, on the evening of 24 November 1989, the government resigned en masse. Quiet Prague went wild. A month later, the parliament elected Havel – dismissed by the prime minister as a ‘nobody’ only weeks before the revolution – as the country’s president.

‘Like the hobbits on the journey to Mordor . . . the little guys say: “I will take the ring”.’

SRDJA POPOVIĆ, SERB ACTIVIST AND AUTHOR OF BLUEPRINT FOR REVOLUTION

Humour, as an element of rebellion, helps unlock many doors – including and especially in dark circumstances.

Throughout the 1990s, Slobodan Milošević ruled Serbia with an iron fist. He seemed impossible to dislodge, and Serb opposition leaders argued with each other as much as they did with Milošević. The youth movement Otpor (‘Resistance’) helped change that. Creativity became a key weapon in their non-violent armoury. On one occasion, Otpor pasted an image of Milošević on to a barrel and encouraged passers-by in the main shopping street of Belgrade to pick up a baseball bat and ‘smash his face for just a dinar’ – which, after a nervous start, people did with enthusiasm. The authorities weren’t sure how to react. The organizers were nowhere to be seen (they were watching from a nearby café), and ‘barrel-bashing’ wasn’t an easily identifiable crime. For lack of a better target, police ended up detaining (and being photographed detaining) the barrel instead. Milošević looked less invulnerable, and the authorities looked plain foolish.

In 2000, with the help of Otpor – which had finally been able to persuade the established opposition politicians to unite behind a single candidate – those who stood against Milošević were united as never before. When Milošević falsely claimed victory in elections that year, hundreds of thousands took to the streets to demand he back down.

Eager not to miss the final episode of a drama that I had followed for many years, I slipped into Serbia on the night train from neighbouring Montenegro, in possession of a visa I had bought in a Montenegrin bar. (Unwilling to let the world witness what was happening, the authorities refused journalists all entry into Serbia and had thrown out those who were already there, so it seemed appropriate to cut corners. Purchasing a visa of dubious provenance is neither recommended nor to be repeated; in the circumstances, however, it was difficult to regret.)

Thus, I was there for the dénouement – including the extraordinary Birnam Wood scenes of 5 October 2000, when vast numbers travelled from around the country to demand that Serbia’s own Macbeth must finally go. The roads around Belgrade were jammed solid with cars and buses filled with people heading into the capital, laughing and hooting for a victory that they had not yet achieved.

The events of that day included a bulldozer driver who drove his vehicle across the country and finally into the entrance to the building of the hated state TV. (The uprising became known as the ‘bulldozer revolution’.) The regime surrendered the same evening, after police threw away their jackets and joined protesters. As the headline in a previously pro-Milošević paper declared the next day, ‘The will of the people has conquered.’

Milošević told the nation that he had ‘just learned’ that he had lost the election, after all. Eight months later, he was delivered to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague. He died behind bars in 2006.

The protests against Milošević succeeded for many different reasons. Protesters had courage, creativity and humour. And their humour gave them confidence. The most successful Otpor slogan, dreamed up one evening in a Belgrade kitchen, declared, ‘Gotov je’ (‘He’s finished’). Everything else flowed from that.

‘It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.’

AUNG SAN SUU KYI

Cracks in the façade often appear in surprising places. Burma, or Myanmar, is another example of a country where an apparently invincible regime was eventually shown to be less invincible than it thought.

In 1998, during one of the few periods when she was not under house arrest, I met and interviewed the Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Shortly afterwards, photographer Tom Pilston and I were detained and interrogated, for the crime of meeting the woman who the Burmese people called ‘The Lady’. But Aung San Suu Kyi was right when she told us, ‘This is not a sustainable situation. Change will come.’ One of our arresting officers explained why it was forbidden to meet with Aung San Suu Kyi. It was simple, he explained, ‘She has wrong views.’

But things are not always as monolithic as they seem. A curious twist to our Burmese story came as Tom and I were being deported from the country and put on a blacklist that would last for the next fourteen years. Not everybody, it turned out, was on-message. One of the officials tasked with throwing us out patted us on the back as he was doing so, and wished us good luck with our work.

The same pattern appears, over and over. The military monolith that had controlled Myanmar for half a century finally crumbled in the face of popular aspirations for change. After huge protests in 2007, Aung San Suu Kyi was released in 2010. In 2015, her party gained a parliamentary majority. In 2016, the woman with ‘wrong views’ became Myanmar’s de facto leader.

Anybody who is interested in the subject of non-violent protest must contend with the argument that it can only be successful in ‘easy’ cases where the government is already inclined to give way, and protesters are thus merely pushing at an open door. Over the years, that argument has become increasingly difficult to sustain.

For decades, Gene Sharp – now in his eighties, working from his home in east Boston – has written about the power of non-violent protest. For much of that time, his message was ignored. Non-violence and its impact was seen as a fringe interest. In recent years, however, Sharp has gained global attention for the first time. The ‘Clausewitz of non-violent warfare’ has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and in 2011 an award-winning documentary about his work was released – perhaps fittingly, in the same week that the Occupy protests began in New York.

One of Sharp’s best-known books is From Dictatorship to Democracy, a handbook for non-violent troublemakers that has been translated into dozens of languages. In it, Sharp quotes a Chinese story about the ‘monkey master’ who demands that monkeys give him the fruit they collected, and flogs those who disobey. The monkeys ‘suffered bitterly’ but dared not complain. One day, the monkeys rebelled and ‘took the fruits the old man had in storage, brought all with them to the woods, and never returned’. The fable concludes, ‘Some men in the world rule their people by tricks and not by righteous principles ... As soon as their people become enlightened, their tricks no longer work.’

In truth, even when people become ‘enlightened’, tyrannical rulers are more inventive than the monkey master, as we have repeatedly seen in recent years. Real-life monkey masters deploy deadly tricks to cling to power. In Syria, creative acts of non-violent resistance – forbidden music in litterbins, blood-red water in fountains, ping-pong balls with rebellious slogans tumbling down the streets, and much more – have long since seemed overtaken by the country’s unending bloodshed. Hundreds of thousands have died and millions have been forced to flee their homes, even as the world looked away.

Unfettered violence is, however, by no means the trump card that some – rulers and ruled alike – still sometimes believe it to be. In 2011, two political scientists, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, published a study of non-violent protest. Chenoweth had begun the research as a sceptic. She believed that those who argued for the efficacy of non-violent action were ‘well intentioned but dangerously naïve’. From Chenoweth’s original perspective, ‘Although it was tragic, it was logical for people to use violence to bring about change.’ She told a workshop organized by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict that successful examples of using non-violent resistance to achieve change were ‘probably exceptions’.

But Chenoweth was challenged to analyse the evidence. Maria Stephan, her soon-to-be co-author, demanded, ‘Are you curious enough to study these questions empirically?’ And so they did just that. Chenoweth and Stephan went on to track the impact of hundreds of violent and non-violent campaigns for change over the past hundred years. In Chenoweth’s words, ‘The data blew me away.’ In a data-packed comparative analysis, the authors found that non-violent campaigns were twice as likely to succeed as violent insurgencies – thus partly echoing the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who played a key role in South Africa’s liberation: ‘A human being looking at it would say that arms are the most dangerous things that a tyrant needs to fear. But in fact, no – it is when people decide they want to be free. Once they have made up their minds to that, there is nothing that will stop them.’

Chenoweth and Stephan concluded:

In the last fifty years civil resistance has become increasingly frequent and effective, whereas violent insurgencies have become increasingly rare and unsuccessful. This is true even in extremely repressive, authoritarian conditions where we might expect non-violent resistance to fail.

Where violence did achieve change, the track record showed – in a finding which is unsurprising but too often ignored – that the prospects of achieving stability and democracy in the years that followed are dramatically reduced.

The stories in this book pay homage to those who have defied conventional wisdom and thus created or paved the way for change. There are stories of surprise and mischief – ‘laughtivism’, in the words of Serb activist Srdja Popović. There are stories where the sheer weight of numbers helps make change inevitable. There are stories where the pivot has proved to be the courage or decency of a single individual. There are stories where artists – working in theatre, music or visual arts – have challenged the status quo. There are stories of the ever-changing world of social media – allowing small acts to have global resonance, bringing large numbers of people together for a single purpose, and providing new ways of revealing abuses to the world.

As always, there are many reasons for pessimism. But experience teaches us: we should not underestimate the impact of creativity, courage and non-violence in helping to create a different world.