Re: Hague Tribunal Exonerates Slobodan Milosevic for Bosnia
Posted: Sat Jun 10, 2017 3:16 am
Template Revolutions: Marketing U.S. Regime Change in Eastern Europe (EXCERPT)
by Gerald Sussman and Sascha Krader
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
Financing is the mother’s milk of regime change, particularly for organising communications, media, and propaganda, staging protests, conducting poll watching, and managing the campaign of selected opposition candidates. With a commitment of $23 million in USAID spending towards the strategic objective of ‘democratic transition’ in Serbia (with a population of 10 million) in 2000 (US Embassy in Yugoslavia 2002), the opposition was empowered and emboldened to contest the election and force Milošević from power. If there were any doubt about State Department objectives, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, its propaganda channel and website aimed at Central and Eastern Europe and Russia, was quite explicit. It declared that total U.S. government assistance to the anti-Milošević Serbian student movement Otpor and the Democratic Opposition of Serbia was $10 million in 1999 and $31 million in 2000 (Bacher 2002).8 George Soros's Open Society Institute provided the opposition an additional unspecified pool of money (Corwin 2005).
U.S. funding also supported ostensibly nonpartisan NGOs that were contesting Milošević's authority. One NGO, the Centre for Free Election and Democracy (CeSid), in fact worked hand-in-glove with the Democratic Opposition multiple political party alliance in Serbia (Cevallos 2001). CeSid was created by disgruntled anti-Milošević activists following the protests of 1996-1997 and was funded by Soros’s Open Society Institute and NDI, which trained its leaders in Bulgaria (MacKinnon 2007, 41, 44, McFaul 2005). On election day, each Serbian poll monitor was paid five dollars (U.S. Institute of Peace 2004), a little more than the average daily wage.9
Other recipients of Western aid included the oppositionist Radio B92 (McClear, McClear, and Graves 2003, 19), the Association of Independent Electronic Media, which received NED funds for a campaign named ‘Rock for Change, Rock the Vote’, and the Belgrade Center for Human Rights, which also got a NED grant to ‘encourage Serb academics, journalists and civic activists to participate directly in the formation of policy for the democratic political opposition’ (NED 2006).10 NED has a link prominently featured on the Center’s web page.
***
Planning for the overthrow of Milošević involved a highly coordinated effort by local and foreign agencies. A Western-funded international conference on Serbia's future was held in Bratislava in 1999, co-organized by the U.S.-based East West Institute and the Slovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The East West Institute is a conservative think tank whose honorary chairmen are George W. Bush and Helmut Kohl and whose purpose is ‘to help support the development of democracy and free enterprise in Central and Eastern Europe and Russia’ (Peace Direct 2005). Following the conference, a task force was organized to build connections between pro-Western Serbian entities and organizations in the international community, including the Council of Europe, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and the European Parliament (Minić and Dereta 2007, 89-90).
Regional coalition-building, funded and overseen by foreign donor agencies, was part of a broader strategy to remove vestiges of the Russia-leaning old guard. America's Development Foundation, essentially a non-profit (oddly labeled an ‘NGO’) under the wing of USAID, together with the State Department, NED, and other ‘democracy promotion’ groups, used USAID/Romania funds to start a program in 2000 called ‘Romanians for Serbian Democracy’, linking Serbian opposition NGOs with their Romanian counterparts (America's Development Foundation, 2007).
Throughout the region, media training has been vital in pursuing U.S. foreign policy objectives and local regime change movements. During the 1990s, USAID’s media assistance to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics amounted to $175 million (Hoffman 2002). In preparation for Milošević's overthrow, the United States in 1999 was spending ‘more than $1 per Serb’ on media assistance (McClear, McClear, and Graves 2003, 14) as a way of destabilising the Serbian government. As USAID explained:
The goal of USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (USAID/OTI) was to fund programs and media outlets that could disseminate messages pushing immediate political change. USAID/OTI characterised its activities as ‘pushing the reform agenda’ (cited in McClear, McClear, and Graves 2003, 30).
In Serbia, according to a local marketing professional, ‘every word of the opposition's one-minute and five-minute core political messages used by opposition spokesmen across the country was discussed with U.S. consultants and tested by opinion poll’. Anti-Milošević candidates and supporters ‘received extensive training on how to stay ‘on message,’ answer journalists' questions and rebut the arguments of Milosevic supporters’. Youth group activists with American-paid training were taught how to handle journalists (Dobbs 2000). Various U.S.-government media training grants were channeled through Freedom House, the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), Internews, and other American and local groups in Ukraine and Georgia (Mitchell 2006; U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, no date).
Several Eastern European political groups involved in regime change used nonviolent organizing tactics adapted from the writings of a controversial American author on the subject, Gene Sharp. A former research professor at Harvard University, Sharp is the founder of a strangely named research center in Boston called the Albert Einstein Institute, which claims Gandhi as its inspirational mentor. In 2004, AEI printed 12,000 vernacular language copies of Sharp’s manifesto for non-violent regime change,11 From Dictatorship to Democracy, for the use of opposition forces in Ukraine (AEI 2004, 12).
USAID and Freedom House additionally funded the publication and dissemination of 5,000 copies for the Eastern European region. Otpor adapted parts of Sharp’s earlier book, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, for a document they called the ‘Otpor User Manual’ (Bacher 2002). In the summer of 2000, the International Republican Institute brought Sharp’s AEI colleague, Robert Helvey, to Budapest to train Otpor in strategic nonviolence (U.S. Institute of Peace 2000).12 Activists trained at this seminar then returned to Serbia, where they provided training in fear management and strategic nonviolence every week until the 2000 election (Miller 2001). The Ukrainian youth group Pora was said to have considered Sharp’s book their ‘bible’ (Strijbosch 2004).
by Gerald Sussman and Sascha Krader
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
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Financing is the mother’s milk of regime change, particularly for organising communications, media, and propaganda, staging protests, conducting poll watching, and managing the campaign of selected opposition candidates. With a commitment of $23 million in USAID spending towards the strategic objective of ‘democratic transition’ in Serbia (with a population of 10 million) in 2000 (US Embassy in Yugoslavia 2002), the opposition was empowered and emboldened to contest the election and force Milošević from power. If there were any doubt about State Department objectives, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, its propaganda channel and website aimed at Central and Eastern Europe and Russia, was quite explicit. It declared that total U.S. government assistance to the anti-Milošević Serbian student movement Otpor and the Democratic Opposition of Serbia was $10 million in 1999 and $31 million in 2000 (Bacher 2002).8 George Soros's Open Society Institute provided the opposition an additional unspecified pool of money (Corwin 2005).
U.S. funding also supported ostensibly nonpartisan NGOs that were contesting Milošević's authority. One NGO, the Centre for Free Election and Democracy (CeSid), in fact worked hand-in-glove with the Democratic Opposition multiple political party alliance in Serbia (Cevallos 2001). CeSid was created by disgruntled anti-Milošević activists following the protests of 1996-1997 and was funded by Soros’s Open Society Institute and NDI, which trained its leaders in Bulgaria (MacKinnon 2007, 41, 44, McFaul 2005). On election day, each Serbian poll monitor was paid five dollars (U.S. Institute of Peace 2004), a little more than the average daily wage.9
Other recipients of Western aid included the oppositionist Radio B92 (McClear, McClear, and Graves 2003, 19), the Association of Independent Electronic Media, which received NED funds for a campaign named ‘Rock for Change, Rock the Vote’, and the Belgrade Center for Human Rights, which also got a NED grant to ‘encourage Serb academics, journalists and civic activists to participate directly in the formation of policy for the democratic political opposition’ (NED 2006).10 NED has a link prominently featured on the Center’s web page.
***
Planning for the overthrow of Milošević involved a highly coordinated effort by local and foreign agencies. A Western-funded international conference on Serbia's future was held in Bratislava in 1999, co-organized by the U.S.-based East West Institute and the Slovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The East West Institute is a conservative think tank whose honorary chairmen are George W. Bush and Helmut Kohl and whose purpose is ‘to help support the development of democracy and free enterprise in Central and Eastern Europe and Russia’ (Peace Direct 2005). Following the conference, a task force was organized to build connections between pro-Western Serbian entities and organizations in the international community, including the Council of Europe, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and the European Parliament (Minić and Dereta 2007, 89-90).
Regional coalition-building, funded and overseen by foreign donor agencies, was part of a broader strategy to remove vestiges of the Russia-leaning old guard. America's Development Foundation, essentially a non-profit (oddly labeled an ‘NGO’) under the wing of USAID, together with the State Department, NED, and other ‘democracy promotion’ groups, used USAID/Romania funds to start a program in 2000 called ‘Romanians for Serbian Democracy’, linking Serbian opposition NGOs with their Romanian counterparts (America's Development Foundation, 2007).
Throughout the region, media training has been vital in pursuing U.S. foreign policy objectives and local regime change movements. During the 1990s, USAID’s media assistance to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics amounted to $175 million (Hoffman 2002). In preparation for Milošević's overthrow, the United States in 1999 was spending ‘more than $1 per Serb’ on media assistance (McClear, McClear, and Graves 2003, 14) as a way of destabilising the Serbian government. As USAID explained:
The goal of USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (USAID/OTI) was to fund programs and media outlets that could disseminate messages pushing immediate political change. USAID/OTI characterised its activities as ‘pushing the reform agenda’ (cited in McClear, McClear, and Graves 2003, 30).
In Serbia, according to a local marketing professional, ‘every word of the opposition's one-minute and five-minute core political messages used by opposition spokesmen across the country was discussed with U.S. consultants and tested by opinion poll’. Anti-Milošević candidates and supporters ‘received extensive training on how to stay ‘on message,’ answer journalists' questions and rebut the arguments of Milosevic supporters’. Youth group activists with American-paid training were taught how to handle journalists (Dobbs 2000). Various U.S.-government media training grants were channeled through Freedom House, the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), Internews, and other American and local groups in Ukraine and Georgia (Mitchell 2006; U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, no date).
Several Eastern European political groups involved in regime change used nonviolent organizing tactics adapted from the writings of a controversial American author on the subject, Gene Sharp. A former research professor at Harvard University, Sharp is the founder of a strangely named research center in Boston called the Albert Einstein Institute, which claims Gandhi as its inspirational mentor. In 2004, AEI printed 12,000 vernacular language copies of Sharp’s manifesto for non-violent regime change,11 From Dictatorship to Democracy, for the use of opposition forces in Ukraine (AEI 2004, 12).
USAID and Freedom House additionally funded the publication and dissemination of 5,000 copies for the Eastern European region. Otpor adapted parts of Sharp’s earlier book, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, for a document they called the ‘Otpor User Manual’ (Bacher 2002). In the summer of 2000, the International Republican Institute brought Sharp’s AEI colleague, Robert Helvey, to Budapest to train Otpor in strategic nonviolence (U.S. Institute of Peace 2000).12 Activists trained at this seminar then returned to Serbia, where they provided training in fear management and strategic nonviolence every week until the 2000 election (Miller 2001). The Ukrainian youth group Pora was said to have considered Sharp’s book their ‘bible’ (Strijbosch 2004).