Ian Traynor at The Guardian reports from the First Tirana Festival of Activism, a remarkable gathering in Tirana of opposition and pro-democracy activists from around the globe, including plenty of representatives from the Former Soviet Union.
Young veterans and strategists of the Orange, Rose and Cedar revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia and Lebanon, as well as of the anti-Milosevic uprising, were joined in Tirana by Albanian youngsters organised to fight everything from illegal Italian waste dumping to corruption and violence against women. Alongside them were student leaders hoping to emulate the success of their peers against the daunting dictatorships in Belarus, Azerbaijan and in Uzbekistan, where President Karimov has just demonstrated his ruthlessness by massacring hundreds.
I was particularly taken by how well they are organising themselves, including the use of some of the most up to date technologies and marketing techniques:
If the revolutionary class of 1989 comprised middle-aged dissidents and intellectuals graduating from underground bookclubs to the barricades, the class of the new millennium is a revolutionary vanguard that is media savvy.
Their tools are the internet chatroom and the text message, the logo and brand recognition, the eye-catching flyer and pithy sloganeering. These outfits are non-hierarchical, decentralised, nominally leaderless and organised with militaristic precision.
"Our idea was to use corporate branding in politics," said Mr Marovic of Serbia’s Otpor, which has become the model for parallel movements across the region.
"The movement has to have a marketing department. We took Coca-Cola as our model."
Seeing this level of organisation is great news. I’m sure that opposition groups will benefit far more from adopting innovative techniques by themselves than the money that the US and EU can pump into democracy promotion. And who’d have thought Coca Cola would prove a model for the global democratic revolution???
From their press release, I see that the organisers plan to make this an annual event, moving from country to country.
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varske 06.09.05 at 7:16 pm
What a contrast with students in 68. But they didn’t manage any successful revolutions. Obviously the marketing was missing!
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