Iran protesters: the Harvard professor behind their tactics

The momentous collapse of authoritarian rule, from Czechoslovakia in 1989 to Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and others, established a model for implementing Sharp’s tactics – one the Iranian authorities sought to avoid.

Authorities in Iran have closely examined past velvet revolutions, as well as Sharp’s books. A 2007 cartoon video created by Iranian intelligence portrayed Sharp as “the theoretician of civil disobedience and velvet revolutions” and “one of the CIA agents in charge of America’s infiltration into other countries.”

But Iranians have their own history of “improvised struggles” that predate his work, says Sharp: the 1905-06 constitutional revolution, and the 1979 Islamic revolution against the shah, during which “protesters were even putting flowers in the guns of the shah’s soldiers.”

Today, the stated aim of former presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi and other key reformists in Iran is not to overthrow the Islamic system set up in 1979, which they themselves helped build. Instead, they seek to reverse what they say was a fraudulent election, and make pro-democracy reforms within the existing system.

Still, some reformist actions are vintage Sharp, from Mr. Mousavi’s refusal to negotiate or back down on demands about the election to strict nonviolence. Sharp says it’s “quite amazing” that the protests are continuing despite an extensive crackdown that left scores dead and subjected detainees to torture and rape.

While fewer are brave enough to come out in the streets today, Sharp says massive demonstrations are only one way to bring down a regime. A variety of methods can be used to undermine dictators, who “require the assistance of the people they rule.”

Aggravate regime’s weaknesses

“These regimes always present themselves as all-powerful – absolutely omnipotent, so that resistance becomes futile,” says Sharp. “But if you learn this regime has these five ... or 20 weaknesses – and you can deliberately aggravate those weaknesses – it weakens the regime. It helps it fall apart.”

Sharp’s ideas, adapted for Iran, are circulated by people such as Mohsen Sazegara, a founder of the ideological Revolutionary Guard who was arrested after becoming a reformist editor in the 1990s.

He now lives in Virginia, where he produces a daily 10-minute video to encourage nonviolent action, which he says reaches hundreds of thousands in Iran. He has read Sharp’s work closely.

Farsi translations of two of Sharp’s books can be downloaded from Mr. Sazegara’s website, which receives 2,000 e-mails a day – often including new tactics that he beams back into Iran in his videos.

“Iranians are an educated nation, especially the younger generation ... and I’m sure that many of them study the experience of nonviolent movements in other countries,” says Sazegara, who adds that the strategy of Mousavi’s Green Movement is strictly nonviolent. “We think if we make a mistake and go for violent actions, the regime [can be] more brutal than any violent opposition.”

But it can still be a dangerous business, even from thousands of miles away from Iran. Sazegara says he has received a number of death threats.

“If they kill me, so what? There will be thousands of Mohsen Sazegaras right now,” he says. “Every one of the young generation has read these books, and knows everything better than me.”

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