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Shy U.S. Intellectual Created Playbook Used in a Revolution Tarig Mohamed Mohamed-kheir Anter
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Apr 18, 2011 - 8:48:48 AM
Shy U.S. Intellectual Created Playbook Used in a Revolution; Written by: Sheryl Stolberg
Published: February 16, 2011; at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/world/middleeast/17sharp.html?_r=1
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Posted by: Tarig Mohamed Mohamed-kheir Anter; Khartoum; Tel.:
00249911636990
BOSTON � Halfway around the world from Tahrir Square in Cairo, an
aging American intellectual shuffles about his cluttered brick row house in a
working-class neighborhood here. His name is Gene Sharp. Stoop-shouldered and
white-haired at 83, he grows orchids, has yet to master the Internet and hardly
seems like a dangerous man. But for the world�s despots, his ideas can be
fatal.
Few Americans have heard of Mr. Sharp. But for decades, his
practical writings on nonviolent revolution � most notably �From Dictatorship
to Democracy,� a 93-page guide to toppling autocrats, available for download in
24 languages � have inspired dissidents around the world, including in Burma,
Bosnia, Estonia and Zimbabwe, and now Tunisia and Egypt.
When Egypt�s April 6 Youth Movement was struggling to recover from
a failed effort in 2005, its leaders tossed around �crazy ideas� about bringing
down the government, said Ahmed Maher, a leading strategist. They stumbled on
Mr. Sharp while examining the Serbian movement Otpor, which he had influenced.
When the nonpartisan International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, which trains
democracy activists, slipped into Cairo several years ago to conduct a
workshop, among the papers it distributed was Mr. Sharp�s �198 Methods of
Nonviolent Action,� a list of tactics that range from hunger strikes to
�protest disrobing� to �disclosing identities of secret agents.�
Dalia Ziada, an Egyptian blogger and activist who attended the
workshop and later organized similar sessions on her own, said trainees were
active in both the Tunisia and Egypt revolts. She said that some activists
translated excerpts of Mr. Sharp�s work into Arabic, and that his message of
�attacking weaknesses of dictators� stuck with them. Peter Ackerman, a onetime
student of Mr. Sharp who founded the nonviolence center and ran the Cairo
workshop, cites his former mentor as proof that �ideas have power.�
Mr. Sharp, hard-nosed yet exceedingly shy, is careful not to take
credit. He is more thinker than revolutionary, though as a young man he
participated in lunch-counter sit-ins and spent nine months in a federal prison
in Danbury, Conn., as a conscientious objector during the Korean War. He has
had no contact with the Egyptian protesters, he said, although he recently
learned that the Muslim Brotherhood had �From Dictatorship to Democracy� posted
on its Web site.
While seeing the revolution that ousted Hosni Mubarak as a sign of
�encouragement,� Mr. Sharp said, �The people of Egypt did that � not me.� He
has been watching events in Cairo unfold on CNN from his modest house in East
Boston, which he bought in 1968 for $150 plus back taxes.
It doubles as the headquarters of the Albert Einstein Institution,
an organization Mr. Sharp founded in 1983 while running seminars at Harvard and
teaching political science at what is now the University of Massachusetts at
Dartmouth. It consists of him; his assistant, Jamila Raqib, whose family fled
Soviet oppression in Afghanistan when she was 5; a part-time office manager and
a Golden Retriever mix named Sally. Their office wall sports a bumper sticker
that reads �Gotov Je!� � Serbian for �He is finished!�
In this era of Twitter revolutionaries, the Internet holds little
allure for Mr. Sharp. He is not on Facebook and does not venture onto the
Einstein Web site. (�I should,� he said apologetically.) If he must send
e-mail, he consults a handwritten note Ms. Raqib has taped to the doorjamb near
his state-of-the-art Macintosh computer in a study overflowing with books and
papers. �To open a blank e-mail,� it reads, �click once on icon that says �new�
at top of window.�
Some people suspect Mr. Sharp of being a closet peacenik and a
lefty � in the 1950s, he wrote for a publication called �Peace News� and he
once worked as personal secretary to A. J. Muste, a noted labor union activist
and pacifist � but he insists that he outgrew his own early pacifism and describes
himself as �trans-partisan.�
Based on studies of revolutionaries like Gandhi, nonviolent
uprisings, civil rights struggles, economic boycotts and the like, he has
concluded that advancing freedom takes careful strategy and meticulous
planning, advice that Ms. Ziada said resonated among youth leaders in Egypt.
Peaceful protest is best, he says � not for any moral reason, but because
violence provokes autocrats to crack down. �If you fight with violence,� Mr.
Sharp said, �you are fighting with your enemy�s best weapon, and you may be a
brave but dead hero.�
Autocrats abhor Mr. Sharp. In 2007, President Hugo Chávez of
Venezuela denounced him, and officials in Myanmar, according to diplomatic
cables obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, accused him of being part
of a conspiracy to set off demonstrations intended �to bring down the
government.� (A year earlier, a cable from the United States Embassy in
Damascus noted that Syrian dissidents had trained in nonviolence by reading Mr.
Sharp�s writings.)
In 2008, Iran featured Mr. Sharp, along with Senator John McCain
of Arizona and the Democratic financier George Soros, in an animated propaganda
video that accused Mr. Sharp of being the C.I.A. agent �in charge of America�s
infiltration into other countries,� an assertion his fellow scholars find
ludicrous.
�He is generally considered the father of the whole field of the
study of strategic nonviolent action,� said Stephen Zunes, an expert in that
field at the University of San Francisco. �Some of these exaggerated stories of
him going around the world and starting revolutions and leading mobs, what a
joke. He�s much more into doing the research and the theoretical work than he
is in disseminating it.�
That is not to say Mr. Sharp has not seen any action. In 1989, he
flew to China to witness the uprising in Tiananmen Square. In the early 1990s,
he sneaked into a rebel camp in Myanmar at the invitation of Robert L. Helvey,
a retired Army colonel who advised the opposition there. They met when Colonel
Helvey was on a fellowship at Harvard; the military man thought the professor
had ideas that could avoid war. �Here we were in this jungle, reading Gene
Sharp�s work by candlelight,� Colonel Helvey recalled. �This guy has tremendous
insight into society and the dynamics of social power.�
Not everyone is so impressed. As�ad AbuKhalil, a Lebanese
political scientist and founder of the Angry Arab News Service blog, was
outraged by a passing mention of Mr. Sharp in The New York Times on Monday. He complained
that Western journalists were looking for a �Lawrence of Arabia� to explain
Egyptians� success, in a colonialist attempt to deny credit to Egyptians.
Still, just as Mr. Sharp�s profile seems to be expanding, his institute is
contracting.
Mr. Ackerman, who became wealthy as an investment banker after
studying under Mr. Sharp, contributed millions of dollars and kept it afloat
for years. But about a decade ago, Mr. Ackerman wanted to disseminate Mr.
Sharp�s ideas more aggressively, as well as his own. He put his money into his
own center, which also produces movies and even a video game to train
dissidents. An annuity he purchased still helps pay Mr. Sharp�s salary.
In the twilight of his career, Mr. Sharp, who never married, is
slowing down. His voice trembles and his blue eyes grow watery when he is
tired; he gave up driving after a recent accident. He does his own grocery
shopping; his assistant, Ms. Raqib, tries to follow him when it is icy. He does
not like it.
He says his work is far from done. He has just submitted a
manuscript for a new book, �Sharp�s Dictionary of Power and Struggle:
Terminology of Civil Resistance in Conflicts,� to be published this fall by
Oxford University Press. He would like readers to know he did not pick the
title. �It�s a little immodest,� he said. He has another manuscript in the
works about Einstein, whose own concerns about totalitarianism prompted Mr.
Sharp to adopt the scientist�s name for his institution. (Einstein wrote the
foreword to Mr. Sharp�s first book, about Gandhi.)
In the meantime, he is keeping a close eye on the Middle East. He
was struck by the Egyptian protesters� discipline in remaining peaceful, and
especially by their lack of fear. �That is straight out of Gandhi,� Mr. Sharp
said. �If people are not afraid of the dictatorship, that dictatorship is in
big trouble.�
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