Tag Archives: security defections

Why did the Yanukovych regime fall? 5 crucial factors

23 Feb

Ukraine-Yanukovych-protestBy Feb. 21, the Yanukovych junta with its head vanished from Kyiv. The city was liberated soon after the agreement between the regime and the opposition (facilitated by three EU foreign ministers) was signed on February 21. Why did the disintegration of the regime happen if a couple of days earlier the authorities seem to be firmly in power, carrying out the largest repressions in the history of modern Ukraine?  According to my preliminary analysis the downfall of Yanukovych regime came as a result of five interrelated factors:

1) regime violence and repression have always backfired, galvanizing more and more Ukrainians to join resistance against the regime and making previous allies of Yanukovych in the parliament, administration and security forces defect him. It happened on Nov. 30 when the police beat up peaceful students. On January 16 when the regime introduced repressive laws and on February 19-21 when the interior security forces killed close to 100 people.

2) gradual defections of the members of parliament (‘deputies’) from the ruling Party of Regions occurred throughout the conflict. The defections increased their pace on Feb. 20 when 36 deputies from the Party of Regions joined the opposition in voting a law that undermined the repressive apparatus of the regime- the legislation ordered the total withdrawal of security forces from the streets and their return to barracks . This happened the day before the agreement between the regime and the opposition facilitated by the European foreign ministers was signed.

3) international sanctions (such as travel bans and assets freeze against some Ukrainian officials) by the EU and US became a reality on February 21 that made the defections of businessmen-deputies from the Party of Regions more likely.

4) the Ukrainian army refused to join the strife. The regime reassigned on Feb. 19 the chairman of the joint chief of staff to an administrative position in the presidential administration (the decision that essentially equaled a dismissal) while the deputy chairman of the joint chief of staff resigned on Feb. 20 in protest against the regime’s attempts to force the army to intervene. The authorities understood it cannot rely on the army to suppress the resistance.

5) people continued mobilizing and joining resistance throughout Ukraine. Ukrainians undertook a massive number of nonviolent actions that undermined the regime, spread the protest and facilitated defections. They blocked the train with 500 troops from Dniepropietrovsk to Kyiv in the crucial days on Feb. 20-21; locked down the police facilities to prevent security forces from leaving them; continued organizing peaceful demonstrations in towns and cities across the country; led mass funerals for killed protesters; called for and staged economic boycotts; blocked highways to stop movement of thugs; blocked airports; seized government buildings in the regions; run parallel political, and administrative institutions; set up neighborhood watch groups; publicized government repression that showed how disproportionate it was to any threats posed by the protesters; called out the security forces and the army in the Ukrainian cities to declare they were with the people; and with the help of the Ukrainian diasporas Ukrainians won a significant international solidarity and media attention around the world.

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Dictators' Worse Nightmare: Defections

12 Nov

Screen Shot 2013-11-12 at 6.55.34 PMIn his seminal 3 volume book on Politics of Nonviolent Action, Gene Sharp observed that “Nonviolent actionists may try to destroy the opponent’s army as an effective force of repression by inducing deliberate inefficiency and open mutiny among the soldiers, without whom there can be no army” (p. 453).  This was in 1973.  In February 2011, Leon Panetta, the then CIA Director, testified to Congress, trying to explain why the US intelligence community failed to phantom that the seemingly immovable Tunisian and Egyptian dictators might indeed fall and that fall could occur within days through a sheer pressure of mass-based nonviolent mobilization.  In his testimony, Panetta pointed to the source of the intelligence community’s failure to anticipate the fall of dictators: “There’s always been a feeling that the military ultimately could control any demonstration in any regime. But the loyalty of the military is now something that we have to pay attention to, because it’s not always one that will respond to what a dictator may or may not want.”

Given what Sharp wrote almost 40 years earlier the level of ignorance among the top brass of the American ‘intelligence’ officers about the effects of civil resistance and particularly its power to induce defections among security forces was quite astonishing though not surprising. Afterall, the state actors’ understanding of power  – and with that the drivers of major political changes – has been based on a material force: a capacity to repress, financial means to buy off  and a formal position to govern. Unarmed populations that have little material force to show for have been hardly seen as powerful. Yet, time and again, popular nonviolent revolutions prove that that political power is not tangible, is not material and is not institutional and can rest with ordinary people if only they mobilize and organize. The effectiveness of this intangible power rests in the legitimacy of claims and ideals, as well as in the collective identification with shared grievances and expectations that the popular movement can harness and advance. The movement combines this illusive but potent ideational power with a strategic deployment of nonviolent actions that in turn induce defections among the allies of the regime. For example, through the use of nonviolent weapons such as strikes, demonstrations, civil disobedience as well as the work of solidarity networks and mutual aid groups and associations, the Polish Solidarity movement induced mass defections from the Polish Communist Party and the state bureaucracy in the 1980s. In the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos, in Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia and more recently, in Tunisia and Egypt, the dictators commanded their militaries to shoot at unarmed demonstrators only to see their security forces disobey and refuse to follow their orders. Even the Free Syrian Army that eventually hijacked nonviolent resistance, turning it into the armed uprising, was a product of the defections induced by a 5 month-long nonviolent struggle waged by hundreds of thousands of unarmed Syrians between March and August 2011.

My colleagues, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, in their book Why Civil Resistance Works, estimated that the security defections occurred about 52% of the time during the successful nonviolent campaigns and that security defections made nonviolent campaigns 46 times more likely to reach their ultimate objectives of bringing down the regime, expelling occupying forces or win self-determination in comparison with the nonviolent campaigns where defections did not occur. This is the reasons why scholars must look more closely at the dynamics of defections among regime’s supporters, particularly its security forces during the nonviolent uprisings.

At the same time, the policy community must give a serious consideration to different international instruments that could help nonviolent movements bring about quicker and more widespread defections among security forces of the autocratic regimes. Setting up a special global fund for civil resistance movements that could give awards to the officers (together with their families) who refused to follow and give orders to shoot at the unarmed protesters might be one of such instruments.

 

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