Erica Chenoweth

There was a period in which they were experiencing a pretty high degree of police repression.

And I was told by one activist there that

They began organizing something called grandparents protests, which is when they would ask their retired grandparents to come and march or demonstrate with them.

And at those marches, they noticed the police were much less likely to start swinging their batons at the crowd.

There was just a taboo against beating the elderly in public.

And they exploited that taboo and, by the way, also increased their numbers and the diversity of their campaign.

It did.

Milosevic announced that he was retiring to spend more time with his grandson.

He fled.

He fled the square.

And the movement effectively walked through the line of policemen who obviously were not going to fire on them anymore and occupied the parliament building.

And inside, apparently, they found lots of ballots that were pre-marked for Milosevic.

So further demonstrating the fraud.

One of the most important techniques that the SPA was able to organize en masse was a general strike and various other limited strikes and stay-aways.

And stay-aways can be really important for movements that are facing brutal regimes because, unlike mass demonstrations, they don't necessarily place people

in positions of directly confronting the agents of repression.

But in this case, there were also mass demonstrations, sit-ins, marches, protests.

They used a really wide range of nonviolent methods in the course of that campaign.

Yeah, so what was happening there is that there was a massive sit-in outside of the military headquarters demanding that the civilians be represented in the new government and that a transition to democracy take place as soon as possible.

And various security forces committed a mass atrocity.