Democracy grants people the right to protest, to show their opinion on matters that affect their lives and their nation’s. Protesting is a universally acknowledged fact belonging to the modern world. It serves to give voice to those who are disturbed by the faulty policies, drawbacks and negligence of their governments and who wish to raise public awareness on these matters.Demonstrations, rallies, strikes, pickets, boycotts and so on are all ways of protesting. As long as they are within the limits defined by the “law,” protests and acts of similar nature are in essence an indisputable part of democracy, freedom of opinion and expression.
However, in some cases protesting is exploited and used as a means of opposing democracy itself. Protests that give way to riots are now methods of staging coups to shut down administrations and overthrow democratically elected governments.
Legitimacy of Protests and Feasibility of Demands
Democratic protestsare welcomed by societies and addressed by governments to the extent that their demands are tangible, justified andfeasible. Protests lacking those qualities are most likely to fail in having their demands met.
The anti-government movement in Bulgaria in 2013-14 confirmed the validity of these qualities. The protests took place in three separate cycles. January and February witnessed rallies that objected to the high prices of electricity and demanded the government resign. They were successful as the requests were sensible. A later demonstration was against a government officer, and resulted in his resignation. Yet another cycle of protests called for a change of the system, along with some other illegal demands and faced defeat after turning into riots that were not supported by the overall society.
The Gezi Park protests in Turkey in the same year followed the same pattern. Set in motion with a good willed and environmentalist approach, it was likely to succeed considering its solid and feasible calls and legitimate ways at first. The government heeded the nature lovers’ voices and took a positive step by postponing a construction project that required the destruction of Gezi Park. Yet the humanist approach of young people changed course in the wake of provocations of separatist and terrorist gangs and turned into a totally different nature. Demonstrations that began in Gezi Park in Istanbul and that demanded the preservation of Gezi Park as a recreational area spread to other cities of the country and transformed into armed and bloody uprising imposing the fall of government. It was a quite clear coup d’etat attempt that did not refrain from using violent methods and openly rejected the validity of a democratically elected government. The protests were contradictory considering people took to streets using their democratic rights, but then appealed to non-democratic methods to lay their claims ignoring the will of the nation.
Though justified at the beginning, these two cases of protests demonstrate that they are open to hostile manipulations and may lose their legitimacy if left at the hands of ill-minded people. Recently some dark powers have been using this latest technique to manage countries’ internal affairs as they see fit and stage coups to overthrow governments. They bring in professional teams of brutal killers amidst peaceful protests, which then lead to violent anti-democratic clashes. These protests sometimes end up in civil wars where fellows of the same nation kill one another. It all happens in the wake of a government’s non-yielding to some dark power’s demands and a democratically elected government faces anti-democratic attempts.
Methods of Provocations and OTPOR
Such dramatic outcomes come by the employment of social media. Social media becomes an instrument for organizing, stirring and agitating the masses that are presumed to join the demonstrations. Various provocative organizations undertake the organization of some agents and provocateurs who take part in demonstrations by inciting them to get violent. These illegal “subcontractors” organize the public relations part of the riots and channel intellectual circles of the country such as its authors, academicians, journalists and members of non-governmental institutions to act against democratically elected government in the name of democracy and to lead the public.
One of the most common groups among these “professional revolutionary organizations” is a Serbia-based resistance organization,OTPOR. Independent observers state that OTPOR organizes coup attempts and civil disturbance by providing training and logistic support for the US-backed dissident organizations in many countries such as the former Yugoslavia, Serbia, Georgia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Egypt, Brazil, and Turkey. There is a consensus that the CIA hasbeencreating riots and social disturbances in fifty countries OTPOR its offshoot CANVAS…
A relevant source puts forward the following interesting findings OTPOR:
The (OTPOR's) fist-logo,would turn up 11 years later in the streets of Cairo, illustrating further the preposterous, foreign-backed nature ofthe Egyptian uprisings... Serbia’s OTPOR would continue receiving funds from the West and become a “CIA-coup college” of sorts under the name of CANVAS (Center for Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies).
The research article penned by Carl Gibson and Steve Horn and published on “Occupy.com” deals with the international financial, intelligence and political connections of OTPOR and features the following information based on WikiLeaksdocuments:
Serbia’s Srdja Popovicis known by many as aleading architect of regime changes in Eastern Europe and elsewhere since thelate-1990s, and as one of the co-founders of OTPOR… Popovic and OTPOR's offshoot CANVAS have also maintained close ties with a Goldman Sachs executive and the private intelligence firmStratforas well as the U.S. government…
Such examples are easy to find. The internal public opinion on OTPOR is that it is being employed as leverage to overthrow those governments which conflict with the interests of the U.S. No wonder some media organizations that act on behalf of the US administration speak highly of OTPOR at every turn. Moreover, the British media rigorously advocates that the executives of OTPOR have nothing to do with the organization of coups.
Likewise, some Turkish media organizations disseminated similar statements during the 2013 Gezi Park demonstrations. The attempt to occupy the Prime Minister’s residence by armed groups, which is an act of rebellion against the state and treason by law, was orchestrated by OTPOR, according to reports. Yet the media deliberately defined it as “the exercise of legitimate, democratic rights, and freedom of expression by the people,” and thus desired to create misapprehension to display the members of the Marxist and separatist terrorist organizations who are far from representing even a slightest portion of the nation as the representatives of the nation. These media organs called the nation’s security forces who risked their lives to preserve public order and people’s lives as ‘the so-called enemies of freedom and democracy.’
In truth, such mass demonstrations that aim to topple governments, divide countries and organize bloody conflicts - and even civil wars - can no longer be called innocent rallies, but subtle projects of deep states and shadow organizations to take over countries from within.
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