The “NY Times is reporting”:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/world/middleeast/18bahrain.html the following from Bahrain:
bq. The Bahrain military, backed by tanks and armored personnel carriers, took control of most of this capital on Thursday hours after hundreds of heavily armed riot police officers fired shotguns, tear gas and concussion grenades to break up a pro-democracy camp inspired by the tumult swirling across the Middle East.
For those of us who study protest from an individual based perspective (“here”:http://homepages.nyu.edu/%7Ejat7/POP_5_3_Tucker.pdf and “here”:http://homepages.nyu.edu/%7Ejat7/WP_Meirowitz_Tucker_2010.pdf for my own work on this) we are particularly interested in the costs and benefits to individual protesters of participating in protest. The first three of the original “Colored Revolutions”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_revolution – Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine – were conspicuous for their relative lack of violence and the fact that the military stayed out of the way of protesters, thus keeping the cost of protesting significantly lower; indeed, getting killed is the highest possible “cost” of protesting. (The fourth, the Kyrgyz Tulip Revolution, was a little more violent, but again the military restrained from a violent crackdown.) Both the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions shared this characteristic of the military and (for the most part) the security services restraining from a violent crackdown.
As the original Colored Revolutions progressed from Serbia to Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, commentators speculated that this pattern could continue on through multiple other countries in the region, most notably Belarus but also even Russia. However, on May 13, 2005, as “reported in the Economist”:http://www.economist.com/node/3992111:
bq. A crowd of up to 20,000 people gathered in the central square of Andijan on May 13th, where they stood all day. “They didn’t want a caliphate, they wanted bread and democracy,” says Bahadir Namazov of Ozod Dehqonlar. Towards the evening, troops moved in and opened fire, shooting indiscriminately at unarmed demonstrators, striking numerous women and children. According to reports, many were shot in the back of the head.
bq. At first, the Uzbek leadership admitted only that ten government soldiers and “many more” rebels had been killed. But following international pressure, the authorities conceded on May 17th–a day before a visit to Andijan organised for foreign ambassadors–that 169 were killed, including 32 troops and 137 “terrorists”. Meanwhile, Ozod Dehqonlar maintains that apart from 542 dead in Andijan, 203 more people were killed by troops in Pakhtabad, another city in the Ferghana valley, when they were trying to flee to safety across the Uzbek-Kirgiz border.
Bares a bit of a resemblance to the report on Bahrain, doesn’t it? Even more importantly, it is worth nothing that – even though the protests in Andijan had to do with a trial and not a fraudulent election like the other Colored Revolutions – there hasn’t been another “successful” Colored Revolution in the Post-Communist region since Andijan. Now this is not to say this pattern will necessarily be repeated in the Middle East – it is possible the genie is already out of the bottle in enough other countries that one violent crackdown in Bahrain is not going to slow the spread of protest – and of course there were instances of violence (e.g., “Romania”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_Revolution_of_1989) as communism collapsed in Eastern Europe in 1989 that did not stop the spread of regime collapse. But it is certainly worth noting the similarities, and journalists in particular would be well advised to keep in mind Andijan as they report today on Bahrain.