Surviving death threats as the ‘Arab Spring’ spreads
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WHEN two former Millburn Academy pupils joined forces to make a film about an American academic, they were not expecting a front row seat to watch history being made.
Yet this is what happened to film-maker Ruaridh Arrow when he was caught up in the Egyptian revolution.
Ruaridh and assistant producer Cailean Watt, who first met as pupils at Millburn, returned to Inverness to work on their film about the work of non-violent protest advocate Gene Sharp, a film which has now attracted widespread international interest as a chronicle of 2011’s "Arab Spring".
Ironically Ruaridh and Cailean were forced into making and funding the film for themselves when they could not interest other broadcasters or production companies.
However, the film-makers lack of a budget proved to have unexpected benefits.
"If we’d had a lot of funding, the film would have been finished at the beginning of 2010 when no-one was interested in Gene Sharp," Ruaridh said.
"Now everybody is interested in him." Ruaridh worked as a journalist for The Herald in Glasgow before embarking on a television career with Sky News and has also worked for Channel 4’s "Dispatches" and produced programmes for the BBC and More4.
He first heard of Gene Sharp when he enrolled in the Department of War Studies at the University of London.
"A couple of my friends were Serbians who had been in the movement opposing Slobodan Miloševic and they had done that using the ideas of Gene Sharp," Ruaridh revealed.
He heard the name again in connection with Ukraine’s Orange Revolution and a third time in Glasgow when he stopped to speak to a group of Iranian students protesting against the Tehran government.
"I realised that all these movements were linked by one man, so I went searching for any film or video of him," Ruaridh said.
"The only thing I could find was a propaganda film from Iran, a cartoon of him sitting in the White House plotting the overthrow of the Iranian regime, saying he was one of the CIA’s most powerful agents.
"Then I found another piece saying he was this 80-year old orchid keeper living in a tumble-down house in Boston. How could he be both? I had to find out."
So Ruaridh (30), dipped into his life savings to get himself and a cameraman friend to Sharp’s New England home, where they interviewed him every day for a week until their money ran out.
Eventually Ruaridh was able to return and interview some of Sharp’s colleagues, including colourful former US Army colonel Bob Helvey.
"He was one of the most decorated veterans of the Vietnam War, but he had an army university scholarship and went along to see what these ‘peace-freaks’ were up to. At this meeting Gene Sharp wandered in and said this was the most effective way you can take down a dictator without using violence," Ruaridh said. "Helvey was seized by this idea. He realised it was a practical application of non-violence. He took it to Burma where a lot of refugees were fighting a guerrilla campaign and tried to convince them that this was more effective than waging a hopeless violent struggle."
From Burma, Helvey took Sharp’s ideas to Serbia where they had their first major success in helping to oust Miloševic from power.
Other democracy movements in eastern Europe noted the success of the Serbian revolution and they in turn began to adopt the 198 non-violent "weapons" outlined in Sharp’s writing in their "Colour Revolutions" — The Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan.
The ideas then spread to the Middle East, but Ruaridh already had an idea of potential flash points in the region thanks to placing an interview clip on YouTube.
"YouTube has maps showing where clips are viewed around the world and shows the countries where there is most activity in green," Ruaridh explained.
"Egypt above any other country was glowing green — the hot spots were Egypt, Syria and Libya. If you looked at Google there were huge spikes in searches for Gene Sharp in those regions so for the first time you could predict where revolutions were going to happen."
Ruaridh had a chance to see Sharp’s system in practice for himself in Egypt, but his equipment was immediately seized by the secret police.
Refusing to be put off, Ruaridh equipped himself with a small tourist camera and joined the main protest in Tahrir Square, remaining there day and night in spite of violence from President Mubarak’s supporters.
"By the time I left, half the journalists in my hotel were in hospital because they’d been attacked," Ruaridh said.
"I’ve been to Afghanistan, but that felt like the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done. It was almost a post-apocalyptic scenario.
"You had tanks on the end of the street and it felt as if anything could happen. Journalists were being taken off the street and you didn’t know if it was the police or not."
"A cameraman working with me had a kitchen knife put to his throat and a crowd shouting: ‘Kill him!’"
For Ruaridh, who also reported on the situation for the BBC, the safest location was in the square itself because protestors wanted the world to know what was going on.
"Basically I just couldn’t get out," he said. "When I was going into the square, this shady guy with an American accent came up to me and said: ‘You go in there and we will find you and kill you.’ I
was stuck between a rock and a hard place."
He and Cailean, who remained in touch from Inverness, even agreed a codeword which would signal that Ruaridh had been snatched.
"My biggest concern was just being disappeared," Ruaridh said.
The violence abruptly stopped following an appeal from US President Barack Obama, a clear indication to Ruaridh that there had been a government orchestrated campaign against journalists and demonstrators.
"When I left the square and went past this army checkpoint, the soldiers were actually apologising to me for what had happened," he added.
Ruaridh noted photocopied pages from Sharp’s books being distributed among the revolutionaries.
On returning to Britain, he had a chance to see another revolution in action, but without even leaving home.
"I had the leader of the Syrian revolution organising things from my flat for a couple of days," he revealed.
The Western Sahara might be the next location to see Gene Sharp’s theories put to the test, Ruaridh suggests, but there is also the possibility his techniques may be used in Pakistan to install an Islamic regime rather than a democracy.
"That’s something I asked Gene about," Ruaridh added.
"His view is that you give people the information anyway. If they are doing it non-violently that’s got to be better than the violent option."
Though Sharp previously missed out on the Nobel Peace Prize, losing out to President Obama, Ruaridh believes the events of the last few months might lead to the accolade this year.
"Gene never takes credit for anything. That’s one of the reasons he’s so unknown," Ruaridh said.
"Yet he’s a real American hero. He’s done things that have had a real political impact."
Ruaridh hopes the film will be released in the next couple of months.
"There’s incredible international interest," he said.
If it does prove a success, Ruaridh hopes to continue making films with a similar international scope, but based here in Scotland.
"Scottish broadcasting seems to be quite introspective and backwards looking," he said.
"There are a lot of modern film-makers who want to talk about where we are going and have an international outlook."
