In Ukraine, a franchised
revolution By K Gajendra Singh
"A huge geopolitical battle is being fought
in Ukraine." - Nouvel Observateur, Paris.
BUCHAREST - In scenes reminiscent of the
overthrow of Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze in
November last year (see Georgia in the melting pot, Dec
3, 2003) and Slobodan Milosevich of Serbia in 2000,
crowds opposing Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, the
official winner of Ukraine's presidential polls on
November 21, massed at the main door to parliament in
support of his rival Viktor Yushchenko, a former premier
too, who claimed that the polls were rigged.
Parliament on Sunday annulled the results, which
had given pro-Russian Yanukovich 49.46% of the votes
against 46.61% for pro-West Yushchenko. But Roman
Zvarych, a deputy and one of Yushchenko's close aides,
said: "We are in legal limbo. Much of this we are making
up as we go along." The Supreme Court, as of late seen
as a neutral body, was due to sit for a third day
Wednesday to examine allegations of systematic electoral
fraud.
These events are part of a major
geopolitical battle being fought in Ukraine, with the
United States and Europe trying to encroach on Russia's
traditional strategic turf. With the latter resisting
it, the situation is reminiscent of the Cold War era.
Ukraine, despite so far evolving peacefully, is now
teetering on the edge of an abyss, with the possibility
of serious turmoil looming, which could have
ramifications that affect post-Cold War equations.
"If we really want to preserve peace and accord,
and if we really want to build up the democratic society
that we talk about so much ... let's organize new
elections," Interfax reported outgoing President Leonid
Kuchma as saying, after a call by US Secretary of State
Colin Powell, who expressed concern about reports of a
possible split between east and west Ukraine. After
meeting regional leaders and Yanukovich, Kuchma said
there should be legislative reform, including "a
constitutional agreement to be approved by [parliament],
because the country needs a legitimate president".
International mediators will step up
efforts on Wednesday to resolve the crisis. The European
Union sent foreign-policy chief Javier Solana to Kiev this
week to meet with Kuchma. A German government statement
said Russian President Vladimir Putin and German
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder "were in agreement that the
results of a new election, based on Ukraine law and the
will of the Ukraine people, would be strictly
respected".
But in spite of the presence of
foreign mediators, earlier negotiations between the
warring political leaders did not go well and a
financial crisis now threatens Ukraine; the National
Bank of Ukraine issued on Tuesday a regulation that
restricts withdrawals on deposits in Ukrainian banks.
Yanukovych comes from the eastern part of the
country, which traditionally has deep economic,
historical, cultural, linguistic and ethnic ties with
Russia. Putin personally traveled to Ukraine before each
of the election's two rounds to assure Ukrainian voters
that Moscow's sympathies were unambiguously with
Yanukovych. And Putin has already twice congratulated
Yanukovych on winning the election.
Russia's support
for Yanukovych in the presidential campaign thus unavoidably
transformed the Ukrainian vote - which was in
essence a choice between the political continuity
represented by the prime minister and the political
change embodied by Yushchenko - into a geopolitical
choice between West and East.
While protests in
Kiev have hogged international TV coverage, supporters
of Yanukovich in Donetsk's regional council in eastern
Ukraine, his stronghold, voted 164-1 to hold a
referendum on December 5 on giving the region the status
of a republic within Ukraine. "We won't tolerate what's
going on in Ukraine," Donetsk regional governor Anatoly
Bliznyuk told lawmakers. We have shown that we are a
force to consider." There have been reports of
intimidation of supporters of Yushchenko in the eastern
regions. Most of Ukraine's gross domestic product comes
for the eastern and southern regions of the country.
Meanwhile, Yushchenko, buoyed with full Western
support and the international splashing of Kiev's
massive protests in his support across headlines, raised
the stakes on Sunday, saying that he might not accept
the court's decision and called for legal criminal
action against Yanukovich and his supporters. An aide to
Yushchenko demanded that outgoing President Kuchma sack
the prime minister and called for the formation of a
coalition government.
In Warsaw, Polish
President Aleksander Kwasniewski, a pivotal regional
figure and one of the visiting international mediators,
said that a breakup of the state was indeed a real
threat. Speaking for the EU, which had condemned
procedural violations of the November 21 vote, Dutch
Foreign Minister Bernard Bot said new elections would be
"the ideal outcome". The likelihood for a fresh poll
brightened first when a spokesman for the Russian
Foreign Ministry - despite obvious support for
Yanukovich - said that Moscow also now favored a re-run.
Reportedly Yanukovich has said he would back the new
poll only if he and Yushchenko ruled themselves out of
the running. Influential US Senator Richard Lugar, a US
monitor, also weighed in on the international debate. He
told Fox News that he favored a re-run of the election.
Under the Dutch presidency, earlier statements
and the reaction of EU appeared to be harsh. The EU,
taken over by political discards at home, has neither a
coherent foreign policy nor the military muscle to fight
a war except under US coercion and tutelage, as in
Kosovo. But Ukraine and the crisis in Darfur, Sudan, gave
a welcome pretext to the Western media to turn its focus
away from the destruction and carnage in Iraq.
Western media, such as CNN and BBC, with anchors
and often biased experts, pounced on the story with an
enthusiasm unseen since Saddam Hussein's statue was
toppled in Baghdad. London's anti-Iraq war newspaper the
Independent and the pro-war Telegraph excitedly declared
a "revolution" in Ukraine. Across the Atlantic, the
rightwing Washington Times welcomed "the people versus
the power".
It is interesting that 2 million
anti-war demonstrators who streamed though the streets
of London against the war on Iraq in March 2003 were
politically ignored, but some tens of thousands in
central Kiev are proclaimed to be "the people", while
the Ukrainian police, courts and governmental
institutions are dubbed as instruments of oppression.
Little notice was taken when opposition parties in
Pakistan, in power in two provinces, protested against
President General Pervez Musharraf, who reneged on his
promise to the opposition to give up the all powerful
post of army chief at the end of 2004. And the many
thousands in the streets were also largely ignored.
This writer, who was posted in Bucharest in the
early 1980s and has been based here for many years and
was accredited to Azerbaijan in Caucasus in the
mid-1990s, feels that after the collapse of the Soviet
Union and former communist regimes in Europe, mostly
money grabbing mafia-style leadership, supported by the
West, have been thrown up as an alternative. They have
built up massive nests in the West on which they then
become dependent, like Russia's billion-dollar
oligarchs, who also control "free media". Under the
charade of globalization and economic laissez
faire, hundreds of billions of US dollars have been
transferred to Western banks and institutions, which
have become debts for the hapless poor masses in these
countries.
In Romania in 1989 there was a
spontaneous uprising by students and people against the
Nicolae Ceausescu regime, but it was taken over by old
Communist Party nomenclature. In 1990, security
officials of the old regime emerged as Romanian
nationalists to provoke inter-ethnic riots with
Hungarians in Tirgu Mures. Vladimir Tudor, an admirer of
Ceausescu, makes no bones about his anti-foreigner
policy. Under a pro-West president in the late 1990s,
Romania was robbed left and right. EU leaders and the US
have repeatedly criticized rampant and pervasive
corruption in Romania, which itself went to polls on
Sunday to elect a new president.
There is a
similar pattern developing elsewhere in Eastern Europe
with the nationalist card being used by corrupt
politicians to cover up their own corruption. The events
in Serbia, Georgia and now Ukraine are an expression of
people's frustration and helplessness, however, pro-West
leadership is unlikely to deliver the goods either.
Romania's GDP now equals what it was in 1989, when the
communist regime was overthrown. Most of the GDP is now
cornered by 10-15% of the top political and bureaucratic
elite. The masses - especially the older generation -
suffer from daily privations and are withering away. The
populations in most of the former communist states are
declining fast. But the Western media rarely write about
the terrible impact of this so-called democracy,
capitalism and globalization.
The man "selected"
by the West to lead Ukraine, Yushchenko, finds his
support among groups who have privatized public assets
to their cronies. He is supported by huge funds from
newly rich Ukrainians, who want to preserve their gains.
Huge amounts of money were also pumped from the West to
groups who support Yushchenko. Openly and blatantly, the
US and other Western embassies paid for exit polls,
prompting Russia to do likewise, though not to the same
extent. Western media cited the muzzling of the media in
Ukraine - which included closing the newspaper Silski
Visti - after it ran an anti-Semitic article claiming
that Jews had invaded Ukraine alongside the Wehrmacht in
1941. On September 19, Yushchenko's ally, Alexander
Moroz, told JTA-Global Jewish News: "I have defended
Silski Visti and will continue to do so." Yushchenko,
Moroz and their oligarch ally, Yulia Tymoshenko,
meanwhile, cited a court order closing the paper as
evidence of the government's desire to muzzle the media.
A nation divided At Kiev's School for
Policy Analysis, political science expert Olexiy Haran
says historic fault lines are being exploited by
government leaders to divert attention from their
tolerance of corruption. "Some of the governors are
trying to push for the split in the country," he said.
"I believe it's being done deliberately. The main issue
is corrupted power, criminals, and democracy, not
language or religion." To howls of protests from the
Russian-speaking east, Yuschenko ruled out calls to make
Russian an official language of the country, arguing
that this could see multinational companies and even
newspapers print only in Russian. "Until now, when the
West thought about Ukraine, it was negative," said
Haran. "The great thing about these election
falsifications is that the people stood up and the West
saw that there is democracy in this grey zone. This is
the Orange Revolution [orange is the color of
Yushchenko's Our Ukraine party]. Everyone here is
conscious of the legacy."
The Western media have
only highlighted how youthful demonstrators can bring
down an authoritarian regime, simply by attending rock
concerts in a central square. The demonstrations
supporting pro-Western Yushchenko have laser lights,
plasma screens, sophisticated sound systems, rock
concerts, tents to camp in and huge quantities of orange
clothing. These are all spontaneous protests. Enormous
rallies were held in Kiev and eastern Ukraine in support
of Yanukovich, but Western TV channels hardly noticed
them. Yanukovich supporters were denigrated as having
been brought in by buses, while ignoring obvious
questions such as where the "Orange Revolution" money
has come from and how quickly the opposition organized.
It appears to be another case of spreading democracy
through the use of a civilian coup d'etat.
Ukraine's recent history The
Kiev movement touches on a historical and religious raw
nerve in Ukrainian polity and society. Throughout most of
its history, Ukraine was split between competing
empires, and the fault lines run deep with the great Dnipr
River as the divide. The western part of the country
was governed for more than 300 years by either the Polish
or Austro-Hungarian empire while the east was dominated
or part of Russia. The east is Russian-speaking
and Christian Orthodox, while the west is mostly Ukrainian
speaking and Greek Catholic, orthodox in character but
owing allegiance to the pope.
With its
tortuous and divisive history and lacking in
ambivalent nationalism, Ukraine's current borders were last
drawn after World War II, when some Polish territory was
added to it as well some from Romania. Former Soviet
leader Nikita Khrushchev added Russian territory, including
the Black Sea coastline, to Ukraine. Russians in the Soviet
republic of Ukraine had happily voted for independence
after the collapse of the USSR in 1990-91.
Because of its mixed legacy of history,
the international mediators in Kiev attempting to
unravel the election mess include the Polish prime minister,
the EU's Solana, as well as Russian
representatives including Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov. Apart from
Russia's geopolitical interests, a hostile Ukraine
would constrain its access in the West and make
Russia's access to the Black Sea as limited as Iraq's is in
the Persian Gulf. If not handled carefully and
sensitively, rapprochement between Moscow and Brussels to face up
to a neo-conservative-driven United States would come to a
standstill. Ukraine itself might break up with
unforeseen consequences for all.
Eventually
Western media took some note of what supporters of
Yanukovich were saying: that the specter of Ukraine
coming apart could transform the rich industrial region
- along with the Crimean Peninsula - into an autonomous
powerhouse or even lead it to join with Russia.
Alexander Lukyanchenko, mayor of Donyetsk, Yanukovich's
home town, told the local assembly: "We should, in an
orderly, constitutional way, stage a referendum of trust
to determine this country's make-up." He warned that the
split could begin unless demonstrators cleared the
streets of Kiev, adding that the rest of Ukraine could
not survive without its industrial east.
Another franchised revolution The high
percentage of votes in Donetsk (96%), the home town of
Yanukovich, provided proof that electoral fraud had
taken place, according to Western media. But turnouts of
over 80% in areas which supported Yushchenko were not.
Yanukovich's final official score was over 49%, but when
Western-supported Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili
officially polled 96.24% in January, no one questioned
it. The observers who now denounce the Ukrainian
elections applauded Georgia's results, saying that it
"brought the country closer to meeting international
standards".
One of the most active
"pro-democracy" groups in Ukraine's democratic
opposition is Pora, which means "it's time". The student
activists of Pora received personal tutorials in
non-violent resistance from Serbian students of the
Otpor ("resistance") group, which was in the forefront
of toppling Milosevich in Belgrade. Then the Serbs
helped the Georgian vanguard movement Kmara ("enough is
enough"). So a Georgian flag was also being waved in
Kiev's Independence Square. In Tbilisi, the
rose-revolutionary Georgian President Mikhail
Saakashvili interrupted his first anniversary address to
offer a few words of encouragement in Ukrainian to his
"sisters and brothers" in Kiev. The reawakened cold
warriors link the "chain of Europe's velvet revolutions"
in this peaceful march of democracy to what the crowds
first chanted on Wenceslas Square in Prague in November
1989. So a jaded pro-democracy Lech Walesa was there too
in Kiev, just as he had been in Prague.
Pora's
posters plastered all over Ukraine depict a jackboot
crushing a beetle, an allegory of what Pora wants to do
to its opponents. It was like this during Nazi-occupied
Ukraine, when pre-emptive war was waged against the Red
Plague spreading out from Moscow. Nobody in the West has
said anything against these posters. Pora continues to
be presented as an innocent band of students having fun.
But it is an organization created and financed by
Washington, as were sister organizations in Serbia and
Georgia, Otpor and Kmara.
Says a Western Cold
War warrior: "If we, comfortably ensconced in the
institutionalized Europe to which these peaceful
demonstrators look with hope and yearning, do not
immediately support them with every appropriate means at
our disposal, we will betray the very ideals we claim to
represent." He adds, "At the same time, until now,
democracy has been creeping backwards. Control of the
biggest industries, of the media, of state revenue and
of the security services has fallen into the hands of a
corrupt and sometimes murderous elite of cynical,
self-loving opportunists who feed off the enterprise and
hard work of others as they float between the worlds of
business, politics and bureaucracy."
This might
more appropriately apply to new Western-supported rulers
in former communist countries and even some countries in
the West. The United Kingdom and the US often forget the
enormous dysfunction in their own so-called democratic
system, where their governments lied brazenly about Iraq
for over a year in the run-up to war and with impunity,
while they criticize others and support continued brazen
Western intervention in the democratic politics of other
countries.
A US franchise A lot of
planning, work and money has gone into efforts to design
a US model for promoting democracy around the world. The
model's first success was notched in Serbia. Funded and
organized by the US government, which deployed US
consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big
American parties and US non-government organizations
(NGOs), the campaign defeated Slobodan Milosevich at the
ballot box in Belgrade in 2000.
Richard
Miles, the US
ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role in the campaign to
oust Milosevich. In November last year, as US
ambassador in Tbilisi, Miles reapplied the same method
successfully. Thanks to his coaching, US-educated
Saakashvili brought down Eduard Shevardnadze. When the
US ambassador in Belarus, Michael Kozak, a veteran of
similar operations in Central America, notably in
Nicaragua, organized a near identical campaign to try to
defeat the Belarus strongman, Alexander Lukashenko, he
failed. "There will be no Kostunica in Belarus," the Belarus
president declared, referring to the United States'
Belgrade success 10 months earlier.
But
experience gained in Serbia, Georgia and Belarus has
been invaluable to the US in planning the operation in
Kiev. It is thus easy to understand such slickly
organized spontaneity. The operation - engineering
democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience,
which would be the envy of even a Gandhian - is now so
smooth that methods have matured into a template for
winning other people's elections. Located in the center
of Belgrade, the Center for Non-violent Resistance,
staffed by computer-literate youngsters, is ready for
hire and will carry out operations to beat even a regime
that controls the mass media, the judges, the courts,
the security apparatus and the voting stations.
The Belgrade group had on-the-job
training in the anti-Milosevich student movement, Otpor.
Catchy, single-word branding is important. In Georgia
last year, the parallel student movement was Khmara. In
Belarus, it was Zubr. In Ukraine, it is Pora. Otpor also
had a potent, simple slogan that appeared everywhere in
Serbia in 2000 - the two words gotov je,
meaning "he's
finished", a reference to Milosevich. A logo of a
black-and-white clenched fist completed the masterful
marketing. In Ukraine, the equivalent is a ticking
clock, also signaling that the Kuchma regime's days are
numbered. Stickers, spray paint and websites are the
young activists' weapons. Irony and street comedy
mocking the regime have been hugely successful in
puncturing public fear and enraging the powerful. If
only the Tiananmen Square activists could have had this
kind of support in 1989.
Saakashvili had
traveled from Tbilisi to Belgrade to be tutored in the
art of mass defiance. In Belarus, the US Embassy
organized the dispatch of young opposition leaders to
the Baltic, where they had sessions with the Serb
teachers flown from Belgrade. The Americans had
organized the overthrow of Milosevich from neighboring
Hungary as Belgrade was a hostile territory.
Promotion of democracy around the world is a bipartisan US effort; the
Democratic Party's National Democratic Institute (NDI), the
Republican Party's International Republican Institute, the
US State Department and USAID (US
Agency for International Development) are the main agencies. They are
all involved in these campaigns and are further helped
by the Freedom House NGO and billionaire George Soros'
Open Society Institute. US pollsters and professional
consultants are hired to organize focus groups and use
psephological data to plot strategies.
In
Serbia, when US pollsters Penn, Schoen and Berland
Associates found that the assassinated pro-Western
opposition leader, Zoran Djindjic, was hated at home and
had little chance of beating Milosevich in an election,
an anti-Western Vojislav Kostunica was promoted.
Djindjic came up later and handed over Milosevich to the
Hague Tribunal. Of course, the US is determinedly
opposed to the International Criminal Court and would
deny aid to those countries who do not sign a bilateral
accord providing immunity to the US.
It is
claimed that officially the US government spent US$41
million to fund the year-long operation to get rid of
Milosevich from October 1999. In Ukraine, the figure is
said to be about $14 million so far.
While
there are reputed outside election monitors from groups
such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe, the Ukrainian elections and elsewhere involved
thousands of local election monitors trained and paid by
Western groups. Reportedly, Freedom House and the NDI
helped fund and organize the "largest civil regional
election monitoring effort" in Ukraine, involving more
than 1,000 trained observers. They also organized exit
polls. On Sunday night those polls gave Yushchenko an
11-point lead and set the agenda for much of what has
followed.
The exit polls are important because
they help seize the initiative in the propaganda war
with the regime, invariably appearing first, receiving
wide media coverage and putting the onus on the attacked
regime to respond. And how to react when the incumbent
regime tries to steal a lost election. The advice was to
stay calm and cool but organize mass displays of civil
disobedience, which must remain peaceful but could
invite violent suppression.
The US has now
adapted and perfected the latest communication
techniques to apply to post-Soviet states to bring about
desirable changes. "Instruments of democracy" are used
to topple unpopular dictators or unfriendly regimes,
once a successor candidate friendly to the West has been
groomed. The Central Intelligence Agency-sponsored Third
World uprisings of the Cold War days to remove prime
minister Mohammed Mossadaq of Iran, who had nationalized
its oil resources, and of Salvador Allende of Chile,
which brought US favorite General Augusto Pinochet to
power, a man whose crimes are still being catalogued and
looked into, are now passe.
That is the
promotion of democracy, US style. Who is next in line?
K Gajendra Singh
served as Indian ambassador to Turkey and Azerbaijan
from 1992-96. Prior to that, he served as ambassador to
Jordan (during the 1990-91 Gulf War), Romania and
Senegal. He is currently chairman of the Foundation for
Indo-Turkic Studies and editorial adviser with global
geopolitics website Eurasia Research Center, USA. E-mail
Gajendrak@hotmail.com.
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