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12/01/2004:
"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.
...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.
...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.
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.
...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.
...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.
Full Article: Asia Times
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