How an organization financed by the U.S. government has been promoting the overthrow of elected leaders abroad
Joshua Kurlantzick
November/December 2004 Issue
Mother JonesIn early 2004, chaos overwhelmed Haiti. In January, a rebellion erupted against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former slum priest who had frequently angered the United States with his leftist rhetoric. Aristide had twice been elected, but he had alienated many Haitians with his increasing demagoguery and use of violence against the opposition. Yet polls showed that Aristide remained relatively popular, so even experienced Haiti watchers were surprised when, in late February, armed militias marched on the nation’s capital while demonstrators shut down the streets. In the violence, some 100 Haitians were killed. At dawn on February 29, with the militias closing in, Aristide left Haiti on a U.S. government plane.
But did the rebellion really spring from nowhere? Maybe not. Several leaders of the demonstrations -- some of whom also had links to the armed rebels -- had been getting organizational help and training from a U.S. government-financed organization. The group, the International Republican Institute (IRI), is supposed to focus on nonpartisan, grassroots democratization efforts overseas. But in Haiti and other countries, such as Venezuela and Cambodia, the institute -- which, though not formally affiliated with the GOP, is run by prominent Republicans and staffed by party insiders -- has increasingly sided with groups seeking the overthrow of elected but flawed leaders who are disliked in Washington.
Full Article: motherjones.comSee article below in Asia Times: the IRI is involved in the Ukraine 'opposition' too.
rootsie on 12.01.04 @ 10:25 PM CST [
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Something's fishy in Ohio
by Jesse Jackson
n the Ukraine, citizens are in the streets protesting what they charge is a fixed election. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell expresses this nation's concern about apparent voting irregularities. The media give the dispute around-the-clock coverage. But in the United States, massive and systemic voter irregularities go unreported and unnoticed.
Ohio is this election year's Florida. The vote in Ohio decided the presidential race, but it was marred by intolerable, and often partisan, irregularities and discrepancies. U.S. citizens have as much reason as those in Kiev to be concerned that the fix was in. Consider:
In Ohio, a court just ruled there can't be a recount yet, because the vote is not yet counted. It's three weeks after the election, and Ohio still hasn't counted the votes and certified the election. Some 93,000 overvotes and undervotes are not counted; 155,000 provisional ballots are only now being counted. Absentee ballots cast in the two days prior to the election haven't been counted.
Ohio determines the election, but the state has not yet counted the vote. That outrage is made intolerable by the fact that the secretary of state in charge of this operation, Ken Blackwell, holds -- like Katherine Harris of Florida's fiasco in 2000 -- a dual role: secretary of state with control over voting procedures and co-chair of George Bush's Ohio campaign. Blackwell should recuse himself so that a thorough investigation, count and recount of Ohio's vote can be made.
Blackwell reversed rules on provisional ballots in place in the spring primaries. These allowed voters to cast provisional ballots anywhere in their county, even if they were in the wrong precinct, reflecting the chief rationale for provisional ballots: to ensure that those who went to the wrong place by mistake could have their votes counted. The result of this decision -- why does this not surprise? -- was to disqualify disproportionately ballots cast in heavily Democratic Cuyahoga County.
Blackwell also permitted the use of electronic machines that provided no paper record. The maker of many of these machines, the head of Diebold Co., promised to deliver Ohio for Bush. In one precinct in Franklin County, an electric voting system gave Bush 3,893 extra votes out of a total of 638 votes cast.
Blackwell also presided over a voting system that resulted in quick, short lines in the dominantly Republican suburbs, and four-hour and longer waiting lines in the inner cities. Wealthy precincts received ample numbers of voting machines and numerous voting places. Democratic precincts received inadequate numbers of machines in too few polling places that were often hard to locate; this caused daylong waits for the very working people who could least afford the time.
In Ohio, as in Florida and Pennsylvania, there was a stark disconnect between the exit polls and the tabulated results, with the former favoring John Kerry and the latter George Bush. The chance of this occurring in these three states, according to Professor Steven Freeman of the University of Pennsylvania, is about 250 million to 1.
Full Article: chicago sun times
rootsie on 12.01.04 @ 10:16 PM CST [
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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 TimesHere's a good summary...
rootsie on 12.01.04 @ 01:35 PM CST [
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U.S. senator wants Annan to resign as U.N. leader
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The U.S. senator leading the investigation into allegations of corruption and mismanagement in the Iraq oil-for-food program is urging U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to resign.
The "massive scope of this debacle demands nothing less," wrote Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minnesota, in an opinion piece published Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal.
"The decision to call for Mr. Annan's resignation does not come easily," Coleman wrote. "But I have arrived at this conclusion because the most extensive fraud in the history of the U.N. occurred on his watch.
"The world will never be able to learn the full extent of the bribes, kickbacks and under-the-table payments that occurred under the U.N.'s collective nose while Annan is in charge."
Coleman is chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which has been investigating the oil-for-food program for seven months.
Coleman said he was not accusing Kofi Annan of anything "other than incompetence and mismanagement.
Full article:cnn.comColeman is the Freshman senator from Minnesota who was picked by Karl Rove to run against Paul Wellstone in 2000, and lost. But now that Wellstone is dead, he can take his preordained place as Bush's hatchet-man in the Senate. This is revolting.
rootsie on 12.01.04 @ 01:06 PM CST [
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Putin's Warning Appears Aimed for U.S.
MOSCOW (AP) - Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday warned that Ukraine's crisis over last week's disputed presidential election must be solved without foreign pressure - even as European envoys returned to Kiev for a second round of mediation.
While it was delivered in a phone call with the German chancellor, Putin's message appeared aimed more at the United States, seen by the Kremlin as behind a campaign to install Ukraine's pro-Western opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko at the helm of the nation Russia has always regarded as its main satellite.
The former Soviet republic of 48 million has emerged at the center of arguably the biggest direct geopolitical confrontation between Moscow and the United States and its Western allies since the late 1980s, when Eastern Europe was still firmly in the embrace of the Communist empire but struggling to break out.
``Putin is being told by his advisers and allies that for a long time, the West has been actively interfering in Ukraine and Yushchenko as a politician is a purely American project,'' said Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of a leading Russian foreign affairs journal. ``He's told that the whole campaign is being run on ... mostly American, money, and if Yushchenko wins Ukraine will sharply change its political orientation - quickly joining NATO, trying to rupture its ties with Russia and so on.''
Full Article: netscape.cnn.comSome 'opposition.' Yushchenko is the former head of the national bank. Nobody in the mainstream press mentions the larger American/European geo-political-economic-military interests in the country. And not a peep about the pipeline.
rootsie on 12.01.04 @ 09:18 AM CST [
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