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Western Aggression •
Ukraine State TV in Revolt •
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U.S. Campaign Behind the Turmoil in Kiev
By Ian Traynor
The Guardian U.K.
Friday 26 November 2004
With their websites and stickers, their pranks and slogans aimed at banishing widespread fear of a corrupt regime, the democracy guerrillas of the Ukrainian Pora youth movement have already notched up a famous victory - whatever the outcome of the dangerous stand-off in Kiev.
Ukraine, traditionally passive in its politics, has been mobilized by the young democracy activists and will never be the same again.
But while the gains of the orange-bedecked "chestnut revolution" are Ukraine's, the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavory regimes.
Funded and organized by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organizations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box.
Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze.
Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organized a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman, Alexander Lukashenko.
That one failed. "There will be no Kostunica in Belarus," the Belarus president declared, referring to the victory in Belgrade.
But experience gained in Serbia, Georgia and Belarus has been invaluable in plotting to beat the regime of Leonid Kuchma in Kiev.
The operation - engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience - is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people's elections.
In the center of Belgrade, there is a dingy office staffed by computer-literate youngsters who call themselves the Centre for Non-violent Resistance. If you want to know how to beat a regime that controls the mass media, the judges, the courts, the security apparatus and the voting stations, the young Belgrade activists are for hire.
They emerged from the anti-Milosevic student movement, Otpor, meaning resistance. The 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, meaning high time. 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 Milosevic. 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.
Last year, before becoming president in Georgia, the US-educated Mr. Saakashvili traveled from Tbilisi to Belgrade to be coached in the techniques of mass defiance. In Belarus, the US embassy organized the dispatch of young opposition leaders to the Baltic, where they met up with Serbs traveling from Belgrade. In Serbia's case, given the hostile environment in Belgrade, the Americans organized the overthrow from neighboring Hungary - Budapest and Szeged.
In recent weeks, several Serbs traveled to the Ukraine. Indeed, one of the leaders from Belgrade, Aleksandar Maric, was turned away at the border.
The Democratic party's National Democratic Institute, the Republican party's International Republican Institute, the US state department and USAid are the main agencies involved in these grassroots campaigns as well as the Freedom House NGO and billionaire George Soros's open society institute.
US pollsters and professional consultants are hired to organize focus groups and use psephological data to plot strategy.
The usually fractious oppositions have to be united behind a single candidate if there is to be any chance of unseating the regime. That leader is selected on pragmatic and objective grounds, even if he or she is anti-American.
In Serbia, US pollsters Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates discovered that the assassinated pro-western opposition leader, Zoran Djindjic, was reviled at home and had no chance of beating Milosevic fairly in an election. He was persuaded to take a back seat to the anti-western Vojislav Kostunica, who is now Serbian prime minister.
In Belarus, US officials ordered opposition parties to unite behind the dour, elderly trade unionist, Vladimir Goncharik, because he appealed to much of the Lukashenko constituency.
Officially, the US government spent $41m (£21.7m) organizing and funding the year-long operation to get rid of Milosevic from October 1999. In Ukraine, the figure is said to be around $14m.
Apart from the student movement and the united opposition, the other key element in the democracy template is what is known as the "parallel vote tabulation", a counter to the election-rigging tricks beloved of disreputable regimes.
There are professional outside election monitors from bodies such as the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, but the Ukrainian poll, like its predecessors, also featured thousands of local election monitors trained and paid by western groups.
Freedom House and the Democratic party's 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 Mr. Yushchenko an 11-point lead and set the agenda for much of what has followed.
The exit polls are seen as critical because they seize the initiative in the propaganda battle with the regime, invariably appearing first, receiving wide media coverage and putting the onus on the authorities to respond.
The final stage in the US template concerns how to react when the incumbent tries to steal a lost election.
In Belarus, President Lukashenko won, so the response was minimal. In Belgrade, Tbilisi, and now Kiev, where the authorities initially tried to cling to power, the advice was to stay cool but determined and to organize mass displays of civil disobedience, which must remain peaceful but risk provoking the regime into violent suppression.
If the events in Kiev vindicate the US in its strategies for helping other people win elections and take power from anti-democratic regimes, it is certain to try to repeat the exercise elsewhere in the post-Soviet world.
The places to watch are Moldova and the authoritarian countries of central Asia.
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Western Aggression
By John Laughland
The Spectator U.K.
Friday 05 November 2004
How the US and Britain are intervening in Ukraine's elections.
A few years ago, a friend of mine was sent to Kiev by the British government to teach Ukrainians about the Western democratic system. His pupils were young reformers from western Ukraine, affiliated to the Conservative party. When they produced a manifesto containing 15 pages of impenetrable waffle, he gently suggested boiling their electoral message down to one salient point. What was it, he wondered? A moment of furrowed brows produced the lapidary and nonchalant reply, 'To expel all Jews from our country.'
It is in the west of Ukraine that support is strongest for the man who is being vigorously promoted by America as the country's next president: the former prime minister Viktor Yushchenko. On a rainy Monday morning in Kiev, I met some young Yushchenko supporters, druggy skinheads from Lvov. They belonged both to a Western-backed youth organization, Pora, and also to Ukrainian National Self-Defence (Unso), a semi-paramilitary movement whose members enjoy posing for the cameras carrying rifles and wearing fatigues and balaclava helmets. Were nutters like this to be politically active in any country other than Ukraine or the Baltic states, there would be instant outcry in the US and British media; but in former Soviet republics, such bogus nationalism is considered anti-Russian and therefore democratic.
It is because of this ideological presupposition that Anglo-Saxon reporting on the Ukrainian elections has chimed in with press releases from the State Department, peddling a fairytale about a struggle between a brave and beleaguered democrat, Yushchenko, and an authoritarian Soviet nostalgic, the present Prime Minister, Viktor Yanukovych. All facts which contradict this morality tale are suppressed. Thus a story has been widely circulated that Yushchenko was poisoned during the electoral campaign, the fantasy being that the government was trying to bump him off. But no British or American news outlet has reported the interview by the chief physician of the Vienna clinic which treated Yushchenko for his unexplained illness. The clinic released a report declaring there to be no evidence of poisoning, after which, said the chief physician, he was subjected to such intimidation by Yushchenko's entourage - who wanted him to change the report - that he was forced to seek police protection.
It has also been repeatedly alleged that foreign observers found the elections fraught with violations committed by the government. In fact, this is exclusively the view of highly politicized Western governmental organizations like the OSCE - a body which is notorious for the fraudulent nature of its own reports, and which in any case came to this conclusion before the poll had even taken place - and of bogus NGOs, such as the Committee of Ukrainian Voters, a front organization exclusively funded by Western (mainly American) government bodies and think-tanks, and clearly allied with Yushchenko. Because they speak English, the political activists in such organizations can easily nobble Anglophone Western reporters.
Contrary allegations - such as those of fraud committed by Yushchenko-supporting local authorities in western Ukraine, carefully detailed by Russian election observers but available only in Russian - go unreported. So too does evidence of crude intimidation made by Yushchenko supporters against election officials. The depiction is so skewed that Yushchenko is presented as a pro-Western free-marketeer, even though his fief in western Ukraine is an economic wasteland; while Yanukovych is presented as pro-Russian and statist, even though his electoral campaign is based on deregulation and the economy has been growing at an impressive clip. The cleanliness and prosperity of Kiev and other cities have improved noticeably.
There is, however, one thing which separates the two main candidates, and which explains the West's determination to shoo in Yushchenko: Nato. Yanukovych has said he is against Ukraine joining; Yushchenko is in favor. The West wants Ukraine in Nato to weaken Russia geopolitically and to have a new big client state for expensive Western weaponry, whose manufacturers fund so much of the US political process.
Yanukovych has also promised to promote Russian back to the status of second state language. Since most Ukrainian citizens speak Russian, since Kiev is the historic birthplace of Christian Russia, and since the current legislation forces tens of millions of Russians to Ukrainianise their names, this is hardly unreasonable. The continued artificial imposition of Ukrainian as the state language - started under the Soviets and intensified after the fall of communism - will be a further factor in ripping Ukraine's Russophone citizens away from Russia proper. That is why the West wants it.
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Ukraine State TV in Revolt
By Sebastian Usher
BBC
Friday 26 November 2004
Journalists on Ukraine's state-owned channel - which had previously given unswerving support to Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych - have joined the opposition, saying they have had enough of "telling the government's lies".
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Journalists on another strongly pro-government TV station have also promised an end to the bias in their reporting. The turnaround in news coverage, after years of toeing the government line, is a big setback for Mr. Yanukovych.
Journalists in Ukraine seem to have responded to the call by opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko for them to reject government censorship.
A correspondent on the state channel, UT1 , announced live on the evening bulletin that the entire news team was going to join the protests in Independence Square. She said their message to the protesters was: "We are not lying anymore".
Rebellion
For the first time in years, the UT1 bulletin aired opposition views in a balanced way after the station's management acceded to the journalists' demands.
It was the culmination of a rebellion among journalists at the state-run channel that had been brewing for days.
Even the sign-language presenter said that in an earlier bulletin, she had rejected the pro-government script and informed her viewers instead of the allegations of vote-rigging.
The news staff at UT1 were not alone. A couple of hours earlier, journalists on the pro-government private channel One Plus One took a similar stand.
The station had announced earlier in the day the resignation of its news editor, who had been presenting a fiercely pro-government election special for the past three days, after journalists refused to produce news bulletins in protest at censorship of the opposition.
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In the reinstated evening bulletin that replaced the election special, the channel's director Oleksander Rodnyansky stood in front of a solemn group of his colleagues to deliver a brief statement.
He began by saying: "The One Plus One TV channel fully resumes its news and political and social broadcasting.
"We understand our responsibility for the biased news that the channel has so far been broadcasting under pressure and on orders from various political forces."
Mr. Rodnyansky went on to say that the station would now guarantee "full and impartial" news coverage, allowing all viewpoints to be expressed. The subsequent bulletin lived up to this promise.
Media Role
This new balance in TV coverage on previously government-controlled channels means that pictures making plain the huge size of the opposition demonstrations can now reach the heartland of Mr. Yanukovych's support in the east of the country.
Rolling news coverage of the protests by Channel 5 - the one station fully backing the opposition - had earlier been blocked in the region.
The Ukrainian media played a big role in boosting Mr. Yanukovych's election chances by denying the opposition any airtime to make its case and ridiculing his challenger, Mr. Yushchenko. Reporters say the government issued lists of what they could and could not show.
Now that Ukrainian journalists have openly rebelled against such tight government control, Mr. Yanukovych appears to have lost one of the key pillars of his support. It is another clear sign that the momentum behind the opposition is growing ever stronger.
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