US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev
by Ian Traynor
The Guardian (London) 26 November 2004
www.globalresearch.ca 28 November 2004
Back to Alternative Reader Index
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 mobilised 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 unsavoury
regimes.
Funded and organised by the US
government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big
American parties and US non-government organisations, 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, organised 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 centre 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 signalling 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 travelled from Tbilisi to Belgrade
to be coached in the techniques of mass defiance. In Belarus, the US
embassy organised the dispatch of young opposition leaders to the Baltic,
where they met up with Serbs travelling from Belgrade. In Serbia's case,
given the hostile environment in Belgrade, the Americans organised the
overthrow from neighbouring Hungary -
Budapest
and Szeged.
In recent weeks, several Serbs
travelled 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 organise 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 (L21.7m) organising and funding the year-long operation to get rid of
Milosevic from October 1999. In Ukraine, the figure is said to be around
$14 million.
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 organise the "largest civil regional election
monitoring effort" in Ukraine, involving more than 1,000 trained
observers. They also organised 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 organise 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.
Bulatlat
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