Timothy garton ash on Ukraine, archived forever
Salim al-Hukmatyr
archived forever.
Comment
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Freedom's front line
Europe must give immediate and total support to Ukraine's velvet
revolutionaries
Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday November 25, 2004
The Guardian
Can Europe's velvet revolution claim another prize? When Ukrainian
demonstrators on the frozen streets of Kiev place flowers in the
perforated metal shields of their country's riot police, they are
sending us two desperate yet dignified messages: "We want to join
Europe" and "We want to do this in a European way". Peacefully, that
is, supplanting the old Jacobin-Bolshevik model of violent regime
change with Europe's new model of velvet revolution - as in Prague and
Berlin in 1989, as in Serbia's toppling of Milosevic, as in Georgia,
where exactly one year ago the people's president marched into
parliament bearing a long-stemmed rose. If we, comfortably ensconced
in the institutionalised 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.
Tomorrow may already be too late. I'm typing these words on Wednesday
afternoon. Who knows what will have happened in Ukraine by the time
you read them? As I write, both sides are still just about respecting
the first commandment in Europe's new catechism: no violence. But for
how much longer? During the presidential election campaign,
leather-jacketed thugs beat up supporters of the pro-European
candidate Viktor Yushchenko. But the young female protester in Kiev
can still express her hope for a peaceful solution: "as in Georgia a
year ago ... as it should be in a civilised country".
The learning chain of Europe's velvet revolutions is fascinatingly
direct. One of the most active groups in Ukraine's democratic
opposition is called Pora. Pora means "It's time", which is exactly
what the crowds chanted on Wenceslas Square in Prague in November
1989. The student activists of Pora received personal tutorials in
non-violent resistance from Serbian students of the Otpor
("resistance") group who were in the vanguard of toppling Milosevic.
Those same Serbs also helped the Georgian vanguard movement Kmara
("enough is enough"). On Tuesday, a Georgian flag was seen waving on
Independence Square in Kiev. In Tbilisi, the rose-revolutionary
Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili interrupted his first
anniversary address to speak a few words of encouragement, in
Ukrainian, to his "sisters and brothers" in Kiev. Now the Ukrainian
opposition has asked Lech Walesa, once the leader of Solidarity, that
Polish mother of all east European peaceful revolutions, to come to
Kiev and mediate.
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The tricks on the other side are familiar too. Most important of all
is the grotesque abuse of state television to favour the pro-Russian
candidate, Viktor Yanukovich. (State television stations are today's
Bastilles.) Then heavy-handed interventions from Moscow, including two
visits by the Russian president and former KGB-officer Vladimir Putin.
Intimidation. Censorship. Lies. Dirty tricks, including a novel
variant in which Yanukovich supporters were apparently given multiple
voter registration cards so they could "vote early and vote often" in
several different constituencies. The Ukrainian opposition refers to
them ironically as "free voters". Miners from the Donbass region are
reportedly being bussed in to sort out these pansy urban liberals.
(Something very similar happened to keep Ceausescu's successors in
power in Romania.) Then there are the incredible turnout figures, as
in east European dictatorships of old, including one marvellous return
of more than 100%.
Who says Europe is boring? Yet until Tuesday, many west Europeans
probably did not even know that there was a presidential election
going on in Ukraine. We were all focused on that other crucial
presidential election, in the US. And, shamingly, Americans probably
have done more to support the democratic opposition in Ukraine, and to
shine a spotlight on electoral malpractices, than west Europeans have.
Poles, Czechs and Slovaks have been more actively engaged,
understanding how much is at stake.
What's at stake is not just the future of Ukraine: whether it turns to
Europe, the west and liberal democracy, or back to authoritarianism
and Putin's Russia. It's also the future of Russia itself, and
therewith of the whole of Eurasia. A Russia that wins back Ukraine, as
well as Belarus, will again be an imperial Russia, as Putin wishes. A
Russia that sees even Ukraine moving towards Europe and the west, has
a chance of itself becoming, with time, a more normal, liberal,
democratic nation-state. But at the moment, under Putin, Russia is
launched on a different, worse trajectory, and western leaders have
been united in their pusillanimity towards it. We have all been
appeasers there.
Of course, there's a global power play involved, too. Georgia, under
its new government, has become a closer partner of the United States.
Ukraine under Yushchenko might do the same. But above all, it will be
turned towards Europe. These days, the most fervent pro-Europeans are
to be found at the edges of Europe, and none more so than
westward-looking Ukrainians. It's the European Union they hope one day
to join, not the United States of America.
In the short term, there's a limit to what we can do. For once, the
leadership of the EU has spoken out as plainly as Washington. "We
don't accept these [election] results," said the Dutch foreign
minister, Bernard Bot, speaking for the current presidency of the EU.
"We think they are fraudulent." Well said, Mr Bot. And Javier Solana,
the nearest thing the EU has to a collective foreign minister, has
warned that Ukraine's relationship with the EU will depend on its
relationship to democracy. Yet clearly, the immediate crisis has to be
resolved internally, between the Ukrainians themselves.
It should, however, be our unambiguous position that peaceful civil
disobedience is a legitimate, even a necessary response to electoral
fraud. And that the use of military or police force to deny people the
right to peaceful protest is something we do not accept in
21st-century Europe. Actually, it's in places like Kiev, rather than
in Brussels, that you see what a great story Europe has to tell, if
only we knew how to tell it. It's the story of a rolling enlargement
of freedom, from a position 60 years ago when there was just a handful
of perilously free countries in Europe, and virtually the whole
continent was at war, to a position today where there are only two or
three seriously unfree countries in Europe, and almost the whole
continent is at peace. Today, the front line of that forward march is
in Ukraine.
Orwell writes somewhere that "from inside, everything looks worse".
Whatever its faults seen from inside, and they are many, seen from
outside the European Union is a great magnet and promoter of freedom.
Most of our neighbours want to join it in order to become more free
(as well as richer), and so as to secure the freedoms many of them
have fought for in velvet revolutions.
In the longer term, to say, as I believe we should, that a democratic
Ukraine has its proper place in the EU, is the best support we could
give Ukrainian democrats. Immediately, though, we need the hardest,
sharpest warning that Europe, the US and any other democracy that has
influence in Kiev or Moscow can deliver. A group of students in the
western Ukrainian city of Lviv send us this appeal via the BBC
website: "We just hope Yanukovich decides not to turn the guns on us
... Don't let them kill our will."
Anton N. Mescheryakov
> probably the best English expert on Eastern and Central Europe,
> archived forever.
>
> Comment
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Freedom's front line
>
> Europe must give immediate and total support to Ukraine's velvet
> revolutionaries
>
> Timothy Garton Ash
> Thursday November 25, 2004
> The Guardian
> direct. One of the most active groups in Ukraine's democratic
> opposition is called Pora. Pora means "It's time", which is exactly
> what the crowds chanted on Wenceslas Square in Prague in November
> 1989. The student activists of Pora received personal tutorials in
> non-violent resistance from Serbian students of the Otpor
> ("resistance") group who were in the vanguard of toppling Milosevic.
> Those same Serbs also helped the Georgian vanguard movement Kmara
> ("enough is enough"). On Tuesday, a Georgian flag was seen waving on
> Independence Square in Kiev. In Tbilisi, the rose-revolutionary
> Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili interrupted his first
> anniversary address to speak a few words of encouragement, in
> Ukrainian, to his "sisters and brothers" in Kiev. Now the Ukrainian
> opposition has asked Lech Walesa, once the leader of Solidarity, that
> Polish mother of all east European peaceful revolutions, to come to
> Kiev and mediate.
If some West-sponsored "freedom" lovers will try to make the same
trick in Russia I'll have just one option - to kill their leaders
ASAP. Prison is better than yet another revolution, more "democracy"
and other shit, anyway. Of course it's FSB job to stop them but...
Rostyslaw J. Lewyckyj
> If some West-sponsored "freedom" lovers will try to make the same
> trick in Russia I'll have just one option - to kill their leaders
> ASAP. Prison is better than yet another revolution, more "democracy"
> and other shit, anyway. Of course it's FSB job to stop them but...
I see that you are against freedom for the Russians! :(
Why is it that you prefer for russia to continue as a totalitarian
corrupt dictatorship ?
--
Rostyk
Roman Werpachowski
> "Rostyslaw J. Lewyckyj" <urj...@bellsouth.net> wrote in message news:<kJird.6664$Dm2....@bignews1.bellsouth.net>...
>> Anton N. Mescheryakov wrote:
>>
>> > If some West-sponsored "freedom" lovers will try to make the same
>> > trick in Russia I'll have just one option - to kill their leaders
>> > ASAP. Prison is better than yet another revolution, more "democracy"
>> > and other shit, anyway. Of course it's FSB job to stop them but...
>>
>> I see that you are against freedom for the Russians! :(
> needs freedom yet.
>> Why is it that you prefer for russia to continue...
> I do prefer Russia to continue. It's my duty and I'll die for it if
> nescessary. Everything else:
>> ...as a totalitarian corrupt dictatorship ?
> is propaganda. BTW, corruption is a feature of "free", "democratic"
> states. Soviet leaders until Gorby (who's the traitor anyway) were not
> especialy rich; neither their children nor relatives. Stalin, for
> example, left so few after his death his guard officer said, "I was
> richer". Corrupt dictator, right? Corrupt dictator who refused to
> exchange his son for the captured Nazi general? Probably Russia must
> have less "freedom" to be less corrupt and more prosperous. After all,
> the average life expectancy of Russians was a lot longer in USSR,
> there was no unemployment etc.
I'd rather have a corrupt crony than a paranoidal mass-murder at power.
--
Roman Werpachowski
/--------==============--------\
| http://www.cft.edu.pl/~roman |
\--------==============--------/
Anton N. Mescheryakov
>
> > If some West-sponsored "freedom" lovers will try to make the same
> > trick in Russia I'll have just one option - to kill their leaders
> > ASAP. Prison is better than yet another revolution, more "democracy"
> > and other shit, anyway. Of course it's FSB job to stop them but...
>
> I see that you are against freedom for the Russians! :(