U.S. Campaign Behind the Turmoil in Kiev
Raleigh Myers
Raleigh Myers
Worksheet bio
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The latest on the vote fraud Blog
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The anti communist fervor pales in comparison to the anti fascist
sentiment world wide. The theft of two American elections has set the
stage for world wide cooperation against world conquest by the known
fascist entities.
http://raenergy.igc.org/worldlight.html
Look at this as the way to straighten out our election.
US behind Turmoil in Ukraine
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.
Go to Original
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.
***
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
sent by Gregory Elich (activ-l)
The Guardian - Nov 27, 2004
The revolution televised
The western media's view of Ukraine's election is hopelessly biased
by John Laughland
There was a time when the left was in favour of revolution, while the
right
stood unambiguously for the authority of the state. Not any more. This
week both the anti-war Independent and the pro-war Telegraph excitedly
announced a "revolution" in Ukraine. Across the pond, the rightwing
Washington Times welcomed "the people versus the power".
Whether it is Albania in 1997, Serbia in 2000, Georgia last November or
Ukraine now, our media regularly peddle the same fairy tale about how
youthful demonstrators manage to bring down an authoritarian regime,
simply by attending a rock concert in a central square. Two million
anti-war
demonstrators can stream though the streets of London and be politically
ignored, but a few tens of thousands in central Kiev are proclaimed to be
"the people", while the Ukrainian police, courts and governmental
institutions are discounted as instruments of oppression.
The western imagination is now so gripped by its own mythology of popular
revolution that we have become dangerously tolerant of blatant double
standards in media reporting. Enormous rallies have been held in Kiev in
support of the prime minister, Viktor Yanukovich, but they are not shown
on our TV screens: if their existence is admitted, Yanukovich supporters
are denigrated as having been "bussed in". The demonstrations in favour
of
Viktor Yushchenko have laser lights, plasma screens, sophisticated sound
systems, rock concerts, tents to camp in and huge quantities of orange
clothing; yet we happily dupe ourselves that they are spontaneous.
Or again, we are told that a 96% turnout in Donetsk, the home town of
Yanukovich, is proof of electoral fraud. But apparently turnouts of over
80%
in areas which support Viktor Yushchenko are not. Nor are actual scores
for
Yushchenko of well over 90% in three regions, which Yanukovich achieved
only in two. And whereas Yanukovich's final official score was 54%, the
western-backed president of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili, officially
polled
96.24% of the vote in his country in January. The observers who now
denounce the Ukrainian election welcomed that result in Georgia, saying
it
"brought the country closer to meeting international standards".
The blindness extends even to the posters which the "pro-democracy"
group, Pora, has plastered all over Ukraine, depicting a jackboot
crushing a
beetle, an allegory of what Pora wants to do to its opponents.
Such dehumanisation of enemies has well-known antecedents - not least in
Nazi-occupied Ukraine itself, when pre-emptive war was waged against the
Red Plague emanating from Moscow - yet these posters have passed
without comment. Pora continues to be presented as an innocent band of
students having fun in spite of the fact that - like its sister
organisations in
Serbia and Georgia, Otpor and Kmara - Pora is an organisation created and
financed by Washington.
It gets worse. Plunging into the crowd of Yushchenko supporters in
Independence Square after the first round of the election, I met two
members of Una-Unso, a neo-Nazi party whose emblem is a swastika.
They were unembarrassed about their allegiance, perhaps because last
year Yushchenko and his allies stood up for the Socialist party
newspaper,
Silski Visti, after it ran an anti-semitic article claiming that Jews had
invaded
Ukraine alongside the Wehrmacht in 1941. On September 19 2004,
Yushchenko's ally, Alexander Moroz, told JTA-Global Jewish News: "I have
defended Silski Visti and will continue to do so. I personally think the
argument ... citing 400,000 Jews in the SS is incorrect, but I am not in
a
position to know all the facts." Yushchenko, Moroz and their oligarch
ally,
Yulia Tymoshenko, meanwhile, cited a court order closing the paper as
evidence of government's desire to muzzle the media. In any other
country,
support for anti-semites would be shocking; in this case, our media do
not
even mention it.
Voters in Britain and the US have witnessed their governments lying
brazenly about Iraq for over a year in the run-up to war, and with
impunity.
This is an enormous dysfunction in our own so-called democratic system.
Our bias in painting political fantasies on countries such as Ukraine
which
are tabula rasa for us, and to present the west as a fairy godmother
swooping in to save the day, is not only a way to salve a guilty
conscience
about our own political shortcomings; it also blinds us to the reality of
continued brazen western intervention in the democratic politics of other
countries.
[John Laughland is a trustee of www.oscewatch.org and an associate of
www.sandersresearch.com]
; &nbs p; *
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Raleigh Myers
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