[North-NV-Greens] Fwd: RE: USGP-INT What's Going on in the Ukraine?

Fri Nov 26 14:20:02 PST 2004

>This is interesting. We The People should use it here.   Pax, Paul Etx
>
>
>http://www.guardian.co.uk/ukraine/story/0,15569,1360236,00.html
>
>Analysis
>
>
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev
>
>Ian Traynor
>Friday November 26, 2004
>The Guardian
>
>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 
>(£21.7m) organising and funding the year-long 
>operation to get rid of Milosevic from October 
>1999. In Ukraine, the figure is said to be 
>around $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 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.
>
>
>
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-- 
Paul Etxeberri

"Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow"   ---Chateaubriand