Direct Action <<>> US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev

[Ivo Skoric]

That's Hegelian approach. Marxist question would be: why is that
while the US exports so well its 1960's civil rights movement
concepts, their own 21st century civil rights movement is, despite
all their brilliant efforts, so unsucessfull to execute the regime
change at home? Killing of MLK and the Kennedys now in retrospect
looks like an equivalent of top rank communist party purges in
Eastern Europe.
ivo

On 27 Nov 2004 at 0:24, Miroslav Visic wrote:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/ukraine/story/0,15569,1360236,00.html

The Guardian Friday November 26, 2004 Special report Ukraine

US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev

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Ian Traynor

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.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004


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