[Mb-civic] 3 articles about U.S. meddling in Ukraine

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

In our topsyturvey aliceinwonderland world, it appears that nothing as 
portrayed in our corporate media is what it seems....Better to be confused 
than to be "clear" but misinformed...(thanks again to Ed Pearl for these...to 
join his list directly contact him at epearl at sbcglobal.net)

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. 



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, sayingit
"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 ofgovernment'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. 
Ourbias inpainting 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]

 
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