Foreign Correspondence

[CoalTrain]

Some Hungarians are not buying the western line in Ukraine. One of hem sent me this from a Hungarian web site.

US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1360237,00.html

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.