[Peace-discuss] US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev

[Lisa Chason]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/ukraine/story/0,15569,1360236,00.html
>
> The Guardian	 Friday November 26, 2004
>
> US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev
>
> By 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.
>
> The places to watch are Moldova and the authoritarian countries of
> central
> Asia.
>
>
>