Interesting
to look back at this, 10 years ago, from the “Orange Revolution”
from a time when the Guardian was more honest.
What, one asks, has
changed?
US
campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev
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.
26
November, 2004
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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