*Uncle Santa and Ukraine's Orange-Colored Elves*
By Steve Weissman
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Thursday 16 December 2004
Sparring over Ukraine's disputed election, Vladimir Putin and his
one-time buddy George W. Bush still agreed on one thing. Both opposed
"foreign meddling."
"Only the people of any country ... can decide their fate," the
Russian leader told reporters. "One can play the role of a mediator, but
one must not meddle and apply pressure."
"We're watching very carefully what is taking place," Bush replied.
"But any election in any country must reflect the will of the people and
not that of any foreign government."
Neither man meant what he said.
A former colonel in the Soviet KGB, Putin seeks to preserve Kiev's
independence only from NATO and the West, not from the Russian Bear, who
has ruled Ukraine for centuries.
With no less chutzpah or hypocrisy, Bush condemns only Moscow's
meddling - and not Washington's long-term effort to build up Ukraine's
pro-Western opposition. According to the Associated Press
<http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/121204A.shtml>, in the last two years
alone the Bush Administration spent more than $65 million to seed the
Orange Revolution and build support for opposition leader Viktor
Yushchenko.
To Ukrainian protestors, Putin's interference seems the more odious,
and for good reason. He overtly backed the thuggish and highly corrupt
President Leonid Kuchma and Kuchma's handpicked successor, the current
Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych. In the earlier campaign, Putin even
appeared on Ukrainian TV endorsing Yanukovych, which probably hurt more
than it helped. Several of Putin's former campaign staff - the Russian
Karl Rove-niks, as it were - worked directly for Yanukovych, while
others prepared compulsory "talking points" for journalists on the
state-controlled television channels.
Masha Gessen, a liberal Moscow journalist, described their
ham-fisted meddling in an insightful online report for /The New
Republic./ "They tried to create a clone of the Moscow regime - and
failed," she wrote, "in large part because Ukrainians rejected their
heavy-handed style and tools of intimidation."
The heaviest intimidation was poisoning Yushchenko with dioxin, the
chief ingredient in Agent Orange, which the Americans used as a
defoliant in Vietnam. No one has yet proved who tried to kill or
incapacitate the opposition leader, but the whole business smells like
something Col. Putin's former KGB colleagues might have dreamed up. As
one Ukrainian wag put it, "Agent Orange for the Orange Agent."
American meddling was far more subtle, sustained, and effective. The
$65 million plus went to pro-Yushchenko think tanks, civic
organizations, political training, and work with strategically placed
professionals, such as journalists and judges.
It paid for some questionable exit polls and election monitors, many
of them Ukrainian expatriates who were far from impartial.
And, the money paid to train and support PORA ("It's Time"), the
mostly student movement whose jolly, non-violent elves provided
wonderfully creative, highly disciplined shock troops for the Orange
Revolution. With all the Western journalists in Kiev, outsiders still
have no idea how much the activists passed the hat to pay for their
elaborate tent cities with hot food, warm clothes, and big screen TV,
and how much they got from Uncle Santa.
Much of the training came from the Belgrade-based Centre for
Non-Violent Resistance, an offshoot of the Serbian student movement
Optor, which Washington supported in its earlier campaign to oust
Slobodan Milosevic. According to the Guardian
<http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/112804A.shtml> and other newspapers,
the Americans continued to fund the Centre to train non-violent
opposition movements in Georgia, Belarus, and now Ukraine.
*The House of Whose Freedom?*
As far as the public now knows, the Americans funded all this
through a series of "cutouts" - primarily Freedom House and NED, the
National Endowment for Democracy.
NED is mostly a fiction. After Ramparts magazine, the New York
Times, and Senator Frank Church's investigation exposed an earlier
generation of front groups and foundations that passed money for the
CIA, the Reagan Administration created NED to do the same thing, only
with a show of openness about Congressional funding. Not to be too
transparent, NED generally channels the money through a whole network of
other groups, such as the National Democratic Institute for
International Affairs (NDI) and the International Republican Institute
(IRI).
Freedom House has a more colorful past. Styling itself as a
pro-democracy watchdog and human rights group, it is best remembered as
one of the earliest defenders of the Vietnam War, which it portrayed as
an effort to bring freedom and democracy to that troubled country. Where
have we heard that again?
Dominated at the time by pro-Cold War liberals and the State
Department's favorite social democrats, the Freedom House crew regularly
redbaited those of us who opposed American intervention in Southeast
Asia, and later worked closely with the Contras in Nicaragua.
A "senior scholar" at Freedom House and the grandson of Ukrainian
immigrants to the U.S., Adrian Karatnycky proudly told the /New York
Sun/ how he helped organize a training camp for Ukrainians this past
August.
"Croatians, Romanians, Slovakians, and Serbians - leaders of the
group that led civic opposition to Milosevic - taught Ukrainian kids how
to 'control the temperature' of protesting crowds," he explained.
Paid for by the American government, the training camp taught the
Ukrainians how to confront government pressure and how to show that they
were not "part of an evil Western conspiracy." The training also taught
the Ukrainians how to establish connections with the government militia
and how to conduct street theater, poking fun at Kuchma and other
leaders to reduce people's fear of them.
The results of this education, Mr. Karatnycky boasted, can be seen
today on the streets of Kiev.
* "American Son-in-Law, Go Home!" *
Even more obvious, Washington's tightest link to the Orange
Revolution is exactly where Yushchenko's most vocal critics said it was
- through his bright, charming, and well-connected American wife
Katherine Chumachenko.
Born in Chicago to a family of Ukrainian émigrés, Kathy - as she was
then known - got her M.B.A. from the fierce free marketers at the
University of Chicago, became a well-known conservative activist, and
worked in the Reagan White House, where she handled contacts with
American groups of Eastern European origin. She also served in the State
Department, at the Treasury, and on the staff of Congress's Joint
Economic Committee.
In 1991, as the Soviet Union was breaking up, Kathy created the
U.S.-Ukraine Foundation, whose announced mission was to promote
Ukrainian democracy and free market reform. Kathy was the foundation's
president, and then moved to Kiev as its in-country representative. As
you might expect by now, U.S. funding came from NED and the Agency for
International Development.
Living in Ukraine, Kathy - now Katya - met and married Yushchenko,
who was then head of the Central Bank and later Kuchma's Prime Minister.
What a coup for Katya's American backers! Only Yushchenko and Kuchma
fell out, and Washington had to play catch up with a classic
destabilization campaign, which is how the CIA would view the Orange
Revolution.
Significantly, the first ten years of funding for Katya's
U.S.-Ukraine Foundation was separate from the $65 million in U.S.
spending quoted by the Associated Press. AP's figure does include money
to bring Yushchenko to meet as-yet unnamed U.S. government officials.
No doubt, both Washington and Moscow will continue to meddle in
Ukraine through and beyond the new run-off election, now scheduled for
December 26. What the rest of us might ask - wherever we live - is how
to respond.
Hold in mind that Senator John Kerry and other leading Democrats
have staunchly supported the National Endowment for Democracy and its
covert interventions. Note, as well, that former U.N. Ambassador Richard
Holbrooke, whom many Dems wanted as the next Secretary of State, has
just written a widely circulated celebration of Ukraine's Orange
Revolution without once mentioning the American role in it.
So, should we support the meddling we like? Or do we need to oppose
and expose it all?
Where do you stand? I should love to know your opinion.
Steve Weissman
RSVP: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left
monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and
television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he writes
for *t r u t h o u t*./
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