Published in The Dominion (http://www.dominionpaper.ca)
May 31 2007 - 1:48pm
Mark Mackinnon's New Cold War
Canada, the US and democracy promotion in the former Soviet republics
by Dru Oja Jay
Mark Mackinnon's new book opens with a tale of two large buildings blown up by
terrorists. The president, until then an unremarkable leader with deep ties to
the country's secretive intelligence agency, seizes on the tragedy by launching
a war against the terrorists. Suddenly popular for his decisive strikes, the
president sends troops to a small Muslim country that had been occupied, then
abandoned by previous administrations. He uses the urgency of war as a pretext
for consolidating power, naming his lackeys to key positions. The "oligarchs"
of the country, Mackinnon writes, proceeded to set up a system of "managed
democracy," where the illusion of choice and a popular longing for stability
cover up the fact that fundamental decisions are made in an undemocratic
fashion and power remains concentrated in the hands of the few.
Mackinnon, who is currently the Middle East bureau chief for the Globe and
Mail, is of course talking about Russia, and its president, ex-KGB agent
Vladimir Putin--though if Mackinnon notices parallels with another country, he
doesn't say so. The Muslim country is Chechnya and the terrorist attacks were
against two apartment buildings in the town of Ryazan, 200km southeast of
Moscow. Questions were raised about KGB involvement.
Mackinnon's book is The New Cold War: Revolutions, Rigged Elections and
Pipeline Politics in the Former Soviet Union.
Almost without exception, Canadian reporters find it a lot easier to cut
through PR spin and official lies when they're covering foreign
governments--especially when those governments are seen as rivals of Canada or
its close partner, the US. But when the subject is closer to home, their
critical acumen suddenly wilts.
Mackinnon suffers from this common affliction less than most reporters. One
gets the sense that it's a conscious choice, but still a tentative one.
Over the last seven years, the US State Department, the Soros Foundation and
several partner organizations have orchestrated a series of "democratic
revolutions" in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. And, during those
years, each "revolution," whether attempted or successful, has been portrayed
by journalists as a spontaneous uprising of freedom-loving citizens receiving
inspiration and moral support from their brothers and sisters in the West.
Evidence that this support also involved hundreds of millions of dollars,
meddling with choices of candidates and changes to foreign and domestic
policies has been widely available. And yet, for the last seven years, this
information has been almost entirely suppressed.
Perhaps the most glaring evidence of suppression came when the Associated Press
(AP) ran a story on December 11, 2004--at the height of the "Orange
Revolution"--noting that the Bush Administration had given $65 million to
political groups in Ukraine, though none of it went "directly" to political
parties. It was "funneled," the report said, through other groups. Many media
outlets in Canada--notably the Globe and Mail and the CBC--rely on the AP, but
none ran the story. On the same day, CBC.ca published four other stories from
the AP about Ukraine's political upheaval, but did not see fit to include the
one that tepidly investigated US funding.
Similarly, books by William Robinson, Eva Golinger and others have exposed US
funding of political parties abroad, but have not been discussed by the
corporate press.
Canada's role went unreported until two and a half years later,
when--coinciding with the release of The New Cold War--the Globe and Mail
finally saw fit to publish an account, written by Mackinnon. The Canadian
embassy, Mackinnon reported, "spent a half-million dollars promoting 'fair
elections' in a country that shares no border with Canada and is a negligible
trading partner." Canadian funding of election observers had been reported
before, but the fact that the money had been only a part of an orchestrated
attempt to influence elections had not.
For reasons that remain obscure, the editors of the Globe decided, after seven
years of silence, to allow Mackinnon to tell the public about what Western
money has been up to in the former Soviet Union. Perhaps they were influenced
by Mackinnon's choice to write a book about the topic; perhaps it was decided
that it was time to let the cat out of the bag.
Western-funded groups led the "Orange Revolution" in the Ukraine. cc 2.0 Photo:
Sarita Ladios
It's a fascinating account. Mackinnon starts in Serbia in 2000, where the West,
after funding opposition groups and "independent media" that provided a
constant stream of coverage critical of the government--as well as dropping
20,000 tonnes of bombs on the country--finally succeeded in toppling the last
stubborn holdout against neoliberalism in Europe.
Mackinnon describes in detail how Western funding--an effort spearheaded by
billionaire George Soros--flowed to four principle areas: Otpor (Serbian for
'resistance'), a student-heavy youth movement that used grafitti, street
theatre and non-violent demonstrations to channel negative political sentiments
against the Milosevic government; CeSID, a group of election monitors that
existed to "catch Milosevic in the act if he ever again tried to manipulate the
results of an election"; B92, a radio station that provided a steady supply of
anti-regime news and the edgy rock stylings of Nirvana and the Clash; and
assorted NGOs were given funding to raise "issues"--which Mackinnon calls "the
problems with the power-that-is, as defined by the groups' Western sponsors."
The Canadian embassy in Belgrade, he notes, was a venue for many donor meetings.
Finally, disparate opposition parties had to be united. This was facilitated by
then-US Secretary of State Madeline Albright and German Foreign Minister
Joschka Fischer, who told opposition leaders not to run, but to join a
"democratic coalition" with the relatively unknown lawyer Vojislav Kostunica as
the sole opposition candidate for the presidency. The Western-funded opposition
leaders, who didn't have a lot of say in the matter, agreed.
It worked. Kostunica won the vote, the election monitors quickly announced
their version of the results, which were broadcast via B92 and other
Western-sponsored media outlets, and tens of thousands poured into the streets
to protest Milosevic's attempted vote-rigging in a demonstration led by the
pseudo-anarchist group Otpor. Milosevic, having lost his "pillars of support"
in the courts, police and bureaucracy, resigned soon after. "Seven months
later," Mackinnon writes, "Slobodan Milosevic would be in The Hague."
The Serbian "revolution" became the model: fund "independent media," NGOs and
election observers; force the opposition to unite around one selected
candidate; and fund and train a spray-paint-wielding, freedom-loving group of
angry students united by no program other than opposition to the regime. The
model was used successfully in Georgia ("the Rose Revolution"), Ukraine ("the
Orange Revolution") and unsuccessfully in Belarus, where denim was the
preferred symbol. The New Cold War has chapters for each of these, and
Mackinnon delves deep into the details of the funding arrangements and
political coalitions built with Western support.
Mackinnon seems to harbour few illusions about the US exercise of power. His
overall thesis is that, in the former Soviet Union, the US has used "democratic
revolutions" to further its geopolitical interests; control of oil supply and
pipelines, and the isolation of Russia, its main competitor in the region. He
notes that in many cases--Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, for example--repressive
regimes receive the hearty support of the US, while only Russian-allied
governments are singled out for the democracy promotion treatment.
And while Mackinnon may be too polite to mention it, his account significantly
contradicts the reporting regularly vetted by his editors and written by his
colleagues. Milosevic, for example, is not the "Butcher of the Balkans" of
Western media lore. Serbia was "not the outright dictatorship it was often
portrayed in the Western media to be," Mackinnon writes. "In fact, it was more
like an early version of the 'managed democracy' [of Putin's Russia]." He is
frank about the effects of the bombing and sanctions on Serbia, which were
devastating.
But in other ways, Mackinnon swallows the propaganda whole. He repeats the
official NATO line on Kosovo, for example, neglecting to note that the US and
others were funding drug-dealing autocratic militias like the Kosovo Liberation
Army, the subject of many misleading, laudatory reports by Mackinnon's
colleagues circa 2000.
More fundamentally, Mackinnon ignores the West's central role in the
destabilization of Yugoslavia after its government balked at further
implementation of IMF reforms that were already causing misery. Mackinnon
experiences and discusses the phenomenon of destabilization-by-privatization in
most of the countries he covers, but seems unable to trace it back to its
common source, or see it as principle of US and European foreign policy.
Former Russian Politburo operative Alexander Yakovlev tells Mackinnon that
Russia's politicians had "pushed the economic reforms too far, too fast"
creating "a criminalized economy and state where residents came to equate terms
like 'liberal' and 'democracy' with corruption, poverty and helplessness."
In one of the more dramatic moments in the book, the 82-year-old Yakovlev takes
responsibility, saying: "We must confess that what is now going on is not the
fault of those who are doing it... It's us who are guilty. We made some very
serious errors."
In Mackinnon's world, the rapid dismantling and privatization of the state-run
economy--which left millions in poverty and despair--is an explanation for the
Russian and Belarussian peoples' love affair with strongman presidents who curb
liberties, marginalize opposition, control the media and maintain stabilnost,
stability. But somehow, the ideology behind the IMF-driven devastation doesn't
make it into Mackinnon's analysis of the motivations behind "New Cold War."
Mackinnon notices the most literal US interests: oil and the Americans' fight
for regional influence with Russia. But what escapes his account is the broader
intolerance for governments that assert their independence and maintain the
ability to direct their own economic development.
Energy and pipeline politics are a plausible explanation for the US's interest
in the southern former Soviet republics. He might have added that the US used
Georgia as a staging ground during the Iraq war. When it comes to Serbia,
Mackinnon is forced to rely on an implausible account of NATO carrying out a
moral mission to prevent genocide. The claim no longer makes any sense, given
available evidence, but remains prevalent in the Western press.
Mackinnon mentions Haiti, Cuba and Venezuela in passing. In all of these
places, attempts have been made to overthrow the governments. In Venezuela, a
US-backed military coup was quickly overturned. In Haiti, a Canadian- and
US-led coup resulted in a human rights catastrophe that is ongoing and recent
elections confirmed that the party that was deposed remained more popular than
the alternative presented by the economic elite. In Cuba, attempts to overthrow
the government have been thwarted for half a century.
To explain these additional, more violent attempts at "regime change," it is
not enough to cite the literal interests. Venezuela has considerable oil, but
Cuba's natural resources do not make it a major strategic asset, and, by this
standard, Haiti even less so. To explain why the US government provided
millions of dollars to political parties, NGOs and opposition groups in these
countries requires an understanding of neoliberal ideology and its origins in
the Cold War and beyond.
This much would be evident if Mackinnon added some much-needed historical
context to his account of modern-day methods of regime change. In his book
Killing Hope, William Blum documents over 50 US interventions in foreign
governments since 1945. History has shown these to be overwhelmingly
anti-democratic, if not outright catastrophic. Even mild social-democratic
reforms of government in tiny countries were overwhelmed by military attacks.
If true democracy involves self-determination--and at least the theoretical
ability to refuse the dictates of the "Washington Consensus" or the IMF--then
any evaluation of democracy promotion as the tool of US foreign policy has to
reckon with this history. Mackinnon's account does not and remains almost
resolutely ahistorical.
The last chapter of The New Cold War, entitled "Afterglow," is dedicated to
evaluating the ultimate effects of democracy promotion in the former Soviet
republics. It is Mackinnon's weakest chapter. Mackinnon limits himself to
asking whether things are better now than before. The frame of the question
lowers expectations and severely stunts the democratic imagination.
If one sets aside these considerations, then it is still possible for curiosity
to get the better of the reader. Is it possible that good things can come even
from cynical motivations? Liberal writers like Michael Ignatieff and
Christopher Hitchens made similar arguments in support of the Iraq war and
Mackinnon flirts with the idea when he wonders whether young activists in
Serbia and Ukraine were using the US, or whether the US was using them.
So, did things get better? The information Mackinnon presents in his answer is
extremely vague.
In Serbia, he says, life is much better. The revolution hasn't brought too many
benefits to the daily lives of Serbs, a cab driver tells Mackinnon. However, he
writes, "The era of gasoline shortages and of young men being sent off to fight
for a 'Greater Serbia' was long past and the late-night laughter and music that
spilled out of Belgrade's packed restaurants spoke to an optimism unheard of
under the old regime."
In this and many other cases, Mackinnon buys a well-diffused propaganda line
without looking at the facts. Straying from the meticulous detail he brings to
his reporting of the ins and outs of democracy promotion, Mackinnon seems to
believe that it was a diabolical scheme by Milosevic--and not economic
sanctions or bombing and subsequent destruction of the bulk of Serbia's
state-owned industrial infrastructure--that led to gasoline shortages.
Mackinnon admonishes Serbs to face up to their role in the war, while letting
NATO's bombing campaign, which left tonnes of depleted uranium, flooded the
Danube with hundreds of tonnes of toxic chemicals, and incinerated 80,000
tonnes of crude oil (thus the gasoline shortages), off the hook.
In Georgia, Mackinnon again relies on nightlife in the capital city as an
indicator of the country's democratic well-being. "The city bubbled with a
sense that things were starting to move in the right direction...swish Japanese
restaurants, Irish pubs and French wine bars were popping up on seemingly every
corner." The leisure activities of the economic elite are just that; there are
many ways to judge the well-being of a country, but to rely on the sights and
sounds of well-heeled city dwellers enjoying themselves to the exclusion of
other criteria is peculiar.
Mackinnon remarks in passing that the Western-backed regime of Saakashvili has
resulted in "declining freedom of the press," but has "boosted the economy."
In Ukraine, "newspapers and television stations could and did criticize or
caricature whomever they wanted," but the Western-backed free market ideologue
Yuschenko made a series of blunders and unpopular moves, resulting in major
electoral setbacks for his party a few years after the "revolution" that
brought them to power.
Strangely, Mackinnon's sources--other than the odd cab driver--seem to consist
entirely of the people receiving funding from the West. Independent critics,
apart from aging and deposed former politicians, are virtually nonexistent in
his reporting.
Still, the question: did the West do good? In the final pages, Mackinnon is
equivocal and even indecisive.
Some countries are "freer and thus better," but the Western funding has made it
more likely for repressive regimes to crack down on would-be democratizing
forces. In Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan, he is critical of the lack
of funds for democratic promotion, leaving local NGOs and opposition groups
hanging. He attributes this inconsistency to arrangements where American needs
are better served by repressive regimes. In other parts of the chapter, he
finds democracy promotion as a whole to be problematic.
At one point, he comments that "the help that [US agencies] gave to political
parties in countries like Ukraine would have been illegal had a Ukrainian NGO
been giving such aid to the Democrats or Republicans." One also imagines that
Canadians would not be impressed if Venezuela, for example, gave millions of
dollars to the NDP. Indeed, the prospect seems as ridiculous as it is
unlikely...and illegal.
Mackinnon's information suggests, though he does not say it outright, that
associating the idea of "democracy" and its attendant freedoms with Western
funding and US-led meddling in the governance of countries is likely to
undermine legitimate grassroots efforts at democratization. For example,
dissidents in Russia tell Mackinnon that when they gather to demonstrate,
people often look at them spitefully and ask who is paying them to stand in the
street. In one case, Mackinnon points out that a report from an authoritarian
government claiming that dissidents are pawns of the West is dead-on.
Mackinnon's assessment does not follow this evidence to its conclusion; he
doesn't stray from the view that alignment with either the US or Russia are the
only options for countries in the region.
While alignment with one empire or another may seem to be inevitable,
Mackinnon's implicit Russia-or-US manicheanism obviates other ways of promoting
democracy. Mackinnon ignores, for example, a decades-long tradition of
grassroots solidarity with democratic forces in countries--predominantly in
Latin America--where dictators were often financially backed and armed by the
US government. Such movements were usually limited to curbing excessive
repression rather than sponsoring democratic revolutions, but this lack of
power can be attributed, at least in part, to the lack of media coverage from
mainstream journalists like Mackinnon.
If one is concerned with democratic decision-making, then surely one is also
concerned with the ability of countries to make decisions independently of the
meddling of foreign powers. Mackinnon also does not address how such
independence might be brought about. One can speculate that it would involve
preventing the aforementioned meddling.
The New Cold War is notable for its thorough account of the internal workings
of democracy promotion and the point of view of those receiving the funding.
Those looking for an analysis that bring such a thorough accounting to its
actual aims and effects, however, will have to look elsewhere.
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