-Caveat Lector- EUROPE Ukraine Grim choices K I E V Search archive NEARLY eight years after independence from the Soviet Union, many of the candidates in Ukraine’s presidential election, due in October, say they want to go back, more or less, to the old days. And at least three out of the seven most serious say they want to recreate the Soviet Union in one guise or another—with Ukraine inside it. Even candidates who claim to want reform, President Leonid Kuchma included, hark back to the Soviet Union in other respects. Mr Kuchma’s heavy-handed tactics smack of the era when a vote of 99% in favour of the incumbent was pretty average. “Ukraine must follow the European road,” he said recently. “Changing the president would mean changing the political course: I have no right to let that happen.” Hardly the spirit of democracy. Certainly, if various of the proclamations by other candidates are to be believed, Ukraine would veer sharply in another direction under several of Mr Kuchma’s rivals. Parliament’s speaker, for instance, Oleksandr Tkachenko, has been full of enthusiasm for the (so far mainly theoretical) reunion of Russia and Belarus, clearly implying that Ukraine should join it. Piotr Simonenko, head of Ukraine’s Communist Party and another candidate for president, favours that three-country link too. Natalia Vitrenko, running for the Progressive Socialist Party, wants the entire Soviet Union put back together. Each of these three old-guard candidates is well up with Mr Kuchma in the opinion polls. An analyst at the East-West Centre, a think-tank in Kiev, says—with some justification—that the forthcoming election could decide whether Ukraine has a future as an independent state. The “back-to-the-Soviet Union” candidates certainly have supporters, especially in Ukraine’s east and south, where ethnic Russians (numbering about 10m out of Ukraine’s 50m people) and Ukrainians with old-left sympathies are most numerous. In 1991, even they voted for independence, thinking that Ukraine was being exploited by the rest of the Soviet Union and that independence would bring prosperity. Eight years on, GDP has fallen by two-thirds. Easterners are particularly despondent. NATO’s war over Kosovo has also helped set Ukrainian minds against the West. Though the Socialist Party’s Oleksandr Moroz, a former speaker of parliament, is casting himself as a Scandinavian type of social democrat (albeit with the expectation of winning a lot of communist votes), the prevailing mood may also prod him into pandering to nostalgia for the Soviet Union. Of the wily old operators, Mr Kuchma apart, only Yevhen Marchuk, a former KGB boss for Ukraine, is still clearly pro-western. In his determination to fight back, Mr Kuchma is playing dirty. Last month the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which tries, among other things, to encourage democratic habits, said his tactics could harm Ukraine’s relations with western institutions. Some of the president’s men have told television bosses that, if they give presidential challengers air-time, they may lose their licences or find that advertisers withdraw their business. The electoral commission has been helping the president, too. For example, it made life hard for Mr Moroz by stalling for a month over whether it would hand his party the forms it needed to get the minimum 1m voters’ signatures entitling him to run. “We’re facing a deliberate, planned campaign to stop me taking part in the election,” complains Mr Moroz, who says some of his party’s buildings have been set on fire and his supporters attacked. Recent events in Donetsk, the coal-mining area in the east that is a hotbed of anti-Kuchma feeling and happens also to be the country’s most populous region, have been particularly murky. Ivan Ponomarev, the head of the region’s assembly and an enemy of Mr Kuchma’s, mysteriously resigned in May. The chief beneficiary has been Viktor Yanukovich, the region’s governor and one of the president’s friends. Despite a constitutional bar against one person being both governor and head of the regional assembly, Mr Yanukovich now has both jobs. More important, his new one should give him unimpeded oversight of the conduct of the election. The regional assembly is in charge of electoral procedure and, among other things, vote-counting. The outlook for the West (and particularly for the United States, which has set great store on Ukraine’s independence and future prosperity) is bleak. Not only do several presidential candidates with a chance of winning want to rebuild the Soviet Union, but the man most determined to point Ukraine westwards, Mr Kuchma, looks like resorting to highly undemocratic tactics to achieve the aim which the West, broadly, endorses. Bodies such as the OSCE are, to put it mildly, embarrassed. The Council of Europe, which monitors human rights across the continent and has among its members all but the very nastiest countries in Europe, has recently implied that Ukraine will be booted out if its presidential election is dirty. DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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