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COMMENTARY
November 27, 2004
The Ukraine
The political crisis in the Ukraine is actually quite encouraging. A presidential election has obviously been stolen by an old-line ex-Communist thug and the people won't stand for it. The demonstrations began soon after election results were posted last Sunday. By yesterday huge crowds of people and vehicles decorated with the orange of the leading opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko had surrounded the Cabinet office and most of the major administrative centres demanding a proper recount of the polls; and Mr. Yushchenko had informally established an alternative government behind their lines. His supporters were also burning tires and setting up roadblocks here and there. The police were still trying to decide their loyalties. For the last decade the Ukraine has been under the power of Leonid Kuchma a retired Soviet missile designer who ruled as chief oligarch of the country 's old Soviet industrial lords and enforcer of their status quo. They won two elections the first quite legitimately by promising to end the disorder and corruption that enveloped the Ukraine after independence. They delivered only a bigger and better-organized disaster. The opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko a former president of the national bank served as prime minister from 1999. His limited land ownership privatizations have been responsible for most of the Ukraine's (faltering) economic recovery since then. About two-fifths of the economy disappeared in the 1990s while the vast surviving ex-Soviet bureaucracy resisted and sabotaged all reforms except those which could be exploited to line their own pockets. Mr. Yushchenko became the Ukraine's most popular politician until sacked by President Kuchma in 2002 in what resembled a fit of envy. He was replaced as prime minister by Mr. Kuchma's designated successor Viktor Yanukovych the man who won the "official" vote. Mr. Yanukovych is the butt of jokes across the west of the country for his boorishness corruption and incompetence; a man who worked his way up the greasy pole as a Communist apparatchik in Donetsk after the KGB erased his earlier criminal record as a petty thug and housebreaker. The election campaign was very one-sided with even Yanukovych's slogans clumsily copied from those of the Yushchenko campaign. This is not a question of dimpled chads: it is inconceivable that Yanukovych won the election except perhaps in the farther east. The Ukraine itself tends to divide internally west and east. The Soviet Communists built up the more loyal east much of which remains Russian-speaking. It continues to be an artefact of socialist industrialization which is to say economically dysfunctional and habitually passive towards thick-set strongmen. Whereas Kievans and western Ukrainians think of themselves as Central Europeans. The damage that has been done to the Russian President Vladimir Putin should not be overlooked. He invested more political capital than was wise by heavy-handedly supporting both President Kuchma in the Ukraine and Alexandr Lukashenko the authoritarian president-for-life of Belarus -- the two "Little Russias" from the old Soviet Union. Ukrainian events remind Russians of how much fraud was involved in their own last election. Mr. Putin prematurely congratulated Mr. Yanukovych on his "victory" then when the demonstrations irrupted upon Kiev called instead for everyone to await the final result. He then congratulated Mr. Yanukovych again; then gave up on that and started babbling about the need to respect the Ukrainian constitution. President Putin had already awkwardly cashed out of large political investments in Georgia's Eduard Shevardnadze and Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic. As our sharpest Canadian Russia-observer Patrick Armstrong summarizes: he begins to look both interfering and inept burning bridges both East and West. The rest of the international community is coming off well. Starting with uncompromising statements of support for the demonstrators from Vaclav Havel in Prague and from the White House in Washington the idea that the fraudulent Ukrainian election was not only unacceptable but could be overturned quickly spread through the European capitals and now Kiev is filling up with European mediators running back and forth between the factions. Is this interference in Ukrainian internal affairs? You bet and let's hope we get more of the kind. It would seem that the Kuchma legacy is going down in the person of Mr. Yanukovych in that slow-motion way in which oversized statues descend from eastern pedestals. And when the dust clears it is likely the Ukraine will have shifted considerably towards the West. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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