Ukraine

[Serb]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph


And Yanukovych is Russias whore.

Two powers meddling in the elections of a third country to favor their candidate, OMG THE HORROR! Everyone contributes the way he thinks it's best. The West gives money, and Russia rigging technologies.

Oh come on, you must be kidding. As everyone knows here, Russia is a sh!thole and do not posses any technologies, esp. technologies that are superior in comparison with western technologies.

[laurentius]

Serb has a point there

[Tripledoc]

Originally posted by Serb


Oh come on, you must be kidding. As everyone knows here, Russia is a sh!thole and do not posses any technologies, esp. technologies that are superior in comparison with western technologies.

The Russian SS-N-22 Sunburn anti-ship cruise missile is the most advanced misslie in the world today. It is at least ten years ahead of any American counterpart. There is no defence against it. It travels at mach 2.1 and very near the sea surface. It is programmed to take violent turns that makes it impossoble to shoot down. It can carry nuclear devices.

[Tripledoc]

The evil Guardian strikes again.

US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev

Ian Traynor
Friday November 26, 2004
The Guardian

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.
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.

[Gangerolf]

Journalists on Ukraine's state-owned channel - which had previously given unswerving support to Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych - have joined the opposition, saying they have had enough of "telling the government's lies".

Journalists on another strongly pro-government TV station have also promised an end to the bias in their reporting. The turnaround in news coverage, after years of toeing the government line, is a big setback for Mr Yanukovych.

Journalists in Ukraine seem to have responded to the call by opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko for them to reject government censorship.

A correspondent on the state channel, UT1, announced live on the evening bulletin that the entire news team was going to join the protests in Independence Square. She said their message to the protesters was: "We are not lying anymore".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4044791.stm

fantastic

[Kassiopeia]

I loved the broadcast where a Yakunovich supporter was shown holding a speech on a TV channel, and this lady who was translating it straight into sign language supposedly added "This guy is telling lies, don't believe him" in the end.

[Combat Ingrid]

[Gangerolf]

yeah that was hilarious.

at the end she said "I guess you won't be seeing me again"

[Tripledoc]

Kind of funny of people can make jokes about a possible civil war.

People will not be better off if the opposition wins the war. They are totally being brainwashed by Western ideas.

When Liberalism hits the Ukraine maybe hundreds of thousands will loose their lives becauses they will not recieve state benefits. The unemployed, the elderly will be thrown into the streets.

What is even more disgisting is that all the news reporting made form ukraine is being made by people who of course belongs to the top one percent who is westernized - and benefits.

I don't know how to say this, but just take a look at them and look through their bull.

Not one, not a single one, government in which this OTPOR campaign has been succesful in has experienced a rise in living standards. In fact it is the reverse.

The B 52 channel in Serbia is now overtaken by a German pop/commercial channel.

[Harovan]

Originally posted by Serb
Pret ne po-detsky. Nesmotrya na to, chto ya zloupotreblyau iskluchitelno pivom. Ostalnaya bratva hleshet vodku. Prichem hleshet po-vzroslomu. Odnin iz kamradov uzhe sebya ne kontroliruet. Mezhdu nim i drugim komradom proizhodit dialog:
- ty menya uvazhaesh?
- tebe nado domoi!
- tnet, blya, ty menya uvazhaesh?
- tebe nado domoi!
- pochemu?
- da hui ego znaet, no tebe ochen tuda nado, ty uzhe vseh tut zaebal!
- ty menya uvazhaesh?
itd.
Realnyi blin anecdot.

Prizyvnik uzhe kak poltora chasa kak se'balsya, no vesel'e tolko nachinaetsya.
Koroche tipichnyi russkii prazdnik.

As I see, not much has changed in Russia in the past 25 years. I remember such dialogs, oh the horror!

[OliverFA]

Re: Ukraine

Originally posted by Gangerolf
"Don't leave Independence Square until victory" - Viktor Yushchenko

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4031981.stm

Yushchenko was leading in the polls before the election, but now he seems to have lost. 96% turnout in the east - which is Yanukovych-land... Smells kinda fishy.

I hope things won't get too ugly.

Kerry was leading in all the polls and no one with a common sense (starting with him) suspects of a fraud.

In Spain the Popular Party was leading in the polls, but the Socialist won. I dislike them, and I don´t like the fact that they won, but I will never say they won by manipulating the results.

It´s not good, not only for Ukraine, but also for the European Union and Russia, that this is happening. If the results are what we want, then we believe in Democracy. If the other party win, then democracy is a fake. We cannot think in this way unless we have firm proves or facts that point to this. Otherwise it´s just desestabilizing the system for a bit of power. And on the other hands, the relations between Russia en the EU will not be benefited by the fact that the EU questions the Pro-Russia candidate...

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Serb
That's the only way to solve the crisis. Democracy is not a power of mob, but power of low.

Actually, it's both together.

[chequita guevara]

The Parliament in Kiev has decertified the election, but this may not have any legal meaning.

[Solver]

From what I read it will definitely matter. After all, the election comittee also was officially distrusted by the parlament, and it might be sacked soon, too.

[Serb]

Originally posted by Atahualpa


This is all based on the assumption that there was no election fraud. Currently this assumption is more than vague.
Don't try to build strong arguments on vague assumptions.

It's not an assumption. There was no election fraud. Only the Consitutional Court of Ukraine can decide that this election was (or wasn't) a fraud. Until that monent, statments like "There was no fraud and Yanukovech was elected legally" are correct statements, because Central Electoral Commision of Ukraine declared him as legal winner.