Ukraine at the crossroads

Recent elections have revealed a need for renewed democractic accountability in both the United States and in Ukraine, but in only one of those democracies has there been a response

by Keith Mackenzie

During the past few weeks, the world's attention has been focused on presidential elections in two countries: the United States and Ukraine. George Bush's victory over challenger John Kerry on November 2 nd was met with a great deal of fatalism. Very few people took to the streets, and although there were half-hearted murmurs of ballot-tinkering taking place in the major swing states, people took it all with a grain of salt and moved along. This is surprising, because this past election in the United States was one of the most heavily-battled in recent memory, and likely will go down in history as a significant event for that country.

And then there is Ukraine. For the past month, Ukraine is at a similar crossroads with its very future being determined by current events. With no one getting the required 50% of votes in the October 31 st elections, a run-off election was then held on November 21 st between Prime Minister Victor Yanukovich, better known as Kuchma's hand-selected successor, and Victor Yushchenko, also known as a great proponent for improving relations with the West, as opposed to with Russia.

Exit polls on election day showed that Yushchenko held a healthy edge in votes—54 percent to 43 percent, according to numerous sources. But the end result of the ballot counting showed Yanukovich the victor with 49.46 percent against Yushchenko's 46.61, percent according to the Central Election Commission.

Suddenly, people took to the streets in the hundreds of thousands in a city of some 2.5 million. They were boldly saying to the authorities: “Enough! We want a change.” This is when the world media suddenly took notice, and just as suddenly, Ukraine was at the centre of the world stage, ahead of Iraq, even.

The events in Ukraine were then compared with the events that happened in Georgia almost exactly one year earlier, when Eduard Shevardnadze was upstaged by Mikhail Saakashvili who was swept to power. Comparisons were also made to the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, and to Lech Walesa's revolution in Poland, among others. Yushchenko was suddenly a Western hero to stand alongside the greatest of liberators, according to Western media.

That's when David Orchard and John Laughland, among others, started circulating emails and articles suggesting that we should watch carefully what is going on in Ukraine and reconsider our gushing support for a man like Yushchenko, partly because he has an American wife (Kateryna Chumachenko Yushchenko) who worked as an adviser on Eastern European ethnic affairs in the Reagan White House and in the State Department's human rights office.

The Yushchenkos had met when she led a study tour that took Ukrainian bankers to the US in 1993, and Yushchenko at the time was the head of the Ukraine Central Bank. There has also been talk of anti-Semitism in the Yushchenko camp, based on loose relations with a publication based in Lviv that published some allegedly anti-Semitic articles on events in western Ukraine during WWII when the Nazis invaded.

Also, there was an ultra-nationalist militant group called UNSO which was supportive of Yushchenko. Also, PORA, a student organization in Ukraine that promoted the democratic process, was demonized as being a product of American interests. Some were even saying there was a coup taking place, with the real losers being the Ukrainian people. So, based on this, perhaps Orchard is right and we should be careful about whom we support in our call for change and accountability in Ukraine.

On the other hand, consultations with local British Columbian Ukrainian leaders suggest these allegations are unfounded, and that they originate in the Yanukovich campaign that aims to present Yushchenko as little more than an American puppet, as an anti-Semite, and as an arch-nationalist. The goal of the Yanukovich side was to win the election by attacking Yushchenko in a smear campaign—one campaign image of Yushchenko had him paraded about on a horse and in a cowboy hat (as though it were the Wild West of America) and waving a flag with the Nazi swastika on it. As we've seen in the American elections, campaigns can be dirty, and the Ukrainian elections were plenty dirty on both sides.

My concerns are born from a genuine fear and chagrin for the Ukrainian people who have seemingly flocked to Yushchenko's side with nary a question or any kind of criticism of his leadership. And I have fear that people are not seeing the cracks in Yushchenko's campaign, particularly with the credible claims that he is working merely as an American puppet.

There is such a thing as an “ideology of democracy” in the United States, an ironic term in that ideologies require one to profess unquestioned faith for that ideology. Democracies are—in theory anyway—a system where cynics, sceptics, and free-thinkers thrive by questioning, as per the original concept of checks and balances in American democracy. In the United States, there is such staunch devotion to democracy that people fail to notice any cracks that can often appear in that kind of system. After seeing what happened in the United States election, I am concerned that the people of Ukraine are following Yushchenko with the same sort of blind faith with which the people of the United States were following their own respective leaders.

In Ukraine, there is very little ideology left over from the Soviet Union, and those who want to go back to a Soviet system are few and far between, and only want to do so because of understandable nostalgia for the “good ol' days.” In Ukraine at present, there is in fact a very high level of scepticism and a very high level of cynicism on all sides, and many are fully aware that there is a very real corruption inherent in the so-called Ukrainian democratic process. Interestingly enough, the cynicism and distrust in Ukrainian society is largely a consequence of the old Soviet system, when people didn't know who to trust in the streets, and developed very little trust in the leadership.

We have seen a great deal of resistance from the people of Ukraine in response to the election results, and this will continue for months to come, and may very well hit another climax on December 26 th , the date of the new run-off election between Yushchenko and Yanukovich. The voice of the people is not completely for Yushchenko as the saviour of Ukraine, nor is it completely for an American-style democracy, and it is especially not for anarchy. Rather, the voice is primarily saying: “Enough! We want a change.” If they hadn't done so, Yanukovich would be the president of Ukraine today. But he isn't, because people wouldn't stand for it. Why didn't the same happen in the United States?

The United States often portrays itself as the leader of democracy in the so-called free world. However, at the present, the people of the United States might consider looking to the people of Ukraine as the true leaders, for the people of Ukraine are the ones taking to the streets and calling for accountability at the national level. What's happening in Ukraine is not a coup. Rather, it is people power at its finest.

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