Subversion in name of 'free & fair elections'
Stage set for new crisis in Ukraine
By Fred Goldstein
The U.S. and European imperialists and their stooges inside
Ukraine have won a political victory, gaining the opportunity
for their favored candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, to win in a new
election.
Washington, the European Union and hordes of
imperialist-sponsored NGO operatives have been working
feverishly to overturn the election of Viktor Yanukovich on the
grounds of "widespread fraud."
Whatever fraud may have occurred in the presidential
election runoff on Nov. 21, freedom and fairness have nothing
to do with why the imperialist world is unanimously calling for
new elections.
If their object were free elections, they would raise a
world outcry against the fraudulent elections being prepared by
the Bush administration in Iraq, where the people are being
ordered to participate in a U.S-staged election under the gun
of 150,000 occupation troops--an event so outside all
international law that everyone connected with it, including
the United Nations staff, should be prosecuted.
And what about when U.S. Marines nullified a free and fair
election in Haiti by kidnapping and overthrowing President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide? What about Saudi Arabia, guardian of
Western oil interests, where there are no elections at all?
Where is the outcry?
The political crisis in Ukraine is about U.S. and European
finance capital taking over the country and tightening a cordon
sanitaire around Russia.
Campaign an 'American creation'
In a polemic against Russian President Vladimir Putin and
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov about Western interference in
Ukraine, Secretary of State Colin Powell declared, "What we
have seen isn't interfering in democracy. What we have seen is
the international community coming together to support
democracy."
In fact, Washington has played a major role in manipulating
the political process and institutions in an attempt to attain
the election result it wants. It pressured the Ukrainian
Supreme Court to declare the election invalid and it got the
parliament to go along with a new election. This pressure comes
as a climax to widespread and protracted imperialist
preparation for a political and economic takeover.
Ian Tailor wrote in the London Guardian on Nov. 26 that "the
campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and
brilliantly conceived exercise in Western branding and mass
marketing....
"Funded by and organized by the U.S. government, deploying
U.S. consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American
parties and U.S. non-government organizations, the campaign was
first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan
Milosevic at the ballot box.
"Richard Miles, the U.S. ambassador in Belgrade, played a
key role. And by last year, as U.S. ambassador in Tbilisi, he
repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in
how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze."
In Minsk, the capital of Belarus, U.S. Ambassador Michael
Kozak, a former Latin American operative who worked on
subversion in Nicaragua, ran a similar operation in an
unsuccessful attempt to oust the government of Alexander
Lukashenko.
When the television screen flashes pictures of crowds around
government buildings in Kiev, Ukraine's capital, it is vital to
know that these crowds, many of them made up of the middle
classes that have benefited or want to benefit from
privatization and the formation of thousands of small
businesses, have been organized by political operatives in
Washington, Wall Street and the capitals of Europe.
CIA, NED, USAID and Soros
Institutions funded by the National Endowment for Democracy,
aptly described by Michel Chossudovsky as "the civilian arm of
the CIA," have virtually overrun Ukraine in the past decade.
"In Venezuela," he adds, "the NED was also behind the failed
coup against President Chávez and in Haiti it funded the
opposition parties and NGOs in the U.S.-sponsored coup d'etat
and deportation of President Aristide."
(www.globalresearch.ca)
This electoral overturn has been long in the making. The NED
and U.S. Agency for International Development fund an NGO
called the National Democratic Institute (NDI) that has been in
Ukraine since 1993, two years after the bourgeois government in
Kiev declared its independence following the collapse and
breakup of the Soviet Union--a historic setback for socialism
under the pressure of imperialism.
For the first election in 1994, the NDI organized a group
called the Committee of Voters of the Ukraine (CVU). This
coalition of bourgeois forces fielded 4,000 election monitors
in the parliamentary and presidential election. After the
elections, in 1995, it went around the country promoting
privatization. By 1997 it had 17,000 election monitors ready.
Now it has 18,000 volunteers and 160 branches throughout
Ukraine.
Albright and Woolsey, too
And who heads this organization? Madeleine Albright, former
U.S. secretary of state under Bill Clinton--a fierce advocate
of the destruction of Yugoslavia, archi tect of the takeover of
Serbia, and defender of the genocidal sanctions against
Iraq.
Another principal institution operating in Ukraine is
Freedom House. Along with NDI, it has organized election
monitors and trained campaign operatives. Heading its board of
trustees is James Woolsey, a former director of the CIA.
Woolsey is a hawk on Iraq and part of the Cheney-Rumsfeld
faction that tried to link al-Qaeda and Sept. 11 to Saddam
Hussein.
Freedom House is partly funded by George Soros's Open
Society. Soros, whose wealth is estimated at around $10
billion, has played a key role in Ukraine. In 1992 he made a
billion dollars and became persona non grata in Britain when
his speculation caused the collapse of the pound. He has a vast
corporate empire and played a personal role in consolidating
the capitalist counter-revolution in the former socialist
countries of Eastern Europe.
Ask in an interview on March 3, 2004, "Could you name the
sum allocated for your programs in Ukraine in 2004?," he
replied, "The budget is $5 million. Another million is supposed
to be allocated for grants... It's quite possible that in the
end we will spend about $8 million."
(www.civicua.org/soros/en/index.html)
Another key institution funding programs in Ukraine is the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It is endowed by
Boeing, Citigroup, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller
Foundation, General Electric and the Andrew Mellon Foundation,
among others. It is also endowed by Yukos, the Russian oil
company whose billionaire owner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, tried to
sell a huge chunk of it to U.S. oil companies and is now in
jail.
Jonathan Steele pointed out in the London Guardian of Nov.
26: "In Ukraine, Yushchenko got the western nod, and floods of
money poured in to groups which support him, ranging from the
youth organization Pora to various opposition websites. ...
Intervening in foreign elections under the guise of an
impartial interest in helping civil society, has become the
run-up to the postmodern coup d'etat, the CIA-sponsored third
world uprising of Cold War days adapted to the post-Soviet
conditions..."
Steele puts his finger on the essential factor in the
present crisis. "Ukraine has been turned into a geostrategic
matter not by Moscow but by the U.S., which refuses to abandon
its cold war policy of encircling Russia and seeking to pull
every former Soviet republic to its side. The EU should have
none of this."
It is clear that the foundations and the NGOs are basically
an extension of the U.S. capitalist state, but they allow
corporations and former government officials to carry on
subversion in open relationships that would be more difficult
to execute within the formal framework of the government.
Different factions of the ruling class get to promote their
policies outside of, but in tandem with, the government. The
State Department and the CIA have been working on the
subversion of the Ukraine since long before the USSR broke up.
The present campaign is just a continuation of that policy.
It is a delicate matter, because U.S. imperi alism needs
Russia's support or acquiescence in the war in Iraq, in
pressuring North Korea, and in keeping military bases and an
oil presence in Central Asia and the Caucasus. But at the same
time, it wants to reduce Russia to complete dependency,
fomenting pro-Wall Street factions inside Russia to challenge
the bourgeois grouping of President Vladimir Putin and
nationalist elements. The ultimate goal is a takeover of
Russia.
Not the old Cold War
The term Cold War has been used to describe the present
crisis. This term has to be analyzed from a Marxist point of
view. When the USSR collapsed, the Cold War, in its fundamental
meaning, was over. It had been a class war between two
irreconcilable social systems. The USSR was based upon the
nationalized means of production, a planned economy and a
monopoly on foreign trade. It was a socialist system based on
production for social use, not for profit.
For a variety of reasons, all of which can ultimately be
traced to its protracted isolation as a socialist state, war,
and the poverty of its economic foundation, it was defeated by
imperialism. The first and most crucial phase of that defeat
was the destruction of socialist property relations and the
establishment of capitalist relations, wage slavery,
exploitation and private property--together with national
oppression, poverty, unemployment and all the attendant evils
that workers suffer under capitalism.
But for imperialism, simply overturning property relations
and establishing a capitalist class in Russia and the former
republics of the USSR is hardly the end of the process. After
overturning the economic foundation, the ultimate goal of the
giant monopolies is to seize control of the superstructure,
that is, to completely take over the political systems in order
to open the doors to thoroughgoing imperialist
exploitation.
That is what is behind the crisis in Ukraine and is their
goal with respect to Russia. Wall Street and Washington want to
go back completely to the days before the working class, led by
Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, seized power in Russia. Tsarist
Russia had been both an imperialist country, with respect to
its colonies, and a colony of Western imperialism: French,
German, British and, to a lesser extent at that time, U.S.
capital.
In the struggle over turning back the clock, Ukraine is a
vital element. The Russian government, representing the new
gangster capitalist class there, which enriched itself by
seizing the wealth built up under socialism by the workers and
peasants, has been struggling to hold back the invasion of
Western imperialism--as have sections of the Ukrainian
bourgeoisie.
In September 2003 they came together to form the Common
Economic Space, composed of Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and
Kazakhstan. With a combined population of 225 million, it is
intended as a counterweight to the European Union and U.S.
corporations.
Yushchenko and his group, Our Ukraine, declared their
intention to destroy the CES should they be elected. This is a
major factor behind the anti-Yanukovich agitation of the
Western imper ialists. The CES is an attempt to recon stitute,
on a bourgeois basis, a Russian-centered economic bloc that
would ultimately reduce and eliminate tariffs, develop a common
tax policy and work towards economic coordination. This is
anathema to the imperialists, both economically and in terms of
the geopolitical struggle.
Their solution is to make Ukraine "European"--that is, a
slave of Western capital. That would open the door to forcing
Russia down the same path, back to the days of being a
neocolony.
Right now, the Ukrainian oligarchs and bourgeois groupings
around President Kuchma and Yanukovich are retreating, as is
Putin of Russia. They are selling out the interests of not just
the domestic bourgeoisie, but of the working class and
peasantry, who will suffer most under a complete imperialist
takeover.
The only way Russia and the republics were able to fight
back against world capital was to organize a socialist republic
with the working class in power. The Ukrain ian workers of the
Donetz basin and the industrial regions have every right to
oppose the bourgeois and petty bourgeois crowds and politicians
in Kiev, who want to sell the country to the West. But the
answer does not lie in Yanukovich, who is a tool of the
oligarchs, nor does it lie in Putin. The only way Ukrainian
workers can stave off the further encroachment of Western
capital is to fight their own capitalists and reestablish a
socialist Ukraine.
Reprinted from the Dec. 16, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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