Ukraine votes no to NATO

Fifteen months after Ukraine’s “orange revolution” made Viktor Yushchenko president, he has been humiliated in parliamentary elections held March 26. Early returns gave his party only 13 percent of the vote. Leading the polls was the “Party of Regions” of former Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, who had been driven from office in 2004.

The 2004 “orange revolution” was as rotten as the 1980 “Reagan revolution.” It overturned the election of Yanukovich, who had been the overwhelming choice of the working class. The Bush administration and West European governments orchestrated and financed protests in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev.

Fifteen months of the so-called revolution was enough to send food prices soaring. Workers were fearful of losing their jobs after the Kryvorizhstal steel works were sold off to Mittal Steel, which in 2006 became the largest steel producer in the world. The same outfit, whose main office is in London, has also bought up Bethlehem Steel of the U.S. and left 95,000 retirees without health insurance.

No wonder the “Party of Regions,” whose opponents allowed these sell-offs, is getting 80 percent of the vote in the heavily industrialized Donbass area.

Yushchenko also wants Ukraine to join NATO. But the 48 million people who live there don’t want their country to be a military launching pad against Russia.

Reports indicate that the Western powers are maneuvering to put the “gas princess,” Yulia Timoshenko, back into the prime minister’s office. Her party is getting the second-largest share of the votes just eight months after Yushchenko fired her.

Timoshenko was president of the local equivalent of Enron—United Energy Sys tems (UES). The $10 billion annual sales of UES provided Timoshenko with a fleet of jet planes and she was named as an associate in a U.S. indictment for money laundering. But the Western media have canonized her as Ukraine’s “Joan of Arc.”

Meanwhile, the European Union and the U.S. announced March 24 that they would impose travel sanctions against President Alexander Lukashenko and 50 other government officials in Belarus, a neighbor of Ukraine and also a former Soviet republic. The excuse for these sanctions is that Luka shenko’s government dispersed protests in the Belarus capital of Minsk against his reelection. These protests had dwindled down to a couple hundred people in a country of nearly 10 million.

A Feb. 26 New York Times article admitted that the U.S. and European Union lavished millions of dollars on the Belarus forces opposed to Lukashenko, with the Bush administration spending $11.8 million to “promote democracy” and other millions raised through groups like the quasi-governmental National Endowment for Democracy and the German organization, Media Consulta.

This “opposition” had called for protests on March 25 to mark the anniversary of a short-lived republic that was declared in 1918 at the end of World War I. None of the capitalist media in the West mentions that this 1918 “republic” was just a stooge regime for Kaiser Wilhelm’s collapsing German empire.

It’s appropriate that today’s “opposition” would celebrate the 1918 republic, as these forces would turn their country over to Ger man and U.S. capital if they got into power. Belarus authorities stopped these right-wingers from gathering strength.

The phony 1918 republic was replaced with a Belarus Soviet Republic of workers and peasants, which transformed Belarus into a modern industrialized country. During World War II, along with the other republics in the Soviet Union, Belarus helped defeat the Nazi invasion.

From 1835 to 1916, during czarist rule, only 244 books were published in the Belarusian language, which is not the same as Russian. From 1918 to 1966 alone, while Belarus was a socialist state and part of the USSR, over 18,000 book titles were published.