Free At Last?
How Canada got caught up in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution—and helped hijack history
BY Izida Zorde
Main photograph by Laszlo Balogh
The centre of the revolution was Kiev’s Khreshchatyk Street, in the city’s historic Independence Square. At the height of the protest, the population of this makeshift community numbered in the thousands. Tents filled the square and the glow of scattered campfires illuminated the orange balloons, scarves, buttons, hats and armbands for sale. Standing in Ukraine’s capital city, amid the posters and the pop music—and a protest sanctioned by a typically brutal police force—I felt as if I was part of the movement, having come here as one of 500 observers sent by the Canadian government to monitor the third round of presidential elections.
Kiev’s tent city began to form on November 22, shortly after Ukraine’s Central Election Committee declared Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych the winner of the previous day’s vote over his chief rival, former prime minister Viktor Yushchenko. Citing allegations of massive fraud and irregularities, Yushchenko refused to accept the results and called on his supporters to rebel. The demonstrations that followed in Kiev and other cities throughout the country signalled the beginning of the Orange Revolution, named for the official colour of Yushchenko’s campaign. In the capital, what began as a small gathering of supporters soon became a massive crowd of students and western Ukrainians who camped on the main street and did not leave until Yushchenko was finally inagurated on January 23.
Western media jumped on the story of the Orange Revolution. The Washington Times welcomed “the people versus the power” and, in December, The New York Times said a new year had begun. In Canada, The Globe and Mail heralded “a new beginning for democratic Ukraine” and the CBC declared the election “will be an example for the world.”
But long before the campaign officially kicked off, the Global Fairness Initiative, a pro-globalization NGO chaired by Bill Clinton, funded an international conference called Ukraine in Europe to discuss the future integration of Ukraine into the global marketplace. After the February 2004 conference, but before the electoral controversy, Western organizations were already entering Ukraine in droves. The US Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, the Eurasia Foundation and several other organizations provided grants and technical assistance to the election organizers. Election monitoring agency the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the Canadian International Development Agency, and the Soros-funded International Renaissance Foundation provided training to ensure the election would be “free.” Freedom House sponsored Ukrainian voter groups Znayu and the Freedom of Choice, whose members include a high-profile student movement that camped out in Independence Square. Meanwhile, the OSCE worked with European, American and Canadian groups to organize major international monitoring efforts. “Formally this help was non-partisan,” Washington Post columnist and Stanford University political science professor Michael McFaul notes, “because the aim was to aid the democratic process. Yet most believed that a free and fair election would bring victory for Viktor Yushchenko.”
Mass citizen-led politics is an empowering and transformative process that has the potential to create a civil society geared toward social change. However, with the international press rallying support for the pro-Western Yushchenko and powerful US, European and Canadian NGOs providing money and training to “orange revolutionaries,” it’s difficult to believe that the role of the West didn’t change history. The question is, did it change for the better?
Since 1991, every election in the former Soviet Union has been tainted by fraud, vote-rigging and unfair use of state television. At the same time, every election since 1991 has been largely ignored by the West. The fact that Western intervention in the 2004 Ukraine election occurred so quickly after widespread complaints of election irregularities in the US is particularly conspicuous.
Amid the international outrage, Western countries sent an unprecedented number of observers to oversee the third round of elections. Canada took a leading role, sending a record 500 observers in a delegation led by former prime minister John Turner. The country’s second-largest delegation, 38 Canadians dispatched to observe the election in Bosnia in 1996, pales in comparison. In total, more than 12,000 observers were dispatched to Ukraine, representing not only Canada, but also Poland, Lithuania, Russia, the US, the European Union and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) representing countries of the former Soviet Union. Not only was the world watching the third round of elections in Ukraine, they were there, positioned throughout the major cities and in the industrial and agricultural regions of the country.
According to University of Toronto professor Paul Robert Magocsi, Canada has a specific interest in Ukrainian politics. Its primary involvement stems from the fact that Canada prides itself on overseas operations that do not require military intervention. In addition, the Canadian government considers itself to have a special relationship with Ukraine because of the large and historic presence of Ukrainian immigrants here (there are more than a million Canadians of Ukrainian decent). Canada has also sponsored development programs in the country and has been involved in its transformation since its independence in 1991.
As a Canadian observer, it was my job to visit polling stations on election day to look out for other observers, unauthorized persons and security forces and make note of violations of electoral norms: There should be no obstacles between the voter and the ballot box, no one should leave the polling station with a ballot box, no one should be threatened before or after casting a vote and dead people can’t vote.
I arrived in Ukraine on December 20 in a flurry of foreigners. I had joined the observation mission for a number of reasons, not the least of which was my desire to serve as a witness to an event that had generated so much international interest. Of course, I was not the only one. There were foreigners everywhere—in the streets, the bars, the restaurants and the hotels, lined up at discotheques and pounding at the keyboards in internet cafés. We were asking for directions, inquiring about locally made beers and vodkas, shopping for fur hats and eating authentic meals in restaurants where serving staff wore “traditional” dress. Whether we were there as members of the much-publicized observer missions or as representatives of major media outlets, our presence did not go unnoticed. And although we were expected to be objective and ensure an honest outcome, there was a perception in Ukraine that we were there to get Yushchenko elected. For that reason, international observers were welcomed in western Ukraine and viewed with suspicion in Eastern Ukraine, the pro-Russian Yanukovych stronghold.
The east-west division of the vote roughly corresponds to the historical divide within the country. The western regions rely mostly on agriculture and represent the former territories of the Polish-Lithuania commonwealth of the 17th century. They are pro-Western, with a mostly Ukrainian-speaking, Catholic population. The industrial eastern region, which includes the Republic of Crimea, has strong links with Russia and the Russian Orthodox church. The Russian language is used in official correspondence and the population is made up of many ethnic Russians.
But many media outlets made this east-west conflict into one of good and evil. The political process had been derailed by a “criminal regime,” James Carroll wrote in The Boston Globe on November 30, “giving victory to Prime Minister Yanukovych instead of the true winner, opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko…. The world listens less out of kindness than out of the grave awareness that this contest is starkly between right and wrong and its outcome matters everywhere.”
The 2004 election process in Ukraine began this past fall when President Leonid Kuchma stepped down after serving the maximum two five-year terms. On October 31, 25 candidates contested the position in an election that resulted in a near draw, with official figures giving Yanukovych 39.32 percent of the vote and Yushchenko 39.87 percent. Because no candidate reached the 50-percent margin required for an outright victory, a run-off election was scheduled for November. After the November 21 run-off, Ukraine’s Electoral Commission declared Yanukovych the winner with 49.46 percent of the vote (Yushchenko took 46.61 percent). Between the first round of elections and the second, dramatic increases in turnout were recorded in Yanukovych-supported regions. This effect was most notable in Yanukovych’s hometown of Donetsk, which reported a turnout of 98.5 percent. Observers for the OSCE noted the run-off vote “did not meet international standards,” while US senior election observer Senator Richard Lugar called the numerous irregularities a “concerted and forceful program of election day fraud.”
Irregularities included ballot stuffing, intimidation and large numbers of new voters appearing on electoral rolls—especially in Yanukovych districts, where observers for the opposition say Yanukovych supporters travelled around the region voting as many times as they could. There were also reports that students, hospital patients, prisoners and others reliant on some form of government assistance were strongly encouraged to vote for the government candidate.
On December 3, accepting allegations of fraud lodged by the opposition, the Ukrainian Supreme Court declared the second round of elections invalid on the grounds that it was impossible to determine the will of the electorate with any certainty.
On December 26, I woke up at 3 a.m. to drive into the rural northwest polling region of Volyn. Previously the wheat belt of Ukraine, the communities in this region had underused land, unheated buildings and, according to local pensioners, up to 80 percent unemployment. Driving on dirt and cobblestone roads in the grey-white light of early morning, we passed forests and fields and communities that weren’t on the map. Arriving at our first polling station just as day was breaking we went into the cold, dimly lit community centre, where we were met by commission members eager to make sure that everything was right in international eyes. Nobody wanted to see the election go into a fourth round. Far from the concerts of Kiev, Ukrainians were just eager to see things resolved.
We drove from polling station to polling station along the bumpy dirt road in an old Peugeot, passing babushkas, faded cottages, packs of wild dogs and roaming geese and chickens. In front of many of the polling stations were groups of young men who said they were there to protect the place from possible disruption by Yanukovych supporters. We were told to watch out for them, but after a quick chat we realized they were only there because there wasn’t anything else to do. What was also clear from visiting these communities was that while residents overwhelmingly supported Yushchenko, they didn’t believe that his election would bring any measure of relief to their day-to-day reality. Many of the people I spoke with were nostalgic for the days of nationalized industry and Soviet-organized economy when they had, if not freedom, then at least jobs and heat.
Speaking to Al Jazeera on November 31, Bulent Gokay, an international relations expert and director of the European studies program for the UK’s Keele University, pointed out a much overlooked fact: “The two [presidential] candidates both Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych and Yushchenko have their roots in the same anti-democratic ruling elite which divided the wealth of the country after the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
Yushchenko and his longtime ally Yuliya Tymoshenko (whom he named prime minister this past January) were heralded as representatives of the people who had been cheated out of victory. But both are members of Ukraine’s powerful oligarchy. Yushchenko began working for the country’s national bank in the early 1990s—a period marked by the freezing of Ukrainian bank accounts and a massive decline in standard of living—and became its head in 1993. Over the same period, my family in Crimea lived through poverty they had never before experienced or anticipated. They spent the early ’90s figuring out how many different meals could be created from Cream of Wheat, flour and onions.
In December 1999, Yushchenko was appointed Prime Minister by President Leonid Kuchma and overwhelmingly ratified to the post by the Ukraine Parliament in a vote of 296 to 12. Soon after Yushchenko’s appointment, Tymoshenko, who was deputy prime minister, became embroiled in a confrontation with coal mining and natural gas industry leaders. In January 2001, Kuchma fired her on charges she forged customs documents and smuggled in Russian natural gas while president of United Energy Systems of Ukraine (UES). Later that year, Parliament entered a non-confidence vote in Yushchenko’s government. In 2002, he created the Our Ukraine political coalition. It received a number of seats in the subsequent parliamentary election, but not enough to hold a majority.
Tymoshenko experienced an increase in power under the Soviet System, but rose to particular prominence after the collapse of the Soviet Union, directing three energy-related companies and acquiring a significant fortune between 1990 and 1998. She was the president of UES from 1995 to 1997 and moved into politics in 1996 when she was elected as a representative for the Khirovohrad riding with a record of 92.3 percent of the vote. Unlike the high voter turnout in Yanukovych’s home riding in 2004, however, Tymoshenko’s overwhelming majority did not raise eyebrows in the international community.
Aurel Braun, a professor of political science and international relations at the University of Toronto, says Tymoshenko has inexplicably developed into an icon for the Ukrainian democratic revolution. “[She] is one of the early oligarchs,” he says. “Over the past three to four years she has remade herself as a Ukrainian nationalist. She has changed her hairstyle to resemble that of a Ukrainian folk dancer and learned to speak Ukrainian [her first language is Russian]. She is a firebrand and is now a hard-line Ukrainian nationalist.”
Braun points out that “The EU, particularly Poland and Lithuania—which at some points in history ruled Ukraine—want to move Ukraine out of the Russian orbit. The Poles in particular have said that if Russia maintains control of Ukraine then it can become an empire again—one that could threaten its neighbours. But if Russia can be stopped from controlling Ukraine, it could be prevented from becoming a threatening geopolitical power.”
But Ukraine is linked to Russia through several political, economic and military agreements, including one concerning the gas monopoly Gazprom. It also has strong ties to the US and Western Europe through the NATO-funded GUUAM alliance (a regional agreement between five CIS states, Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Moldova), which is dominated by US oil interests and aims to keep Russia out of the Caspian Sea.
The media-constructed myth that a pro-Western reformist democrat was cheated of victory not only misrepresents the political situation in Ukraine—namely that there are deep, historical and intentional divisions between the eastern and western parts of the country—but depicts voters from eastern Ukraine as blinded throwbacks to the communist era.
After completing the rounds of our polling stations, my team travelled to our base in Lutsk, a city northwest of Kiev on the Polish border, to receive instructions on where to watch the final count. We were directed to a polling station in our translator’s riding so that she would also have the opportunity to vote, and we arrived about 45 minutes before counting was to take place. Our arrival at the polling station was again received with much excitement, and polling station officials were eager to make sure we were satisfied with what we saw. The vote count proceeded with military precision under the watchful eyes of observers from Canada, a Yanukovych representative from the Kharkov stronghold and a delegate from the Ukraine Committee of Voters. When the counting was done, our observer team followed the head of the commission to the Territorial Election Commission, where we witnessed the transfer of votes. Running past security guards up three flights of stairs, we arrived in the meeting room where the votes were transferred to the main count. This process was observed by members of the OSCE who stayed well into the night until all the polling stations reported in. When the counting was done, there was no roar from the crowds, no cheers of victory. Exit polls predicted a Yushchenko victory, but we wouldn’t find out the official results for days. Of course, they would be a surprise to no one.
Under Yushchenko, Ukraine will turn toward the West and begin in earnest the privatization of national industries. Many believe his victory will halt Ukraine’s integration into the CIS, made up of 12 of the 15 states of the former Soviet Union, and may lead to the cancellation of the Common Economic Space between Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Furthermore, it is likely that Yushchenko will increase attempts to further ally with Europe through possible membership in the EU and NATO.
Among the CIS, Ukraine, with its abundant industrial and agricultural resource base, was generally considered the leading candidate for rapid transition to a market economy. The historic ability of Ukraine’s rich soil to supply large quantities of diverse agricultural products was widely expected to be an engine of growth. Following nearly a decade of economic decline, however, much of the foundation of the original blueprint for reform has yet to be implemented. Privatization, a component for reform to a market economy, has proceeded very slowly and has been generally viewed with suspicion by prominent political factions and local bureaucracy. The largest enterprises, including many in the energy sector, have not yet been privatized.
The interests of Canada, the US and the EU in Ukraine could only be served by a reformer committed to cleansing the country of its Soviet-style administrative and bureaucratic infrastructure. According to Magocsi, Yushchenko has two immediate goals: tax reform and changes to the property laws for foreign investment. International business and trade stand poised to benefit from these changes. He has held true to his word, establishing a cabinet position to facilitate international trade and investment in his first month in office.
Even if the international community believed the third round of elections happened democratically, in the sense that people were allowed to cast their votes and have them counted fairly, the lead up, intervention and representation of this election had much to do with its outcome. In January, the Itar-Tass news service reported that more than 25,000 people attended rallies in support of Yanukovych in southeast Ukraine. But this protest barely registered a blip in the international press. The largest rally, held in the central square of Donetsk, saw Yanukovych supporters set up camp. Dmitry Prudnikov, commandant of this new tent city, told Itar-Tass that there were 50 tents, and another 20 would soon follow. Organizers demanded that Ukraine TV Company broadcast live from the square. This time, however, the West was not watching.
The reality is that Western democracy always wants to get its way, and as much as Yushchenko’s election marked a victory for those activists camped out in Kiev’s main square and in surrounding Western regions, it also marked a victory for Western interests. Fred Eidlin, a professor of political studies at the University of Guelph, best sums it up by describing philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s conception of the general will: “We in the West have a tendency to believe that if an election is truly free and fair, it will produce the result we want to see,” he says. “And if someone doesn’t agree with the general will they may have to be forced to be free.”
