The standard narrative of the Ukraine election tumult portrays recent events there as being a spontaneous outburst of grassroots support for "liberal" Yuschenko agains the Russian-backed Yanukovich. This script seems to have been largely accepted by the denizens of DailyKos, perhaps eager to see a parallel world where the possibilities of fraudulent elections are vigorously contested. But is this story so simple? A Nov. 26
Guardian article by Ian Traynor discussing the role of the National Endowment for Democracy suggests not.
Although Traynor's article is largely celebratory and uncritical, his exposure of U.S. machinations in the Ukraine has been largely ignored by U.S. media, a fact which in itself should raise some eyebrows. Traynor writes:
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.
The mention of the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI) should raise further eyebrows among any familiar with the activities fo the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), of which they are two consituent parts--the remaining two being the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) and the AFL-CIO's American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS)--formerly the Free Trade Union Institute.
On its website the NED proclaims itself as:
a private, nonprofit organization created in 1983 to strengthen democratic institutions around the world through nongovernmental efforts. The Endowment is governed by an independent, nonpartisan board of directors. With its annual congressional appropriation, it makes hundreds of grants each year to support prodemocracy groups in Africa, Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and the former Soviet Union.
It is certainly not affiliated to one individual party, but its characterization of itself as "independent" is belied by a cursory glance at its board of directors, which currently includes such figures as Morton Abramowitz, Evan Bayh, Wesley Clark, Christopher Cox, Bill Frist, Francis Fukuyama, Dick Gephardt, Lee Hamilton, Richard Holbrooke, Greg Meeks, Michael Novaks, and Paul Sarbanes. Indeed, "As Senator Percy remarked when introducing the original NED legislation in the Senate":
The Endowment will come under continuous and extensive scrutiny in the appropriate committees of both Houses of Congress. The additional provisions for GAO oversight, as well as the terms of the USIA grant agreement under which it will function, assure a convergence of oversight procedures virtually unique among grantees of federal funds.
The NED further adds (unsurprisingly, given knowledge of its directorate) that it "frequently consults with relevant policy makers about its work, going well beyond the level of contact required by its authorizing legislation."
So what is the reason for this "unique" quasi-independent, quasi-governmental structure of the NED? What is the reason that former Secretaries of State Baker, Eagleburger, Shultz, Haig, Kissinger, Muskie, and Vance declared in a 1995 letter that they believed the "non-governmental character of the NED even more relevant than it was at NED's founding twelve years ago"?
The NED was founded in the wake of the Church Committee hearings. Headed by Senator Frank Church, these investigations detailed a level of domestic and foreign improprieties by U.S. intelligence agencies that shocked the nation, improprieties that included assassination attempts on foreign leaders and destabilization campaigns galore.
The NED, I argue, was an attempt to lend plausible deniability to an "engineering democracy" strategy that had, at least since the Italian elections of 1948, been the stock in trade of the CIA, but had now become politically unfeasible and embarassing. This should have been clear to careful observors early in its history. Among its first activities, notes former State Department official William Blum:
The Endowment played an important role in the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s, funding key components of Oliver North's shadowy "Project Democracy" network, which privatized US foreign policy, waged war, ran arms and drugs and engaged in other equally charming activities. At one point in 1987, a White House spokesman stated that those at NED "run Project Democracy". This was an exaggeration; it would have been more correct to say that NED was the public arm of Project Democracy, while North ran the covert end of things. In any event, the statement caused much less of a stir than if-as in an earlier period-it had been revealed that it was the CIA which was behind such an unscrupulous operation.
NED also mounted a multi-level campaign to fight the leftist insurgency in the Philippines in the mid-1980s, funding a host of private organizations, including unions and the media. This was a replica of a typical CIA operation of pre-NED days.
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And the NED has not rested on its laurels either. In addition to the campaigns waged agains Serbia's Milosevic, Georgia's Shevarnadze, and the Ukraine's Yanuckovich, as mentioned by Traynor above, the NED has also in recent years been busy in more traditional spheres of American hegemony. While their role has remained largely hidden in the U.S., their efforts have hit the headlines in two particular cases:
On occasion, such as in Venezuela, the State Department issues "special funds" to the NED to finance its activities in nations of "key interest." In April 2002, just days after the failed coup d'etat against Venezuela President Hugo Chavez, the State Department gave the NED a US$1 million grant entitled "Special Venezuela Funds" .. which was distributed to many of the very same groups that had just led and participated in the coup.
In fact, since President Chavez' election to highest office in 1998, the NED has consistently funded just one sector in Venezuela: the opposition to President Chavez. [emphasis in original-Rojo]
Once George W. Bush assumed the US presidency in 2000, funding to opposition groups in Venezuela was quadrupled. Those organizations receiving NED funding, such as the Confederacion de Trabajadores Venezolanos (CTV), the Asamblea de Educacion, Primero Justicia, Fedecamaras, CEDICE, Sumate and others have used the millions in US taxpayer dollars to lead a coup against President Chavez, devastate Venezuela's economy through an illegal 64-day long strike and, later, lead a failed recall referendum attempt.
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And as described by Rep. Maxine Waters:
The United States government also helped to organize and train the political opposition in Haiti. The International Republican Institute (IRI) has been providing the opposition training for political party development, communications strategies, public opinion polling, web site development and public outreach. IRI has a blatantly partisan approach. It trains opposition groups but flatly refuses to work with Lavalas party members or other supporters of President Aristide. IRI's Haiti Program is funded by American taxpayers through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). IRI is currently operating under a two-year grant from USAID obtained in late 2002.
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Meandering back to Ukraine, via this
AP story describing how the NED-funded poll group Penn, Schoen & Berland (also mentioned in connection to Serbia in the Traynor report above) drastically misreported the exit poll results of the Chavez recall referendum, I think a healthy dose of skepticism might be called for regarding both the exit poll "results" in the Ukraine and the "grass roots" nature of the opposition's organization.