What Made Tymoshenko So Odious?
and Yanukovych a Reasonable Ally?
On 1 September, Tymoshenko was the recently praised Prime Minister of Yushchenko's government. By 28 September, she was apparently so unpleasant a partner to Yushchenko that he preferred to ally with Yanukovych, a man who smeared him, bullied his campaign, and stole an election victory from him through fraud.
I've been reading the news, Tymoshenko has said or implied some unpleasant things about Yushchenko, generally by criticizing his allies. So what?
Leaving aside that Yanukovych robbed the whole country, he and the other RoU deputies said and did more churlish things againt Yushchenko personally than Tymoshenko ever could. I've got a posting on his ridiculous debate with Yushchenko before the election rerun, and that wasn't half as bad as the one before it. I've got a short video of him calling Orange Revolution supporters "goats". (the equivalent of "bastards") Yushchenko seems to also have forgotten the welcome Yanukovych's Donetsk gave him when he was on the campaign trail last year. He also seems to have changed his mind since he accused Yanukovych and Kuchma's government in September 2004 of trying to murder him. Even if he has, it doesn't change that Yanukovych's buddy Havrysh accused Yushchenko of using his own poisoning as a "political technology" to help him in the election, as if Yu was not supposed to talk about an assassination attempt during an election. Other Yanu supporters called it a manifestation of Yushchenko's previously and subsequently unknown alcohol abuse.
So Tymoshenko has accused Yushchenko of cozying up to powerful businesspeople, Yanukovych and Kuchma organized billboards calling him a Nazi, then followed it up by unethical behavior of the clearest sort. Assuming she was trying to make money on Nikopol, like Yushchenko accuses her of doing, I still don't get how this makes her worse than the "bandits". I would think it would be better to go on his knees back to Tymoshenko, if he had to (or not kick her out in the first place), than go to those people.
It seems Yushchenko is not one of those people who "never forgets a wrong done to him." I used to think that was a good character trait.
Dan McMinn
in 07) Political History, 10) The Cabinet, 11) Tymoshenko - Bloc Yulia Tymoshenko, 16) Opposition, 35) Orange Revolution
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Reader Comments (13)
It might be this and pani Tymoshenko's failure to perceive such a simple and natural common-sense piece of wisdom render her being a powerful stateslady more dangerous to Ukraine than any sort of agreements with ugly guys like Mr. Yanukovich.
It seems horrible that Yu and Ya signed this agreement--former 'enemies' are now buddies. But this move, along with the entire 2004 election cycle is dramaturgiia. It's not simply drama, but playwrights are involved in staging the spectacle. Don't forget that Yu, Ya, Kuchma, Kwasniewski, Solana, et al. signed a pact in late November 2004 to end the political crisis.
The bit of irony here is that a politician who goes after "enemies" and "bandits" will be percieved by a large part of the population as doing it for political gain. A politician who makes amends with enemies will be percieved as a uniter. If Yushchenko's interest is Ukraine, and "Ukraine is united" as the Maydan posters claimed, then Yu needs to work with Ya to boost economic growth, create jobs, and eradicate rural poverty. This would be the European approach.
The post-Soviet approach is for the billionaire-oligarch politicans to continue bickering about who is the true keeper of the orange flame while Ukraine lags behind countries like Kazakhstan, Slovakia, and Turkey.
I think it's a Kennedy-Assassination sort of thing in the sense everybody knows he was assassinated but there will always be plenty of doubt as for how exactly and who had planned the action and made it happen. And similarly even if the investigation of the poisoning of Mr Yushenko reached certain conclusions and told us the names in question there would always remain suspicion of staging the entire thing and reluctance to accept the results of it in large part of general public. And so people are going to be left to decide whether the President was in fact poisoned and by whom mostly on the basis of their personal views and believes. Who trusts Ukrainian courts these days, anyway?..
(There's also an interview with Nemtsov, but I don't think I'm going to bother translating it.)
I guess there's nothing like power that corrodes the columns of principle, the mortar of friendship and the foundation of ideology.
In what is perhaps his most lucid point ever, Richard Holbrooke noted that the former Yugo leader (now at the Nato kangaroo court)
was never really an arch Communist, or Gorbachev like reformer, or nationalist. Rather, he's about accumulating power via the utilization of whatever ism is in vogue.
Dan, this might be the best formatted blog I have yet to see. Someone else at this site asked what kind of funding is involved in its creation and continued existence?
Leopolis: It may be that establishing normalacy will require dealing with Yanu, but before Yushchenko graced him and his crew with his pact, Regions of Ukraine looked to me like an unimportant fringe party. I still think Yushchenko could have ignored them and instead dealt more with Kinakh and Lytvyn folks or even healed the rift with Tymoshenko at a much less terrible price.
Chris - that would be awesome! (though I'm asking you rather late in the game. Thanks so much for the offer)
Michael - I don't get what you are trying to do: Are you making a case that Milosevic is not such a bad guy, or Tymoshenko is?
I had the impression that Milosevic was implicated in mass murder during his accumulation of power, with lots of evidence to back up the accusations, and that the only problem with the wheels of justice in the Hague court is that they're moving along too slowly. But it's only my opinion and that of a bunch of stable western governments. You on the other hand, must have some pretty impressive evidence to support your claim that the trial is a sham, the judges are compromised, and Mr. Milosevic is victim of slander.
The best formatted blog you've ever seen? Really? I mean I'm flattered, as is my wife, our resident graphic designer. You must have noticed that after two months we finally got the error to stop appearing on the main page, the banner to go all the way down, and worked out various other problems. You may have neglected to notice that I haven't updated either Words and Deeds or Skeletons pages in almost as long, and I can't remember the last time I posted a picture. (soon to change!)
As for funding, I assume you've read my "About Me" page, since I've already told you about it already. The money for the site consists of $18 a month for hosting from Squarespace and a year's subscription to Kyiv Post, which I bought back in January.
I also pay my wife a compliment now and again.
You really didn't get my point about Tymoshenko?
It's quite clear.
As for your stement about Milosevic - he's a bonafide political prisoner. He's no more guilty of "war crimes" than Johnson or Nixon.
http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@131.VBOkhisLsWk.15@.774830b0/35
Adrian Karatnycky came out with a sympathetic article in support of the Serb view.
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9908/opinion/karatnycky.html
Perhaps Karatnycky's most lucid moment.
Oh, wait, except those two didn't use nationalistic slogans to egg on Americans to anihilate minorities in the country, while his fellow nationalists were gunning down those minorities and chucking them into mass graves.
The Karatnycky article seems pretty mediocre to me. (I thought you didn't like his work) Essentially he is saying that Orthodox Christians felt hurt that ethnic cleansing done by their compatriots was being picked on, while there was other ethnic cleansing in the world, some of it directed against them.
If a international organization can help stop ethnic cleansing - good. If some churches think nobody has talked with them enough about it, well, sometimes it happens.
I really want to see where the "gun-toting Ukrainians" line came out, cause he's right that that's a really dumb thing to say.
A lot rests on the phrase about "Today, Orthodox Christendom is reentering the public square after a prolonged period of control by Communist leaders." What that means is that the Russian Orthodox Church has long been a tool of Russia. In my buddy Discoshaman's words, it was a concubine of autocracy, who's leader had received commendation from the KGB.
Some Orthodox churches I've liked, invariably Ukrainian Orthodox churches. The Moscow Patriarchy ones that told their members that Yushchenko is the AntiChrist, and that continue to refuse all offers of friendship from Rome because they get more milage from the "victim" role should crumble and disintegrate. I don't give a damn what they think of Kosovo, though there are other opponents I would care more about.
When matched against Tudjman, Thaci and Izetbegovic - Milosevic was the more moderate.
He didn't egg on the serbs as they had legitimate grievances.
We differ on the referred to Karatnycky article.
Ditto the Croat Catholic church and other Western churches as well.
A prime example of double standards.
Truth be told, the Uniate Chruch has some negatives as well.
Quite the opposite. In recent history it was the Catholic Church, and in his finest moments the late Pope John Paul, who helped lend support to Poles attempting to free themselves from their Soviet government. If you're going to try to make a comparison between late 20th Century KGB influence on the Moscow Patriarchy Orthodox Church, and some Polish church-state interaction a hundred or more years ago, you're going to have to do so over the obvious and overwhelming difference between being lead by an affiliate of a modern secret police organization, and having political-religious dynamics.
I encourage you to point to one episode from Polish history that comes close to this very modern level of control rather than ask me one of you strangely easy questions, even for some as ignorant of Polish history as I.
"Legitimate reasons" have been subject to heavy inflation for years. Now it seems everyone's got them, and thus they're worth almost nothing, definitely not worth piles of bodies of men, women, and children. The Serbs hated the Croats and vice-versa. Big deal, Milosevic was on top when the Serbs were doing their part to get ahead on murdering the other side. It'd be a pretty significant surprise if he, as leader, had no influence over the numerous decisions of Serbian units to murder off non-combatants.
But hey, he might have an outside chance of being innocent. (the Wikipedia entry leaves open the possibility) Frankly it's not a major issue for me, what is, is how little Tymoshenko resembles the man.
I guess you could at least accuse both of them of being opportunistic. But that would not explain Tymoshenko's very inopportune attacks on oligarch schemes in the oil business that got her in so much trouble with Kuchma. Or her four years of inopportune anti-Kuchma fury that almost got her in prison multiple times. I've never seen Milosevic categorized as a populist, whereas Tymoshenko often is. I've never seen her engage in any ethnic-based appeals, though she didn't particularly like the Russian government for a while (while they had a warrant out for her arrest).
It'd be hard for two politicians to be more different.
"Ditto the Croat Catholic church and other Western churches as well... A prime example of double standards."
Name one other significant Western church, and give examples.
Further: Double standards would be if I looked at an issue in which both churches were involved and ignored the faults of the Croat Church while emphasizing the faults of the Moscow Patriarchy. Except Croatia's got nothing to do with it. You might as well argue double standards based on the fact that I didn't mention the questionable role of the church in the Rwandan Genocide. The church there played a questionable role there, sure, but it has nothing to do with the current issue. Neither it, nor the Croatian Church, nor the views of either of their leadership ever came up in my discussion of Ukraine, because neither has a significant presence in the country.
On the other hand, the Moscow Patriarchy priests told their followers that Yushchenko was the anti-Christ, (complete with leaflets), sent its priests marching alongside the handful of anti-Yushchenko's in their sad little anti-protest protests, and likewise espoused the relentless anti-Orange rhetoric of Moscow.
I would be surprised if the Uniate Church didn't have some negatives, as I would be surprised if you found any of them for me, instead of just speculating.