Response to "Is this all in the Interest of Ukraine?"
Click here to read at the article I am responding to.
Mr. XXX says "I really cannot see the point in supporting Mr. Yuschenko," for several reasons, none of which bears scrutiny.
First he doubts Yushchenko is really opposed to Kuchma because he served a term in office. So did the second biggest opposition figure, Yulia Tymoshenko, and she was imprisoned by this administration. Yushchenko's favorite term for administration politicians is "bandits" and he believes they attempted to assassinate him. I'd call that pretty safely "outside the coterie".
Russia gives guns to separatist militants in Georgia, the US gives democracy grants to non-profits attempting to improve public institutions and promote human rights. In Ukraine, the Russians paid many millions for Yanukovych's campaign, the US helped pay the bills for the already existing Committee of Voters of Ukraine -- a declared non-partisan group. Putin visited Ukraine three times around this election and congratulated Yanukovych with victory even before the final results were announced. (then did so again) The US has never made a statement for anything but the democratic process. Where is the "destabilization work" you are so sure the US is promoting?
If Yushchenko were to be declared president, it would be the democratic will of the citizens of Ukraine according to all credible exit polls. It would be a refutation of the pro-administration media smear campaign against Yushchenko which existed concurrently with attempts to shut down all opposition-sympathetic or independent media, the hundred of "power outages", refusal of landing rights, blocked highways and more that impeded Yushchenko's campaign, the bombing of opposition buildings and more. This isn't a vote for a President, this is a vote for a precedent. If Yanukovych becomes President by distaining, mocking, and defrauding the principles of democracy, he will continue to make decisions based on his ability to do so.
Russia seems to agree with you that the election of Yushchenko would weaken its power in Ukraine, just as democratic elections in Georgia were less in its interest than continued strongman rule by Shevardnadze. Is it in Ukraine's best interest for the US (and the EU, and the OSCE...) to attempt to "SYSTEMATICALLY" weaken ties with Russia by supporting the democratic process in the country? Isn't is obvious?
Click here to read at the article I am responding to.
Dan McMinn
3 Comments
Reader Comments (3)
While responding to articles, you might want to review what the person wrote carefully. Author XXX in Italy said nothing about "Russian power in Ukraine". He/She talked of the "weakening of economic ties" with Russia and asked if that was in Ukraine's best interests. Accordingly, since economic ties is not always the same thing as "power" then you haven't properly responded to the article (and sarcasm isn't a very nice response either). Perhaps you should ask XXX to clarify what he/she meant by economic ties, if the normal,everyday trade ties between nations was what they had in mind or if XXX truly meant the kind of economic ties that give Russia power in Ukraine.
Also, why should the answer be "OBVIOUS"? Is it because all ties with Russia are bad and all ties with the USA are good? Such a simplistic answer may not be obvious to readers and posters from areas outside the USA.
Me again. How about a response to articles in CNN, The Washington Post and Newsweek? Specifically I had in mind the following:
CNN - Yushchenko's Popularity Sliding
Washington Post - Sep 2004 - Ukraine at a Crossroads
Newsweek, International Edition, Vol. CXLVI, No. 12, September 19, 2005, page 4. Article title:- Ukraine: The Orange Revolution's Hero Takes a Fall.
In the WP article it seems as though the fraudulent former-PM had overseen some substantial economic growth of 9-12% of the GDP. Are these figures accurate or merely "enhanced" official statistics from the old government?
Having read that WP article, I was shocked to see that apparently under Tymoshenko, the country's economic growth halved to 6%. What is your opinion on this, and if the trend continues will you still move to Kyiv eventually?
The Newsweek article is about Yushchenko's sacking of his entire government, but the last part of the article (written by Malcolm Beith) purports that "According to a recent poll, a mere 37% of Ukrainians believe Yushchenko is a better leader than Leonid Kuchma- the brutal, corrupt tyrant he replaced just nine months ago. Have you heard about or do you know of this poll and do you consider it accurate? I've tried to check for it, but cannot find much on the internet since pretty much any web-search including the words "ukraine", "yushchenko" and "poll" will normally bring up results about the exit polls before the Orange Revolution.
You are absolutely right about the steep fall in Ukraine's economic fortunes since the YuGov took office. I would put the number below 6% for this year; I think, with all the hubbub, that it will probably not exceed 4%. I've mentioned some of the ways the YuGov has been wrong on economics (and why it's still not the most important issue), and corrections it should make.
Just since you're interested, they greatly increased the abysmal social spending of Kuchma, assuming they'd be able to make up the wide gap in privatization (and re-privatization) revenues and more effective tax collection(a pretty optimistic forecast). The collections have picked up a healthy amount, but privatization got bogged down as the ministers bickered. On the main journal page I've gone into considerable detail on the problem, and how it led to Yushchenko's crisis. He's displayed some pretty poor leadership skills.
This decline, and some of the jockeying by his ministers, is why the numbers have fallen. Check in this current blog entry for some more of that poll data you're looking for, from folks like Radio Free Europe - Radio Liberty.
I'm never going to have a reason to put CNN or WPost on this page (much less Aslund, one of my favorite Ukraine commentators), because they make reasonable statements and arguments. On the other hand...
About XXX: Sarcasm is kind of a bitter tool, I know. That is why I have isolated it in this section (away from the main page) where readers of my blog know what they're getting. It's nice of you to stick up for this guy I obviously don't like, but I honestly think you're way off and this guy is a crank. I reread his article a half-dozen more times and it only reconvinced me of why I keep these bitter pages going.
You defend XXX based on the idea that his argument was a purely economic one. It was not. His opening words are "I really cannot see the point in supporting Mr. Yuschenko." In his next paragraph he implies what support he is talking about by saying "if he were to be declared President, what would happen?" Mr. XXX was questioning, at the end of November, 2004, whether it was in Ukraine's interest to support Yushchenko as president, not whether or not his government was going to run the economy well.
He then goes on to explain why Ukrainians shouldn't bother to agitate against the (falsified) election results because:
1) Yushchenko is just like Kuchma (untrue, and I spoke about this in detail)
2) It won't get Ukraine into the EU (irrelevant)
3) The US has been trying to break Ukraine away from Russia (not just economic weakening but "destabilization", like he also accuses the Ukraine Report of). By implication this is a major factor involved in the Orange Revolution, not the will of the Ukrainian people. (untrue, and I talked about how Russia has been interfering blatantly while the US has been supporting democratic institutions in an above-the-board kind of way)
So I did deal directly with his questions and statements, including the fundamental one: "why support Yushchenko's Presidency". The reason politics and power came into the discussion is that economics didn't have a damn thing to do with it, and they did.
Yushchenko won the election. Every legitimate election observation group and many many Ukrainians knew that. Yanukovych and his allies in government falsified enough numbers to make themselves win. That is called depriving people of their democratic rights.
Even if Ukraine's economy goes into the toilet, and Russia becomes its enemy, that is still not as bad as having the nation give up its right to a democratic vote. That Mr. XXX was unable to even *imagine* that democratic choice is worth protesting for is an intellectual oversight of such magnitude his opinion is worthy of nothing but scorn. That he opposes their protests based on absurdly unsupported conjecture makes his argument doubly worthy of scorn. He's also quite willing to heap accusations on a mailing list of English-language news about Ukraine (of all things), insulting their language ability and accusing them of engineering events in Ukraine as part of a US government plot. I should have scorned him for that unfathomable idiocy as well.
Can you find support for his arguments that the US was engaging in destabilization, that it was also trying to systematically "favor the breaking of" Ukraine's economic ties with Russia, or that the Ukraine Daily Report is a tool of persons interested in destabilizing Ukraine and "engineering" events in Ukraine from Delaware? When you're done with that one, how does any of this make democratic choice not worth fighting for?