| The mythology of people power |
Posted via Supernews, ht .. |
| john adams (johnqadamsiiinospam@minusthis.yahoo.com) |
2005/04/02 11:32 |
The mythology of people power
The glamour of street protests should not blind us to the reality of US-backed coups
in the former USSR
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1449869,00.html
John Laughland
Friday April 1, 2005
The Guardian
Before his denunciation yesterday of the "prevailing influence" of the US in the
"anti-constitutional coup" which overthrew him last week, President Askar Akayev of
Kyrgyzstan had used an interesting phrase to attack those who were stirring up
trouble in the drug-ridden Ferghana Valley. A criminal "third force", linked to the
drug mafia, was struggling to gain power.
Originally used as a label for covert operatives shoring up apartheid in South
Africa, before being adopted by the US-backed "pro-democracy" movement in Iran in
November 2001, the third force is also the title of a book published by the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, which details how western-backed non-governmental
organisations (NGOs) can promote regime and policy change all over the world. The
formulaic repetition of a third "people power" revolution in the former Soviet Union
in just over one year - after the similar events in Georgia in November 2003 and in
Ukraine last Christmas - means that the post-Soviet space now resembles Central
America in the 1970s and 1980s, when a series of US-backed coups consolidated that
country's control over the western hemisphere.
Many of the same US government operatives in Latin America have plied their trade in
eastern Europe under George Bush, most notably Michael Kozak, former US ambassador to
Belarus, who boasted in these pages in 2001 that he was doing in Belarus exactly what
he had been doing in Nicaragua: "supporting democracy".
But for some reason, many on the left seem not to have noticed this continuity.
Perhaps this is because these events are being energetically presented as radical and
leftwing even by commentators and political activists on the right, for whom
revolutionary violence is now cool.
As protesters ransacked the presidential palace in Bishkek last week (unimpeded by
the police who were under strict instructions not to use violence), a Times
correspondent enthused about how the scenes reminded him of Bolshevik propaganda
films about the 1917 revolution. The Daily Telegraph extolled "power to the people",
while the Financial Times welcomed Kyrgyzstan's "long march" to freedom.
This myth of the masses spontaneously rising up against an authoritarian regime now
exerts such a grip over the collective imagination that it persists despite being
obviously false: try to imagine the American police allowing demonstrators to ransack
the White House, and you will immediately understand that these "dictatorships" in
the former USSR are in reality among the most fragile, indulgent and weak regimes in
the world.
The US ambassador in Bishkek, Stephen Young, has spent recent months strenuously
denying government claims that the US was interfering in Kyrgyzstan's internal
affairs. But with anti-Akayev demonstrators telling western journalists that they
want Kyrgyzstan to become "the 51st state", this official line is wearing a little
thin.
Even Young admits that Kyrgyzstan is the largest recipient of US aid in central Asia:
the US has spent $746m there since 1992, in a country with fewer than 5 million
inhabitants, and $31m was pumped in in 2004 alone under the terms of the Freedom
Support Act. As a result, the place is crawling with what the ambassador rightly
calls "American-sponsored NGOs".
The case of Freedom House is particularly arresting. Chaired by the former CIA
director James Woolsey, Freedom House was a major sponsor of the orange revolution in
Ukraine. It set up a printing press in Bishkek in November 2003, which prints 60
opposition journals. Although it is described as an "independent" press, the body
that officially owns it is chaired by the bellicose Republican senator John McCain,
while the former national security adviser Anthony Lake sits on the board. The US
also supports opposition radio and TV.
Many of the recipients of this aid are open about their political aims: the head of
the US-funded Coalition for Democracy and Civil Society, Edil Baisalov, told the New
York Times that the overthrow of Akayev would have been "absolutely impossible"
without American help. In Kyrgyzstan as in Ukraine, a key element in regime change
was played by the elements in the local secret services, whose loyalty is easily
bought.
Perhaps the most intriguing question is why? Bill Clinton's assistant secretary of
state called Akayev "a Jeffersonian democrat" in 1994, and the Kyrgyz ex-president
won kudos for welcoming US-backed NGOs and the American military. But the ditching of
old friends has become something of a habit: both Edward Shevardnadze of Georgia and
Leonid Kuchma of Ukraine were portrayed as great reformers for most of their time in
office.
To be sure, the US has well-known strategic interests in central Asia, especially in
Kyrgyzstan. Freedom House's friendliness to the Islamist fundamentalist movement Hizb
ut-Tahrir will certainly unsettle a Beijing concerned about Muslim unrest in its
western provinces. But perhaps the clearest message sent by Akayev's overthrow is
this: in the new world order the sudden replacement of party cadres hangs as a
permanent threat - or incentive - over even the most compliant apparatchik.
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