CCAU announces campaign to get out the vote in Ukraine (02/15/98)

CCAU announces campaign to get out the vote in Ukraine

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - The Coordinating Committee to Aid Ukraine (CCAU) has dedicated $100,000 to a public awareness campaign in Ukraine with the goal of convincing Ukrainian citizens to vote in the upcoming elections to Parliament.

The three-part program will not take any political position, according to the president of the CCAU, Wolodymyr Wolowodiuk, to avoid any suggestion that the organization is involved in the internal political affairs of a foreign country. "We can support the political process, we will not take any political sides," he explained.

Ivan Lozowy, director of the Institute for Statehood and Democracy located in Kyiv, will manage the marketing campaign whose aim is to get out the vote.

One part of the campaign will specifically target youth, who tend to be most apolitical in Ukraine today. "The problem with the youth is that they are not involved in politics, they are out to make a buck," said Mr. Lozowy.

It is also common knowledge here that the Communist Party's strongest constituency in Ukraine is its senior citizens and pensioners, while youths tend to support free markets annd democracy.

The program to get out the youth vote, which has been dubbed "Molod ne chekaie, a obyraie!" ("Youth doesn't wait, it elects!") will utilize a television ad campaign to appeal to young adults to vote in which Ukraine's most popular music stars will appear.

Mr. Lozowy also has plans for a leaflet and T-shirt distribution effort that will involve van excursions by young people into regional and district centers to talk with their politically apathetic brethren. Mr. Lozowy said that this second part of the program will be a fairly straightforward affair. Members of the Ukrainian Student Union, the group that organized the Kyiv hunger strikes in 1990, will make van trips into towns and cities to meet with young people to convince them to vote. "They have a decent regional and local network, and they are quite active," said Mr. Lozowy.

The first part of the program, the television ad compaign, however, will take a bit more planning. The hope, as Mr. Lozowy expressed it, is for pop stars such as Iryna Bilyk, Skriabin or Ani Lorak, to appeal to young people through the medium of television. He has recruited the production company Zoloti Vorota to produce the television clip and has asked a professional musician, Dmytro Tsyperdiuk, to develop a jingle to go with the TV ad.

Mr. Lozowy is also hoping that Ukrainian soccer legend and current head coach of the Dynamo soccer club Valerii Lobanovskii will take part in the television ad. "He is widely known in Ukraine and really respected by the youth, especially by those who follow soccer," said Mr. Lozowy.

The get-out-the-youth-vote program sponsored by the CCAU is the second such effort announced in recent weeks. In mid-January the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America announced that it had been awarded a $175,461 grant by the United States Agency for International Development through the Eurasia Foundation for a civic education project called "Focus Ukraine," whose goal also is to increase the participation of Ukraine's youth in the 1998 parliamentary elections.

Mr. Lozowy said that the two efforts would be coordinated. In addition to targeting the youth, the CCAU effort led by Mr. Lozowy will call on voters of all ages to turn out at the polls on March 29, election day.

CCAU President Wolowodiuk said that part of the $100,000 funding would go for a series of ads to be placed in local newspapers throughout Ukraine calling on Ukrainians to simply vote. He said the ads will be purchased in 730 papers two weeks before elections and then twice again in the week leading up to the vote.

The third part of the program, which has still not been flushed out, foresees the financing of a team of international election observers for the elections. The team, if accredited by Ukraine's Central Election Commission, would be charged with observing the degree of adherence to Ukraine's election law on the day of elections and in the time leading up to them, and would include participants from the United States, Europe and Ukraine.

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