Former Canadian PM reflects on Ukraine's "crusade for democracy" (02/06/05)

Former Canadian PM reflects on Ukraine's "crusade for democracy"

by Christopher Guly
Special to the Weekly

OTTAWA - Former Canadian Prime Minister John Turner still has many foreign elections to observe before he catches up to former U.S. President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jimmy Carter, who regularly criss-crosses the globe to monitor voting.

But just weeks after heading the Canadian delegation that monitored the repeat second round of Ukraine's presidential election on December 26, the 75-year-old Mr. Turner is a man in demand for the role he played in what he dubbed "a crusade for democracy."

Over the past month, he addressed nearly 1,000 guests who attended a dinner, organized by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, at Toronto's Exhibition Place. Before that, in Winnipeg, he was asked to spend about 10 minutes talking about recent events in Ukraine at the Manitoba Historical Society's annual dinner, though the main focus of his speech was the 190th birthday celebration of one of his predecessors, Sir John A. Macdonald.

If he hadn't a previous commitment opening Christian Unity Week at the Anglican Cathedral Church of St. James in Toronto, Mr. Turner would likely have been back in Ukraine on January 23 to attend the newly elected Ukrainian president's inauguration in Kyiv. Mykola Maimeskul, Ukraine's ambassador to Canada, told The Ukrainian Weekly that President Viktor Yushchenko had invited Mr. Turner to be present for the historic moment.

The former Canadian prime minister and the future Ukrainian president know each other; they first met at a Ukrainian Canadian community event in Toronto in May 2003, when Mr. Yushchenko also visited Ottawa.

"I sat next to him at lunch and had a good time with him - I was very impressed," Mr. Turner said recently in a telephone interview from his law office in Toronto.

He added that he hopes that Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin (like Mr. Turner, also a Liberal) will invite President Yushchenko to visit Canada soon, and Ambassador Maimeskul confirmed that such an invitation was in the works.

In Mr. Turner's view, the friendship between Canada and Ukraine was "enhanced in a remarkable way" through the interest shown by Canadians in "sponsoring democracy" in a country he hopes has now begun "a new era."

More than 4,000 Canadians were willing to spend Christmas in Ukraine. But only 463 were selected to be official observers by CANADEM, the Canadian government-funded, Ottawa-based international peace and security organization.

Mr. Turner said that before members of the Canadian mission left Ottawa to be deployed to monitor voting in 17 of Ukraine's 25 regions - or, in the case of 110 observers, dispatched to work with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe - he gave them some advice. "My caution to them was this was a Ukrainian election, not a Canadian election, and our invitation was to be observers only," he explained.

Mr. Turner said he asked that everyone remain "neutral and impartial and silent."

That message was especially relevant to those observers who felt that Mr. Yushchenko was the rightful victor in the second round of voting on November 21, 2004, when Ukraine's Central Election Commission declared that his opponent, now former Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, had won despite reports of massive fraud.

Indeed, Mr. Turner was among the nearly 2,000 protesters who gathered outside Ukraine's Consulate General in Toronto on November 23 to condemn the results of that vote.

In the end, though, all of the members of the Canadian mission - 10 times larger in number than any previous Canadian contingent sent to monitor a foreign election - were paragons of impartiality, said Mr. Turner proudly. "They did a remarkably good job. We didn't have a single incident involving our delegation."

In his interim report, released the day after the final round of voting on December 26, Mr. Turner noted "a number of irregularities and infractions." Some complaints were minor: polling stations without ballots or voter lists, or both, the night before the election. Other issues raised were more serious, including the "most egregious example" of harassment in a poll in the mainly Russian-speaking, eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, where voters were forced "to reveal how they had voted prior to depositing their ballots" while an election official stood by and did nothing.

However, Mr. Turner said that based on what he saw when he visited several polling stations in Kyiv, as well as in a town and a village in the Chernihiv Oblast, the mood was "positive, upbeat, disciplined and well-organized," and polling clerks were "very competent and knew what they were doing."

As he explained in his report: "These polling stations would have done credit to Elections Canada in any of the eight campaigns that I contested."

As it turned out, some Ukrainians were aware of Mr. Turner's place in history as Canada's 17th prime minister. "In some of the polling stations, there were people who had relatives in Canada and knew who I was," he explained. "I think they were pleased that we'd sent somebody of some prominence," he added.

Though he was glad to have been part of "such a critical and, ultimately, successful moment" in the history of a country he first visited as an Oxford law student in the early 1950s, Mr. Turner admitted that it wasn't easy deciding to spend Christmas away from his family. "I talked it over with my wife and my four children, and they felt there was a good democratic purpose and that I ought to go."

On December 24 he met with Oleksander Zinchenko, manager of Mr. Yushchenko's campaign, and was supposed to also meet that day with Mr. Yanukovych's campaign manager, Taras Chornovil. "I showed up at his office, but he got called away to a meeting," said Mr. Turner.

The next day the former PM also had a 90-minute meeting with Yaroslav Davydovych, head of Ukraine's Central Election Commission to discuss election procedures and the Canadian mission's purpose and concerns.

But Mr. Turner didn't miss celebrating the Yuletide season. Canadian Ambassador Andrew Robinson and his wife, Regina, invited him to share Christmas dinner with them in Kyiv.

And, earlier in the day on December 25, Mr. Turner went to the English-speaking Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. Alexander to attend a "great English mass, with a great choir and a priest from Ireland - Father Paul Roche. How do you like that?"

Not ruling out making a fourth visit to Ukraine, Mr. Turner said he would also consider heading up another Canadian election observer mission. "It would depend where and under what circumstances," he explained.

"I was confident there was a reasonable chance for [the December 26 vote] working well as a free and open election in Ukraine. "That might not be the case in other parts of the world," he commented.

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