Panelists assess Ukraine's election and Orange Revolution (02/13/05)

Panelists assess Ukraine's election and Orange Revolution

by Oksana Zakydalsky
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

TORONTO - Debriefings and discussions on the Orange Revolution continue. On January 24, St. Vladimir's Institute organized a public forum titled "Ukraine's Orange Revolution: An Expert Assessment of the 2004 Presidential Elections."

The four panelists were Mark Mackinnon, Globe and Mail correspondent stationed in Ukraine throughout the election events; Prof. Olia Andriewska, Trent University; University of Toronto graduate student Alesia Kachur; and lawyer Daniel Bilak. Prof. Frank Sysyn chaired the panel.

Prof. Andriewska was an election observer under the Canadian government sponsored CANADEM program and was sent to Zaporizhia. She disagreed with the image of a deeply divided Ukraine that became a cornerstone of analysis in the West.

"It's a stereotype that's absolutely wrong but was repeated nonetheless - a Catholic, pro-Western Ukrainian-speaking western Ukraine on the one hand, and a pro-Russian Orthodox Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine, on the other. There was very good reason to treat this division or this stereotype with some skepticism. For one thing, the results of the election were fixed, and the worst excesses took place in eastern Ukraine. Secondly, the specter of secession was being raised by a particular group of people - Kuchma appointees. A permanent, east-west divide had always been one of Kuchma's favorite political cards and this theme was picked up by the Yanukovych campaign," she said.

What was getting much less coverage in the Western press was the fact that Viktor Yushchenko himself was from eastern Ukraine and that he was Orthodox. Many of the leaders of the political opposition, like Yulia Tymoshenko, were also from eastern Ukraine, Prof. Andriewska added.

Although Prof. Andriewska admitted that there are significant regional differences in Ukraine, she expressed doubt about whether these differences have actually consolidated into any kind of political identity. Viktor Yanukovych had received the highest percentage of votes in Zaporizhia after Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea - 70 percent on both November 21 and December 26. But after talking to Yanukovych observers, supporters and voters, she said she was surprised by their lukewarm endorsement of the candidate.

"People there did not seem terribly excited about either Yanukovych or about voting. We typically asked the head of each electoral commission whom they represented. I was surprised by how many people said: I represent Yanukovych, but I'm really neutral. This lack of intensity and passion was a real contrast to Kyiv. There was a real energy in Kyiv, and this was completely missing in Zaporizhia," she said.

Prof. Andriewska also noticed a generational divide. Yanukovych people were, for the most part, pensioners, and the most important issue for them was the fact that Yanukovych had raised pensions two months before the elections.

"I didn't get a sense that language was good predictor of political sentiments. Yanukovych drew his greatest support in the countryside where Ukrainian, or at least surzhyk, predominates. My experience seems to suggest that Zaporizhia was its own world. The Yanukovych supporters that I spoke to were appalled by what was going on in Kyiv; they were distraught by the young people who were demonstrating, but I never got the sense that they were actually looking to Donetsk for any sort of leadership," she added.

"Looking forward to the 2006 elections, there is no monolithic eastern Ukrainian culture, no single narrative of eastern Ukrainian history. At least not yet. Yet, there is a basis for this kind of identity, a basis for this kind of narrative. It would be built around the idea of Orthodoxy, in particular the cultural unity of Eastern Orthodox Slavs, an identity that can easily be fueled by an anti-Kyiv regionalism. What lends this strength is that there is an institutional component - the Orthodox Church, Moscow Patriarchate, that is promoting this identity," she concluded.

Mr. Bilak was in Ukraine as an observer for the for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and saw the election result as a vote on values. Mr. Yushchenko's answer to the question of where is Ukraine going was very clear: toward a united Europe.

"This European choice is not just about meeting the technical requirements of the EU, it's a choice of a set of values that Ukrainians believe they share with the rest of Europe - liberal democratic rather than Asiatic authoritarian values. Fifty-two percent of Ukrainians chose the European values, but 44 percent did not. The national unity issue revolves about how to reconcile these competing values, and managing this will be President Yushchenko's greatest challenge," Mr. Bilak said.

In order to start implementing these values there are, according to Mr. Bilak, two key priorities: changes in governance and political reform. Governance means changing the fundamental relationship between the citizen and the state, where the state serves the interest of the citizen and not the other way around.

Political reform can be divided into: administrative reform and, at its core, the fight against corruption where corruption is tackled as an institutional rather than a people factor; judicial reform and the creation of an independent judiciary; the movement toward a parliamentary system of government and a deconcentration of power in line with most European countries. A free press and the creation of a civil society giving the citizen a voice should also be part of this reform, Mr. Bilak underlined.

Ms. Kachur described the role of students in the Orange Revolution, particularly the student organization Pora, which began organizing long before the opposition cried foul over the presidential elections. She said that it was the activists of Pora who orchestrated the mass demonstrations in Kyiv and set up tent camps throughout the city. She mentioned that the movement drew some of its inspiration and tactics from the booklet "From Dictatorship to Democracy" by Gene Sharp, a senior scholar at the (Soros-funded) Albert Einstein Institution in Boston.

Originally published in 1993 in Thailand for distribution among Burmese dissidents, "From Dictatorship to Democracy" played a role in galvanizing the opposition movements in Serbia in 2000 and Georgia in 2003. (The book is available in English, Ukrainian and several other languages on the Internet). It espouses the concept of civil disobedience against dictatorships, arguing that dictators are never as strong as they tell you they are. They have internal weaknesses and problems that can be deliberately aggravated by intelligent opposition tactics.

Mr. Mackinnon was the only Canadian journalist who was stationed in Ukraine throughout the election events. After his first reports on the election appeared in the paper under the dateline of Moscow (he was the foreign correspondent for all countries of the former Soviet Union), he said that the hostile reaction of the Ukrainian community in Canada to his not being in Kyiv was instrumental in convincing his editor that this was an important story for Canadians. He described the difficult situation of foreign correspondents with respect to stories in "countries of second importance" as newspapers and TV networks cut back funding to their foreign offices. He agreed that the election events in Ukraine was one of the top stories of the year.

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