NEWS AND VIEWS: If only Iraq were like Ukraine: a journalist's experiences (05/15/05)

NEWS AND VIEWS

If only Iraq were like Ukraine: a journalist's experiences

by Yaroslav Trofimov

When I packed my bags to travel to Kyiv to cover Ukraine's Orange Revolution last fall, I took all the usual things that I've learned to bring on reporting trips: a satellite phone, a helmet and a bullet-proof vest.

As a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, it's been my job since 2001 to hopscotch around the world, covering war and mayhem from Afghanistan to Iraq to Liberia. Used to things getting out of hand, I was bracing for a bloody showdown - this time in the city where I was born.

Fellow reporters, some of whom I had last seen in Baghdad, were equally glum. Our opinion of human nature undermined by watching so much bloodletting up close, we instinctively feared that something would just go wrong. And indeed, it wouldn't have taken much - one trigger-happy policeman, one or two agents provocateurs - for the scenes of panic and pain to replace TV images of cheerful, dancing crowds on Independence Square. We all know, of course, how differently things in Ukraine turned out to be. Nobody was roughed up, let alone killed. My bulletproof vest never left the suitcase. The protest movement, spurred by a sense of wounded dignity, achieved tremendous results without spilling a drop of blood. For people like me, who had spent months in Baghdad, where the dead are usually counted by the dozen, this was little short of miracle. In a world caught in a spiral of violence, Ukraine offered an inspiring moment of hope.

Soon, in Egypt, an opposition party adopted the orange scarves of the Ukrainian protests in its drive for more freedom. But, unlike authorities in Kyiv, the ones in Cairo responded by throwing the party's leader in jail. Then, in Beirut, the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri brought tens of thousands of Lebanese to demonstrate for free elections and an end to Syrian domination. (Just like many in Russia pretend that Ukraine is an abnormal formation that will be reabsorbed in the greater homeland one day, Syrians tend to think of Lebanon as an artificially separated part of Greater Syria; Syria even refuses to maintain an embassy in Beirut.)

In downtown Beirut, at a student protesters' tent city that so much resembled the one on Kyiv's Independence Square, posters on a billboard showed the Ukrainian rallies. Instead of orange scarves, the Lebanese went for red and white - the colors of their national flag.

The Syrians' most powerful ally in Beirut, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, understood the symbolism all too well. Unlike pro-Russian politicians in Kyiv, he managed to assemble his own giant, pro-Syrian rally in the heart of the Lebanese capital, bellowing from the balcony: "Here, it is not Ukraine!"

And indeed it wasn't. Syrian troops may be gone now, but a pro-Syrian administration remains in charge in Beirut. And, unlike in Ukraine, the political crisis there - just as in the rest of the Middle East - is punctuated by deadly car bombings as sectarian tensions bubble up to the surface again. Blood all too often has to be washed off the streets.

* * *

Many in Washington nowadays want to portray American efforts to revamp the Muslim world as something akin to the Cold War campaigns to end oppression in Eastern Europe; I have even heard U.S. officials mention Ukrainian and Iraqi elections in the same breath, as interconnected steps in a global march of freedom.

This should be no surprise. Some of the very people in charge of combating "the axis of evil" today were actively fighting "the evil empire" back in the 1980s.

Being a former citizen of that evil empire, it's hard to agree with such comparisons. I remember, as a teenager in the 1980s, listening furtively to U.S.-funded Radio Liberty, trying to make out forbidden words as a Soviet jammer whined siren-like on the same frequency. For people in the Soviet bloc, chafing under a totalitarian regime, America beckoned as a symbol of freedom and national liberation. It's precisely this fresh sense of gratitude that prompted so many countries in the so-called "New Europe" to send troops to help the U.S. in Iraq as the "Old Europe" giants of Germany and France watched from the sidelines.

But, in the Muslim world, the opposite equation is now in place. While in Eastern Europe largely pro-American peoples lived under anti-American regimes, among Islamic lands anti-American fury is most widespread in American allies: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan - and now, of course, Iraq.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, Communist societies crumbled from within as their public opinion defected to America's side. Nationalist feelings, directed against Moscow, helped bring about democracy from Warsaw to Tbilisi. How different from the Middle East! There, regimes have to pander to anti-American feelings to survive; being an Arab nationalist today almost by definition means being anti-American.

If only Iraq were like Ukraine. If only one didn't have to wear a bulletproof vest every day in Baghdad.

Yaroslav Trofimov, who was born in Ukraine, is a roving foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and the author of "Faith at War: A Journey on the Frontlines of Islam, from Baghdad to Timbuktu" (Henry Holt, May 2005; www.faithatwar.com). In 1990-1992 his free-lance articles were published in The Ukrainian Weekly; many of them were written for Rukh Press International. Mr. Trofimov will present his new book and share his experiences at 7 p.m. on May 18 at the Ukrainian Institute of America, 2 E. 79th St., New York.

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