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In
case you missed it
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
By John Laughland
"The Guardian" -- - Friday April 1 2005 -- 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.
· John Laughland is a
trustee of www.oscewatch.org
and an associate of
www.sandersresearch.com
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