In case you
missed it
Manufactured Revolutions?
By
Dragan Plavsic
27 June 05 -
"IS"
-- When is a revolution not a revolution? That is the question
commentators have been asking following a wave of regime changes
that has zigzagged its way progressively eastwards over the last
five years. After Slobodan Milosevic’s overthrow in Serbia in
2000 came the downfall of Edward Shevardnadze in Georgia in
2003, then Viktor Yushchenko’s successful defeat of his
presidential rival in Ukraine in 2004, and earlier this year the
sudden fall from power of Kyrgyzstan’s Askar Akayev.
For some commentators, analysis
of these events is unproblematic. They argue that what we have
been witnessing is a spontaneous resurgence of people power,
necessitated by unfinished business from 1989. As Timothy Garton-Ash,
the indefatigable doyen of velvet revolution, has put it, these
events are ‘the latest in a long series of velvet revolutions
which have helped spread democracy around the world over the
last 30 years’.1
Other commentators have seen
matters quite differently. Instead of people power spontaneously
reborn, they argue that thinly disguised pro-western coups have
been taking place funded by a United States determined to
manipulate elections to its imperial advantage. These are not
popular revolutions at all but street scenes orchestrated by
powerful external forces. One leading exponent of this view,
John Laughland, has ridiculed what he describes as ‘the
mythology of people power’ based on ‘the same fairy tale about
how youthful demonstrators manage to bring down an authoritarian
regime, simply by attending a rock concert in a central
square’.2
There are real problems,
however, with both views. In Laughland’s case, it is his
implicit portrayal of the US as a near-omnipotent puppet-master
successfully pulling all the key strings behind the scenes. This
view reduces people power to little more than the pliant tool of
the US. By contrast, Garton-Ash’s argument remains locked within
the mindset of 1989, steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the
extent to which today’s velvet revolutions have fallen
increasingly prey to manipulation by ruling class and
imperialist interests.
These events certainly involve a
confusing mix of US imperial manipulation, internal opposition
and popular revolt. In each case, the relative weight of these
factors varies. An assessment of these events must therefore be
concrete enough to cater for this.
The Serbian Revolution 2000
The overthrow of Slobodan
Milosevic in October 2000 was a revolution caught between two
epochs. On the one hand, its euphoric mass insurrectionary
character harked back to the heady days of 1989 when revolutions
were powered by revolt from below; on the other hand, the
concerted operation by the Clinton administration to trigger
Milosevic’s removal by means of ‘velvet revolution’ served as a
prototype for subsequent revolutions in the East.
Before 2000, Serbia’s opposition
had twice come close to toppling Milosevic. In 1991, he deployed
tanks on the streets of Belgrade against mass demonstrations,
and during the winter of 1996-1997 three months of mass
demonstrations almost felled him over his refusal to accept that
the opposition had won the local elections. The subsequent
failings of the opposition, split and outmanoeuvred by
Milosevic, led to the formation of the student-led organisation
Otpor! in autumn 1998 by young activists first bloodied in the
mass demonstrations of 1996-1997. It was the leadership of this
mass opposition movement and its student activists that the US
sought to co-opt in the aftermath of its failure to remove
Milosevic during the war against Serbia in 1999.
There were three basic elements
to US strategy in the year prior to the September 2000
presidential election. Firstly, the US Congress approved $10
million and $31 million in 1999 and 2000 respectively to support
the opposition. Via a number of US foundations, notably the
National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and its affiliates, this
money found its way to pro-western opposition parties, such as
Zoran Djindjic’s Democratic Party. Otpor! too received funds,
helping it to produce thousands of posters and stickers
emblazoned with its clenched fist symbol. Secondly, again using
NED and its affiliates operating in Budapest and Szeged in
Hungary, the US trained two dozen Otpor! activists in the
techniques of non-violent struggle and 400 Serbian election
monitors to spot electoral fraud. During the presidential
election these monitors provided evidence of fraud, and
organised parallel exit polls which, by predicting defeat for
Milosevic, had an important galvanising effect on Serbs.3
Thirdly, the US pressured
Djindjic into stepping down as the opposition’s presidential
candidate in favour of the conservative nationalist, Vojislav
Kostunica. An opinion poll of 840 Serbian voters by a US polling
firm had shown that only Kostunica could defeat Milosevic.
Unlike other opposition leaders, Kostunica had been as
consistently anti-US as he had been anti-Milosevic. This was
critical in Serbia where sanctions and the bombing of the
country in 1999 had turned the population bitterly against the
US. Kostunica always rejected US money, famously describing
Washington’s support as ‘the kiss of death’ for his campaign.4
But US strategy was simple: Kostunica would be the front man,
and Djindjic, backed by the US, would be the power behind the
throne and the nucleus of a Serbian capitalist class loyal to
the US.
The character of the Serbian
revolution was not, however, to be defined by these imperial
machinations; rather, its character was ultimately and
conclusively stamped by the depth, intensity and nationwide
scale of an uprising powered from below by years of accumulated
disgust with Milosevic. As two Serbian chroniclers of the
revolution, Dragan Bujosevic and Ivan Radovanovic, have observed
of the opposition’s assessment of the driving forces of the
revolution:
b. The euphoric wave of popular
rebellion against the Milosevic…regime was swelling, and even
DOS [the Democratic Opposition of Serbia] was afraid of it. Some
leaders of DOS were convinced that Milosevic was heading for
defeat at the elections, that he would falsify the results, and
that the opposition would then be lynched by the people unless
it took a direct stand against the usurper of popular choice.5
The depth and intensity of this
euphoric wave found its sharpest expression in the working class
base of the revolutionary uprising against Milosevic,
spearheaded by 7,000 striking miners from the Kolubara strip
mine, just south of Belgrade. For the first time in a decade,
the opposition’s call for a general strike had found a
resounding echo. Kostunica’s two visits to Kolubara and the
constant presence there of opposition figures reflected what
everyone in Serbia recognised: that the engine of the revolution
had shifted perceptibly from the leaders of the opposition to
the miners at Kolubara. Indeed, Milosevic’s fate was
irretrievably to be sealed by his failure to break the Kolubara
miners. This is why his downfall was a victory for the Serbian
working class, bristling with revolutionary potential. In
subsequent weeks, workers across Serbia struck demanding the
removal of company directors tainted by their ties to Milosevic;
others struck for higher wages; and riots swept prisons as
inmates demanded the removal of hated wardens.
At the same time, however,
Milosevic’s downfall was also a victory for the US, even if
Kostunica has emerged as the dominant force in Serbian politics
at the head of governments that remain stubbornly recalcitrant
on important issues. Washington’s strategy of ‘electoral
interventionism’,6 exploiting rigged elections in order to
precipitate regime change, had worked; it could now serve as a
template for future interventions elsewhere.
Georgia’s Rose Revolution 2003
Georgia today plays a central
role in US strategic thinking. One reason for this is the $3
billion oil pipeline under construction across Georgia from
neighbouring Azerbaijan, thereby avoiding both Russia and Iran
on its route to Turkey. But a pro-US Georgia is also in any
event a valuable obstacle to Putin’s more assertive Russia.
Edward Shevardnadze, once Gorbachev’s foreign minister, became
Washington’s man in Georgia in 1992. A supporter of NATO
membership who welcomed a symbolic contingent of US troops onto
Georgian soil, Shevardnadze also sent troops to Kosovo and Iraq.
Under him, Georgia became the largest per capita recipient of US
foreign aid after Israel.
Nevertheless, the Bush
administration became increasingly disenchanted with
Shevardnadze for two reasons. Firstly, his regime was visibly
losing support amid a growing tide of popular anger at poverty,
unemployment and crony privatisation. Secondly, as he sensed
growing US disillusionment, Shevardnadze began to tilt his sails
towards Moscow.
In Serbia, US strategy had been
simple: to remove Milosevic. In Georgia, the strategy was
twin-tracked: to maintain official support for Shevardnadze, but
also to cultivate those pro-US Georgian oppositionists skilled
enough to voice popular anger without jeopardising US hegemony.
Three leading figures were cultivated: Mikhail Saakashvili, a 35
year old lawyer and graduate of Columbia University Law School
in New York, who had been Shevardnadze’s minister of justice,
Nino Burdzhanadze, the speaker of the parliament, and Zurab
Zhvania, a former speaker. All were one-time Shevardnadze
supporters. As the Wall Street Journal put it,
The[se] three politicians
are backed by a raft of non-governmental organisations that
have sprung up since the fall of the Soviet Union. Many of
the NGOs have been supported by American and other Western
foundations, spawning a class of young, English-speaking
intellectuals hungry for pro-Western reforms.7
The original purpose of this
strategy was to oversee an orderly transition from Shevardnadze,
due to leave office in 2005 having served two full terms as
president, to the Saakashvili generation. But the US was also
prepared to contemplate a Serbian-style solution if Shevardnadze
outstayed his welcome or sought Russian help. It was not for
nothing that Saakashvili visited Serbia, and veteran Otpor!
activists, by now pale, degenerate shadows of their former
selves, were hired to train members of Kmara, Otpor!’s Georgian
counterpart.
Washington’s initial reaction,
therefore, when OSCE election monitors issued a statement
pointing to ‘serious irregularities’ with Georgia’s
parliamentary elections in November 2003, was to call
allegations of fraud an ‘overstatement’. As the Financial
Times reported, ‘Observers believe the US had hoped to keep
Mr Shevardnadze, its old favourite, in office until the
scheduled 2005 presidential election.’ Three weeks later, on 21
November, the US changed tack, declaring that it was ‘deeply
disappointed’ with the way the elections had been run.8
By then, Washington was faced
with mounting popular revolt. The opposition, led by
Saakashvili, had embarked upon a campaign of demonstrations
against electoral fraud that was soon being driven by popular
anger at poverty and unemployment. After three weeks,
Shevardnadze’s authority had all but evaporated and a reported
compromise the US tried to broker was abandoned in favour of
unqualified support for Saakashvili. This Georgian scenario has
recently been very well summarised by Russian socialist, Boris
Kagarlitsky:
As soon as Washington
realises that popular dissent is rising in a country and
that regime change is imminent, it immediately begins to
seek out new partners among the opposition… The money
invested in the opposition by various [non-governmental
organisations] is a sort of insurance policy, ensuring that
regime change will not result in a change of course, and
that if change is inevitable, it will not be radical.9
Ukraine’s Orange Revolution
2004
The ‘multi-vector’ foreign
policy of outgoing Ukrainian president, Leonid Kuchma, shorthand
for an unpredictable balancing act between Washington and
Moscow, had always irritated the US. Typically, Kuchma
despatched troops to Iraq while also leaning towards Russia.
This policy reflected the split in Ukraine’s ruling class
between pro-US and pro-Russian wings, a split over which Kuchma
had presided as ultimate arbiter. His departure from the
political scene meant that the presidential election of November
2004 would be dominated by two presidential candidates who
embodied Ukraine’s ruling class divide.
The November election therefore
resulted in a tense and potentially explosive ruling class and
imperialist stand-off. On the one hand, Viktor Yushchenko, once
Kuchma’s prime minister, represented the oligarchic clans –
closely knit capitalist groups – of the Ukrainian-speaking
western Ukraine. Backed by the US, their principal object was to
forge closer economic and political links with the West. On the
other hand, Viktor Yanukovych, Kuchma’s last prime minister,
stood for the oligarchic clans of the largely Russian-speaking
western Ukraine. Backed by Russia, their aim was to maintain
their hegemony in Ukraine and to sustain, if not deepen, links
with Russia.
Anticipating electoral fraud by
Yanukovych, US strategy prior to the election closely followed
the Serbian prototype of direct regime change. Via a number of
US foundations and other Ukrainian NGOs, the US State Department
channelled $65 million to Yushchenko in the two years prior to
the election to fund his campaign, train election monitors and
organise exit polls. According to one report as many as 150,000
people were trained to spot electoral fraud. Some 10,000 cameras
were distributed to election monitors to record fraud. And
Yanukovych’s victory was instantly challenged by exit polls that
gave Yushchenko an 11 point lead. Indeed, the aura of
meticulous, well-funded planning pervaded the Ukrainian
election. Symptomatic was the level of organisation in Kiev’s
Independence Square where Yushchenko’s supporters were encamped.
Multiple soup kitchens were organised and large supplies of
tents arrived; 10,000 loaves of bread and 5,000 tonnes of
porridge were provided every day; 300 toilets were set up and a
fleet of doctors fielded 5,000 calls a day while in the
background ten-hour daily rock concerts played on.10
This is not to deny the real
enthusiasm of the Independence Square crowds who supported the
campaign to overturn Yanukovych’s initial victory. But it is to
recognise that here was a ‘revolution’ whose popular forces
were, from the very outset, carefully controlled and manipulated
by Yushchenko. Unlike in Serbia, where the engine of the
revolution shifted perceptibly to the miners at Kolubara, it is
striking that in Ukraine no such shift to the crowds assembled
in Independence Square ever took place. And by contrast with
Serbia, where revolt bristled with revolutionary potential,
events in Ukraine bristled instead with the threat of civil war.
‘People power’ in Ukraine never appeared as a force in its own
right but was cynically wielded by Yushchenko’s camp as a weapon
in its constitutional struggle to have Yanukovych’s victory
overturned by the Supreme Court. The tense, Cold War-style
character of this electoral stand-off certainly helped both
camps control their supporters; squeezed between two sharply
opposed ruling class blocs, each with their own imperialist
allies, there was much less scope for discontent from below to
find expression.
Ukraine in 2004 represents the
low-point of the ‘democratic’ wave that swept all before it in
1989. This is because it also represents the high-point of
ruling class and imperialist manipulation of ‘people power’.
What was once an inspiring expression of mass popular discontent
had now transparently degenerated into a cynical and dangerous
game of power politics.
Kyrgyzstan’s Tulip Revolution
2005
Ukraine was a well-planned and
controlled affair. Kyrgyzstan in March 2005 was not. Here two
rounds of rigged parliamentary elections in February and March
led to mounting protests against President Askar Akayev. The
fractious nature of the Kyrgyz opposition, some of whose leaders
languished in prison, meant that the scope for expressing
popular discontent from below was significantly greater than in
Ukraine.
The revolution was initially
centred on an uprising in two southern towns, Osh and Jalalabad.
Here, shortly after close of voting on 13 March, government
buildings, police stations and airports were seized by
opposition supporters. In Jalalabad a mass opposition congress,
or kurultai, attended by thousands, passed a resolution
demanding Akayev’s removal, and was followed shortly afterwards
by another in Osh. One leading opposition figure, Ishengul
Boljurova, described the situation in Osh and Kyrgyzstan in
these terms: ‘The governor has fled. The authorities are afraid
of the ordinary people. There is now dual power in the country.
Popular rule is on its way’.11 Eventually, on 24 March, the
protests spread to the capital, Bishkek, where a mass
demonstration, swelling to some 50,000, stormed the presidential
palace, forcing Akayev from power. Widespread looting and arson
then followed. Something of the flavour of these events was
captured by Times reporter Jeremy Page when he visited
the presidential palace:
In Mr Akayev’s personal
quarters I found a protester in a general’s hat raiding the
fridge. Another was having a go on the president’s exercise
bike and a third was trying on his multicoloured ceremonial
felt robes. The president himself had fled.12
These events demonstrate that,
to use Page’s phrase, ‘geopolitics was not the driving force
behind the Kyrgyz revolution’.13 Although Kyrgyzstan has the
rare pleasure of hosting both US and Russian air bases that are
no more than 20 miles apart, the revolution caught everyone by
surprise, even opposition leaders. What drove it forward was
mass popular anger at poverty and unemployment and the Akayev
family’s corrupt monopoly of power and wealth.
Nevertheless, many of the
opposition leaders who came to the fore during the revolution,
such as Roza Otunbaeva, a former ambassador to Washington, had
links with the US. This is not surprising. As in Georgia, the US
followed a dual strategy in Kyrgyzstan; while supporting Akayev,
it also financed an entire ‘democratic’ infrastructure capable
of sustaining a network of opposition parties. Asia Times
Online may not have been exaggerating when it noted that
‘practically everything that passes for civil society in
Kyrgyzstan is financed by US foundations, or by the US Agency
for International Development (USAID). At least 170
non-governmental organisations charged with development or
promotion of democracy have been created or sponsored by the
Americans’.14 In November 2003, US assistant secretary of state
Lorne Craner officially opened a publishing house in Bishkek
with the capacity to produce 18,000 newspapers per hour. Funded
by the US state department and the US foundation, Freedom House,
it published some 60 titles, including opposition newspapers the
state publishing house refused to print.
This infrastructure also served
as an important pole of attraction for disillusioned former
Akayev loyalists turned oppositionists. What is striking about
the Kyrgyz revolution is how many leading ex-loyalists have
returned to the posts they once held under Akayev. Kurmanbek
Bakiyev, a former prime minister is now acting president and
prime minister; Felix Kulov, a former interior minister, is
again in charge of security; and Roza Otunbaeva, a former
foreign minister is once more foreign minister. These are people
Washington can trust to ensure that very little will change.
Indeed, when Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, visited
Kyrgyzstan in April, Bakiyev promptly assured him that the US
airbase in Bishkek could remain.
However, those who actually made
the revolution may have other ideas. As Rumsfeld was visiting,
several thousand landless squatters were seizing land they say
should have been distributed to them after collective farms were
disbanded in the early 1990s. As one report noted, ‘Many of the
new squatters say it was their revolution and insist that they
have every right to take land after years of requests went
unanswered’.15
Conclusion
In recent years, the US has
worked hard to instrumentalise the velvet revolution, to exploit
it for its own ends. With massive funds, it has used rigged
elections to help trigger regime change, as in Serbia and
Ukraine. It has anticipated revolt by cultivating oppositionists
to lead it, as in Georgia. It has established and maintained a
‘democratic’ infrastructure of NGOs, media outlets and
publishing houses that has spawned a host of intellectuals and
activists for whom the most viable economic and political model
is still the one offered by the victor of the Cold War. This
infrastructure sustains US-friendly opposition groups who can
emerge to lead sudden revolts, as in Kyrgyzstan. For all these
reasons, US imperial manipulation today is qualitatively greater
than it was in 1989. Now it has largely unfettered access to
societies closed to it before the fall of the Soviet Union. And
there it can freely target established opposition groups instead
of secretly infiltrating the twilight world of the lonely
dissident. This is why it is justified to talk of the
degeneration of the ‘velvet revolution’.
Nevertheless, there is another
side to this story. If US strategy is indeed to work, it has
ultimately to rely on popular forces to push change through. And
this carries real dangers. Above all, there is the danger that
the popular forces the US seeks to manipulate will sooner or
later strike out in an uncontrollable direction of their own,
well beyond the remit of the bourgeois oppositions the US would
have them follow. Indeed, from the miners at Kolubara to the
landless squatters of Kyrgyzstan, the potential of these
revolutions has been palpable. This is the core contradiction at
the heart of US strategy. And this is why every crisis the US
seeks to manipulate is also an opportunity for socialists to
voice independent demands that can help to push the revolution
to altogether greater democratic heights.
NOTES
1: ‘First Know Your Donkey’, The
Guardian, 27 January 2005.
2: ‘The Revolution Televised’ and ‘The Mythology of People
Power’, The Guardian, 27 November 2004 and 1 April 2005.
3: See for this information R Cohen, ‘Who Really Brought Down
Milosevic?’, The New York Time Magazine, 20 November 2004 and
Michael Dobbs, ‘US Advice Guided Milosevic Opposition’,
Washington Post, 11 December 2000.
4: P Watson, ‘US Aid to Milosevic’s Foes Is Criticized as ̉Kiss
of DeathÓ’, Los Angeles Times, 28 August 2000.
5: D Bujosevic and I Radovanovic, The Fall of Milosevic: The
October 5th Revolution (Palgrave, 2003), p4.
6: Jonathan Steele’s phrase in his ‘Ukraine’s Untold Story’, The
Nation, 20 December 2004.
7: H Pope, ‘Pro-West Leaders in Georgia Push Shevardnadze Out’,
Wall Street Journal, 24 November 2003.
8: G Dinmore, ‘The Americas & Europe: Flaws Exposed in Strategy
of ‘Realpolitik’’’, Financial Times, 27 November 2003.
9: Quoted in P Escobar, ‘What Kind of Revolution is This?’, Asia
Times Online, 2 April 2005.
10: See for this information D Wolf, ‘A 21st Century Revolt’,
The Guardian, 13 May 2005 (based on his BBC4 documentary,
‘Inside the Orange Revolution’ shown on 15 May 2005).
11: Institute for War and Peace Reporting, Reporting Central
Asia no 358, 18 March 2005.
12: ‘President Ousted as Kyrgyzstan Revels in its Spring
Revolution’, The Times, 25 March 2005.
13: As above.
14: P Escobar, ‘The Tulip Revolution Takes Root’, Asia Times
Online, 26 March 2005.
15: Institute for War and Peace Reporting, Reporting Central
Asia no 367, 12 April 2005
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