Will Ukraine finally be 'the hour of Europe'?

CHRIS STEPHEN
 

WHEN the Yugoslav war blew up in 1991, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Jacques Poos, famously declared: "The hour of Europe has come." What followed was more than a decade’s worth of humiliation, doublespeak and disaster as the EU’s diplomats failed, and carried on failing, through wars first in the Balkans and now against terror. But with Ukraine, this European hour may finally have arrived.

Overnight, and without warning, a country of 48 million people has arrived gift-wrapped on our doorstep. And what a baby.

First, Ukraine does not need anything material from us. We do not need to raise cash for the starving, because the country, while not rich, is surviving. We do not need to send troops, because this is a peaceful revolution. And best of all, when it comes to democracy, Ukrainians are doing it for themselves: their Orange Revolution is securely anchored on a love not for naive ideals but for the West’s consumer values. What better neighbour could we hope to find?

But immense problems lie ahead, starting with the fact that, despite endless announcements of victory, Kiev’s Orange Revolution is far from over. The regime of Leonid Kuchma, blamed by international monitors for a spectacular rigging of last week’s presidential elections, lingers on. Kuchma controls the levers of power and he also controls the security forces.

Kuchma has a good reason for hanging on way past the point when normal presidents, in normal states, would have thrown in the towel. That reason’s name is George Gongadze, a journalist murdered four years ago after writing critical stories of the regime.

The United States has tapes of what sounds like Kuchma ordering the killing. The case became a key plank in the opposition campaign. Even if Yushchenko wants to, he cannot offer Kuchma immunity from prosecution. If he loses power, Kuchma is likely to be going to jail - a powerful incentive to hang on long past the point of no return.

More problems will come if Kuchma does finally give away and agree to new elections. Yushchenko wants a quick repeat of the 21 November contest between himself and the prime minister, Victor Yanukovich. But Yanukovich, now a broken man, his government defeated, his candidacy exposed as a fraud, will probably not stand again. This would mean an election with only one candidate, an ugly reminder of Ukraine’s Communist past.

Yet the alternative, a rerun of the entire elections, first round as well as second round, would take months to organise and would be open to the same kind of fraud and cheating that international monitors discovered last time around. Remember: the thugs and cronies who organised the first set of rigged ballots are still around, waiting in the shadows.

And then there is the opposition. While at present united on the streets, it will shortly be divided when, as seems inevitable, it is handed the levers of power. Yushchenko’s candidacy is held together by a coalition of parties who, until his election, spent more time fighting each other than fighting the government. Meanwhile, his money has come from some very rich, very powerful barons who may also want a big slice of the post-revolutionary cake.

And there are questions also over Yushchenko’s leadership style. As a revolutionary, he is a gift, because he is obstinate, honest and clear-headed. But he seems to lack the nous and slyness necessary for the deal-making on which successful presidents depend. He may simply be too nice to make a strong president.

There are also the revolutionaries to consider. In among the hundreds of thousands of happy protesters who throng Kiev with fervent energy each day are some uncertain new organisations.

One such is Pora, the student movement which has occupied the prime site in Tent City, the apparently anarchic campsite that has sprung up in Kiev’s city centre. The leaders of this group are a determined lot, reportedly financed and trained by Washington, and they are starting to show political ambitions, despite the fact that nobody ever elected them. It will take a lot of string-pulling by the Americans to persuade these young bloods that they must simply return to their studies and leave politics to the grown-ups.

And even if Ukraine holds fresh elections, and Yushchenko wins by a landslide, Ukraine’s problems are only just beginning.

In the first place, this is now a hugely divided nation. Even before the elections, there was growing antagonism between the Ukrainian-speaking west, which looks towards the European Union for its future, and the Russian-speaking east, which feels a natural affinity with Moscow.

This election has left people in the eastern provinces seething with anger. In the smoke-stack cities of Donetsk, Lugansk and Dniprepetrovosk, the talk is that the Orange Revolution has stolen the election. Partly this is probably due to the government controlling the media, and telling people in the east, for more than a year, that Yushchenko is an evil man bent on destruction.

But the people in the eastern provinces have solid reasons for fearing Yushchenko. First is his refusal to agree that Russian can have official-language status, along with Ukrainian. Yushchenko has good reasons for this, fearing that if big companies can print in Russian as well as Ukrainian, they will choose the former because they can trade with the Russian giant across the border and Ukrainian will be swallowed up. But his decision leaves Russian speakers feeling like strangers in their own land.

Second, the Kuchma government was careful to pump money into keeping overstaffed mines in the Don Bas region operating. The miners know these jobs will vanish if the opposition gets power. There will be strikes ahead.

The biggest problem of all is Ukraine’s giant, brooding neighbour, Russia. Moscow is furious after seeing Kuchma, its ally, smashed by the Orange Revolution. This has wrecked its plans to launch a trading bloc, the Customs Union, supposed to be an answer to the European Union.

For the EU, this is where the rubber meets the road. A diplomat told me that Javier Solana is stuck with a terrible dilemma. On the one hand, he wants to be seen as a mediator, enjoying the trust of both government and opposition. On the other hand, the EU’s bedrock policy is support for democracy, which means Solana must support the opposition, which wants fair elections, against the government, which even the EU’s own monitors say has rigged the vote.

So far, Solana has played a careful game, in effect oiling the inevitable downward path for President Kuchma. Behind the scenes, it was Solana who this week engineered the round-table discussions at which, confronted by the hopelessness of his position after his government fell, saw Yanukovich finally drop his objection to new elections.

But Solana’s next visit will not be so easy. By backing fair elections, he is effectively backing the opposition. Like the last vote, the next one will be between a government that wants to face Moscow against an opposition that wants to face the West.

If the EU now steps in to help organise fair elections, it will build bridges to this new, impetuous addition to the European family, but risk burning them with Moscow.
http://news.scotsman.com/opinion.cfm?id=1385792004