Political terrorism

Listening to the discussion* of the Ukraine election crisis on BBC World Service's Talking Point (you can watch it and hear it with RealVideo here) this morning, I was struck by one thing that clearly emerged from the points that were being made on both sides of the Ukrainian political divide: whatever else may be needed to resolve the crisis, the one step that can't be dispensed with is a re-run of the second round of the elections. From Katharyna Wolczuk's comments it was possible to glean a truth that in some of the analysis I've seen appears to have been more or less ignored so far: that the Kuchma government, while agreeing to hold the presidential elections in the first place, decided to use and manipulate them in order to deliberately precipitate a crisis of the kind that has developed - one in which fears of a new Cold War can be exploited in order to undermine the Yushchenko opposition. It was this agenda that lay behind the gross and blatant manner in which the election fraud was carried out - the purpose was to make it so open and obvious that it could not possibly be ignored, and would lead to large-scale protests of the kind we have seen in Western Ukraine. The idea was to split the country, to aggravate political divisions that in some ways were not yet clearly defined, to arouse democratic political opinion in the West, and in short to create all the conditions where the accusation of "political interference by the West" could be levelled both at Yushchenko and at the West itself.

This technique is not a very sophisticated one, yet it can be quite effective. Its origins and ancestry are in Moscow - and in recent times it has been used even more crudely, with disastrous consequences in terms of human suffering and loss of life, by Russia in Chechnya. The Kuchma/Yanukovych/Putin axis is well aware that force alone will not lead to the results it desires, and so old KGB informational tactics, some of which date from the Stalin era, were brought out of the cupboard and put to service. What's mildly reassuring about this, at least to a Western observer, is that it highlights even more graphically the true nature of the Yanukovych campaign, and also of its Moscow patrons and supporters. An example: what has happened in the election, and in the last week, will make it difficult, if not impossible, for Yanukovych to go on presenting himself as an ally of the West in the War on Terror - for his government has been seen to be practising a blatant form of political terror: one based on fraud, intimidation and the threat of state repression. This man is no friend of the West, and no friend of democracy: at least that message has come through loud and clear. And the re-run of the second round - this time with proper and extensive international supervision - is needed not only to establish the will of the Ukrainian people, but also in order to provide a start in repairing the split in the nation that was maliciously and intentionally created by the government.
______________________________________________
*There's also a page about the programme, with listeners' viewpoints, here