Us and Them
July 1, 2008 – 6:41 amBusiness Ukraine, 2 June 2008
I asked very pertinent ten questions to President Viktor Yushchenko as he flew into Canada for two reasons. Firstly, to stimulate, as it did, a vigorous debate. Secondly, to ensure that Yushchenko did not receive typically unadulterated praise from the Ukrainian diaspora who would be unwilling to pose difficult questions to him.
The president’s inappropriate choice of allies and leadership of the presidential secretariat has long become evident to any sober Ukrainian or foreign observer of Ukraine. This clearly came out in the intolerant and intellectually incoherent response to my Ten Questions by the singer Oksana Bilozir. The over 150 comments posted on her response ridiculed her failed attempt at responding to my Ten Questions.
As many of the comments pointed out, it is highly unlikely that she wrote the half baked response to my Ten Questions. In all likelihood these were written on the instructions of the head of the presidential secretariat, Viktor Baloga, the president’s bulldog. Bilozir was one of the ten or so deputies in the Our Ukraine-Peoples Self Defence faction who resigned from the party and joined the new United Centre pro-presidential party. The Ten Questions criticised Baloga by name on three occasions as acting unconstitutionally as a Vice President.
Bilozir’s biggest flaky and incoherent comment reflected the Soviet era thinking and language that is still evident in Baloga’s words and deeds. Posing the very question if foreigners can, and have a right, to criticise Ukraine is ridiculous, primitive and disingenuous.
Does the President believe it is morally correct for the head of what he describes his presidential secretariat as a “technical apparatus” to return to Soviet language to describe Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko as a ‘fascist’? The very return to such language brings shivers up my spine as it was last used in February 2001 by President Kuchma, Prime Minister Yushchenko and Speaker Ivan Pliushch in an open letter that labelled the anti-Kuchma protestors, including Tymoshenko, as “fascists”. Yushchenko has still to apologise for signing this letter. Pliushch, meanwhile, always an
opponent of Tymoshenko as seen in his refusal to sign the orange coalition accord, has continued to defend the disgusting statement.
The threat to which such extreme views and growing intolerance of criticism coming from the president’s secretariat can be seen in trumped up criminal charges against Davyd Zhvania, Yuriy Lutsenko and members of the Tymoshenko bloc. Are these to be the new dissidents in Balogastan? The return of former Deputy KGB head and Security Service Chairman Yevhen Marchuk as “presidential adviser” does not bode well for the orange coalition: one wonders whether the presidential secretariat are contemplating drawing on Marchuk’s experience in undermining the Yushchenko government of 2000-2001 when Marchuk was National Security Council secretariat? Marchuk, by the way, like Baloga, is a former Social Democrat.
Another return to Soviet rhetoric was Bilozir’s claim that my criticism derives from Russian intelligence connections. The last time I was accused of working for an intelligence agency was in 1989-1990 when the Soviet media claimed I was a CIA agent. My KGB file prevented me entering the USSR until after the failed August 1991 putsch (an attempt at entering the USR in April 1990 led to my deportation). Making accusations of intelligence connections means Baloga and Bilozir follow in a long tradition from Soviet counter-propaganda against the Ukrainian diaspora, President Kuchma accusations that the Kuchmagate scandal was a Western conspiracy and Viktor
Yanukovych’s claim that the Orange Revolution was a CIA plot.
This intolerance of criticism and undemocratic methods reflects two factors. Firstly, Baloga’s political career in Ukraine’s most despised and Machiavellian clan, the Social Democrats, who controlled his home base of Trans-Carpathia until 2004. Secondly, his low intellectual capabilities and provincialism. Thirdly, the corrupt business methods employed by the Baloga clan in Trans-Carpathia which he has transformed, according to the Interior Ministry, into his own private Boratstan.
If foreigners, as Baloga and Bilozir believe, have no right to criticise Ukraine then do they think it was wrong for the West to condemn the election fraud in 2004? Maybe Bilozir and Baloga believe – like the Russian authorities – that Western involvement was tantamount to “interference” and the entire Orange Revolution was merely a Western-backed, CIA conspiracy. If they do then it is not surprising that they would like a grand coalition as they would in bed with fellow minds. Will they move to ban international observers, as has Russia, from attending elections, particularly the next presidential elections that could be only won by the sitting president through fraud based on his persistently low ratings.
Or if we were to go back further into history, maybe it was wrong for the Ukrainian diaspora during the Soviet era to be anti-communist and anti-Soviet? The Ukrainian famine of 1933, which the President has made into one of his important issues, was first raised in a big way on its fiftieth anniversary in 1983 by the Ukrainian diaspora. Unlike the majority of Ukraine’s elites – who in the 1980s still served the Soviet authorities and continued to deny a famine had taken place until 1990 – I was one of those who took part in the fiftieth commemoration, wrote articles and lobbied about the issue over a decade before Yushchenko. Perhaps Bilozir and Baloga are right and the Ukrainian diaspora and myself had no right to criticise?
If the nationalist inferiority complex argument propounded by Bilozir and Baloga were applied to the President’s policies they would undermine his support for Ukrainian membership of the EU and NATO. Are Bilozir and Baloga proposing that Ukraine, unlike poor reformers Romania and Bulgaria, ignore NATO and the EU when they criticise Ukraine’s mistakes and poorly executed reforms on the path to membership of these organisations? Romania and Bulgaria are inside the EU and NATO precisely because they have listened to foreign criticism.
If Bilozir and Baloga propose that the Ukrainian authorities do in fact ignore criticism from the EU and NATO then they are undermining Ukraine’s path to membership in these organisations and are in contempt of Ukraine’s 2003 law on National Security, which outlines membership in these two organisations as Ukraine’s strategic goal. Following the reformatting of the orange coalition and removal of the Tymoshenko government later this year what progress report will Baloga write for Yushchenko to present to the NATO Foreign Ministers meeting in December on Ukraine’s readiness to enter the Membership Action Plan?
Asking difficult questions of leaders is a vital part of any democracy and free media. Yushchenko by comparison has it easy compared to the avalanche of criticism directed at British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s weak leadership.
If Bilozir and Baloga do not like such criticism then they are enemies of Ukraine’s young democracy and are working against the values upheld by the one fifth of Ukrainians who participated in the Orange Revolution and the 52 percent who voted for Yushchenko on 26 December 2004.
Dear Mrs. Bilozir please let me give you a few words of advice. Either stick to singing or – if you really do unfortunately wish to enter politics – then go back to school. As to Mr. Baloga, I back the growing chorus of orange deputies who say that an orange president deserves a better head of his
“technical apparatus”.