��: �� "��"... �� --

[ Show ]

Support VoyForums

[ Shrink ]

VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, [6], 7, 8, 9, 10 ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 15:51:39 09/25/01 Tue
Author: ��
Subject: ��: �� "��"... ��
In reply to: �� 's message, "�� " on 01:19:50 09/22/01 Sat

� �� (�� - �� "��", ��. ��: The bully of Belarus <a rel=nofollow target=_blank href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4254106,00.html),">http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4254106,00.html),</a> �� (�� ).

<a rel=nofollow target=_blank href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4256816,00.html">http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4256816,00.html</a>

Belarussian foils dictator-buster... for now
Tested US foreign election strategy fails against Lukashenko

Ian Traynor in Moscow
Guardian

Friday September 14, 2001

Michael Kozak specialises in winning other countries' elections. So when he arrived in Minsk last year as the new American ambassador to Belarus, it was clear that Washington was embarking on a strategy of trying to topple the one-man regime of President Alexander Lukashenko through the ballot box.

The nine-month battle of wits between the American "democracy-builder" and Europe's last hardline authoritarian ended in last Sunday's presidential election. The regime confounded the west's plan to open up Belarus to free elections, free markets and civil liberties with Mr Lukashenko proclaiming a landslide victory.

Mr Kozak, a veteran of Washington's campaigns to install sympathetic leaders in Nicaragua, Panama and Haiti and undermine the Castro regime in Cuba - he headed the US mission in Havana for four years before moving to Minsk - has been left licking his wounds.

The regime calls Mr Kozak a spy, the architect of the alleged "White Stork" conspiracy to overthrow Mr Lukashenko. He may be expelled from Minsk.

But the Americans are unapologetic about their most systematic intervention in an election in Europe, outside the Balkans, for years.

The strategy repeated in exact detail the tactics the US used to help the Serbian opposition overthrow Slobodan Milosevic a year ago, and the Nicaraguan opposition unseat Daniel Ortega in 1990.

It concentrated less on covert operations than on modern marketing and branding methods of selling politics, organising election monitoring, manipulating the media and aiming certain aid money in a subtly coercive way.

"The Americans think they've found the blueprint for getting rid of dictators. They haven't. They're wrong," a senior west European diplomat in Minsk said.

Mr Lukashenko, whose secret police are all-pervasive, thwarted the plan: he barred thousands of opposition election monitors, closed opposition newspapers and harassed his challengers.

Now, after funnelling tens of millions of dollars to the Belarus opposition, engineering a united opposition coalition, funding websites, newspapers and manipulative opinion polls, and tutoring a student resistance movement, the Americans are taking stock of how to react to another five years of him.

In the wake of the western failure on Sunday, a row is brewing between the Americans, who want to isolate the regime, and the Europeans, who regard that as counter-productive.

The meticulous western campaign to unseat Mr Lukashenko began seriously in February, when a team of Serbian student leaders who had spearheaded the insurgency against Milosevic arrived in Minsk to advise a young man called Aleksei Shidlovsky and three of his friends on how to adapt the Belgrade blueprint to Belarus. At the same time US state department experts on Serbia and Belarus met to compare notes and draft a strategy.

As a result Mr Shidlovsky, 23, set up the Zubr (Bison) student movement of guerrilla pranksters, armed with US-funded websites, T-shirts, stickers and satire.

In the following months the Americans organised meetings of Belarussian and Serbian student leaders in Lithuania, Poland and Slovakia.

"Otpor [the Serb student organisation] was the model for us," Mr Shidlovsky said. "We have relations with the western embassies. We tell them what we're doing and planning."

Around the same time Mr Kozak embarked on a two-pronged strategy of negotiating with the regime while building up the opposition, to try to create "a template for a democratic process".

The US offered Mr Lukashenko the normalisation of relations, military cooperation, aid money and recognition in return for his establishing laws and procedures to ensure a fair election.

In addition, FBI and Russian detectives were to be admitted to Belarus to investigate allegations of regime death squads abducting and assassinating political opponents.

Heads banged

In the talks on these issues Mr Lukashenko strung everyone along. "He okayed the procedures, but never the substance. Ultimately all our initiatives were rejected," a senior west European official said.

So Mr Kozak concentrated on finding a credible challenger in an opposition crippled by infighting and rival ambitions.

In 1988 Mr Kozak was a special White House envoy in Panama intimately engaged in the planning to get rid of General Manuel Noriega. In 1990 he was instrumental in getting the fragmented anti-Sandinista opposition in Nicaragua to unite behind a single election candidate.

Last year it was American pollsters who found that President Vojislav Kostunica was the sole opposition figure in Serbia who could beat Mr Milosevic in an election, and US diplomats who then persuaded rival figures such as Zoran Djindjic, the Serbian prime minister, to bury their ambitions temporarily.

Mr Kozak, supported by the influential figure of Hans-Georg Wieck, the ambassador in Minsk for the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, applied the same tactics in Belarus.

The US International Republican Institute was asked to do new polls and analyse other opinion data in Belarus. The US analysts found there was no obvious figure to challenge Mr Lukashenko.

The Americans then switched funding away from Semyon Domash, an opposition leader they had previously supported, a western source said.

"His funding was cut and the money tied to support for a real coalition. Kozak has to be credited with making these changes."

By law American aid money may not go to foreign political parties. But Vladimir Goncharik, who was Mr Lukashenko main challenger on Sunday, does not head a political party. About $50m (£35m) in US aid has gone to various Belarus opposition organisations in the past two years.

Two days before the fragmented opposition agreed to unite behind Mr Goncharik, its five main leaders were called to the US embassy to have their heads knocked together. "It took a long time to settle on Goncharik," Mr Shidlovsky said. "There were big rows."

Western officials say that the meeting was the key moment in launching the Goncharik bid, and that he was chosen as a safer, "less radical", option, in the hope that part of Mr Lukashenko constituency would vote for him.

Propaganda war

The same calculation coloured the earlier choice of Mr Kostunica to challenge for the presidency in Belgrade, since many Milosevic supporters were comfortable voting for a Serbian nationalist of pronounced anti-western views.

Another part of the Minsk strategy was to use opinion polls to shape voters' perceptions. West European diplomats in Minsk say the Americans paid anti-Lukashenko pollsters to doctor their survey data to create a sense of momentum behind Mr Goncharik.

One seasoned observer said that when he noticed abrupt increases in the polled support for the challenger he knew the polls were unreliable.

The propaganda war also entailed the student guerrillas plastering Minsk with pithy slogans and stickers showing a lunatic Lukashenko under two words which translate as "It's time to get rid of him" - a straight copy of the successful student operation that covered Belgrade in posters of Mr Milosevic under the slogan "He's Finished."

But in Belarus, the secret police removed the stickers instantly.

The month before the Belarus poll also brought a steady drip of revelations about Mr Lukashenko alleged death squad from disaffected regime insiders and KGB agents. The two investigators for the prosecutor's office who made the death squad allegations in June were given political asylum in the US.

The US campaign has failed in the short-term, but could produce a delayed reaction, as happened with Mr Milosevic, and Alberto Fujimori in Peru.

"In my experience I can't think of anyone so obviously stealing an election and lasting by more than a year or two," a western diplomat said.

Mr Lukashenko admitted as much by saying a day after his claimed victory that the revolution against him had collapsed. "Or at least been postponed."

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]