aaus-list @ ukrainianstudies.org -- [aaus-list] right-wing republicans and Party of Regions

["stephen velychenko" <velychen@chass.utoronto.ca>]

<http://pravda.com.ua/news/2007/3/19/55966.htm>
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17.                       IMPORTING EMBARRASSMENT

LETTER-TO-THE-EDITOR: By Weldon T. Johnson
Action Ukraine Report (AUR) #816, Article 17
Washington, D.C., Thursday, February 15, 2007

American ex-pats living in Ukraine learn to use their creative imagination
when Ukrainians ask embarrassing questions.

Which is what happened again a few weeks ago after Kyiv's popular weekly
magazine "What's On" published its annual Vlada Awards and designated
Ukraine's "Import of the Year - Victor Yanukovich's American Spin
Doctors."

The magazine cynically saluted the "team of American advisers" role in
perpetrating a "transformation nothing short of miraculous." "Why do
Amerikans support the wrong guy? I was asked.

I'd been asked this before during the past year, and I'm never sure whether
to answer this by reciting that American quip "politics is show business for
ugly people" or explain American style political campaigns in terms of
Applied Potemkin Theory.

Ukrainians have had lots of experience with electing wrong guys (and
therefore sympathize with recent American experience in this area), but this
inconvenient fact of American involvement with promoting the wrong guy
from Donetsk over the Orange Messiah is increasingly difficult to hide.  Or
dismiss.

It's not CIA, I said - they do revolutions, as you know.  And it's not
USAID, although one can never be certain where its money goes.  And it's not
the rest of the American government, which is now busy with other rogues.

It is just some free-lancing American beeznezmeny from those Washington
political consulting firms that make lots of money by telling politicians
what clothes to wear and how to paint their hair and when to smile broadly.
And in this case, speak Ukrainian.

"But why are all these guys Republicans?" I was asked.  And knowing
something about the Republican politics of Ukrainian-Americans, another
well informed Ukrainian asked, "The diaspora in Amerika did this?"

Ukrainians haven't yet had much experience with political systems organized
around multiple political parties (blocs), and they still think that
political parties are actually grounded in certain philosophical principles.

>From this perspective, it certainly appears that Yanukovich got (and still
gets) disproportionate Republican support from the United States because
Paul Manafort of Davis Manafort & Freedman is not the only GOP influence
assisting the Yanukovich machine.  Another is Robert Dahl, former advisor to
Newt Gingrich when he was Speaker of the House.  And there's more, too.

During Yanukovich's visit to Washington last December, it was reported here
in Kyiv that prominent Republicans in Washington (including Gingrich) sought
unsuccessfully to make the Ukrainian PM's visit more visible by pressing the
White House for face time with President Bush; those efforts failed and
Yanukovich had to settle for Cheney and Rice without the coveted photo-ops.

Two days after Yanukovich left for Washington, Yanukovich's 25-year old MP
son and ten others (four Regions MPs, aides and girlfriends and Ukrainian
businessmen) were transported to Washington and back to Kyiv on a non-stop
private jet reportedly chartered for $200,000 by MIC Industries, an American
supplier of military hardware where former GOP senator from Maine William
Cohen is chairman of the board and Republican Richard Armitage a board
member.

Cohen, former Secretary of Defense in the Clinton administration, is now
president of The Cohen Group, an international business consulting firm with
interests in the region.

In Washington, Ukraine's four visiting Regions MPs met with "senators and
high-ranked officials from the former Republican majority," including Cohen,
while the three Ukrainian businessmen visited an American company near
Washington to learn "how to build houses and facilities for animals within a
short time."

The premier's son refused to tell reporters who he met with, but said he
left Washington for New York "to have a walk in the park away from other
delegates."

After investigating this group's curious and expensive visit to America,
Ukrayinska Pravda wondered, "Is a charter airplane for PM Yanukovych's
son a typical American hospitality?"

Days following Yanukovich's December visit to the States, former Enron
lobbyist and Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie, now
another political consultant for hire, flew to Kyiv where he was accorded a
VIP welcome by the Yanukovych government and rushed through Borispol
Airport's special passport and customs processing ordinarily reserved for
visiting state diplomats.

Near the end of December, Germany's Der Spiegel magazine reported that
another Republican political consultant, Phillip Griffin, remains in Kyiv to
this day, maintaining a "deliberately low-key presence in a ground-floor
office at 4 Sophievska Street" where there is "no sign on the door, no
doorbell and no security guard."

Like Manafort, Griffin continues as a "behind the scenes operator who makes
but never appears in headlines."  Previously, Griffin was director of the
Moscow office of the International Republican Institute.

It's hard to avoid connecting the dots, and coincidence isn't very
persuasive as an explanation for the apparently aggressive involvement of
American Republicans with the current Ukrainian government.  Some
Ukrainian cynics see an explanation in shared values -- about greed and
crony capitalism, arrogance of power and pervasive secrecy.

More generally, Ukrainians see a huge difference from the prior American
administration when President Clinton visited Kyiv three times, when the
Gore-Kuchma Commission met regularly to discuss substantive matters of
mutual interest, and when Ambassador to Ukraine William G. Miller and
former U. S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and U.S.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright took special interest in Ukraine's
democratic future by, among many other things, actively supporting the
rebirth of politically independent and bribery-free Ukrainian universities -
the real revolution that had to start somewhere.

But that was before exporting democracy became merely fashionable
rhetoric to justify America's dubious adventures.            -30-
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: Weldon T. Johnson, Kyiv, is an American sociologist who
has conducted market research in Ukraine since 1993. Contact:
weldont.johnson@gmail.com.

-- 
Stephen Velychenko
CERES Associate;
Research Fellow,Chair of Ukrainian Studies;
Munk Center
University of Toronto
Devonshire Place
Toronto M5S 3K7