[img caption=”Yushchenko supporters form a march several miles long running through the center of Kiev and down the main thoroughfares of Khreshchatyk and Red Army Street. (11/23/04)” float=”right” width=”240″ height=”360″ render=”<%photoRenderType%>”]8853[/img]Kiev
THE POLITICAL CRISIS in Ukraine has produced crowds that now number over a million people here in the streets of the capital (Kiev’s total population is only 2.6 million) and demonstrations in the thousands by the Ukrainian Diaspora in Canada and Britain. European statesmen such as the former Czech president Vaclav Havel, who once led his own revolution in the street against an authoritarian regime, are calling for the rest of the world to support the democratic opposition. This growing popular movement was sparked by the announcement of the final vote tally from the November 21 presidential run-off election, in which the Ukrainian Central Electoral Commission claimed pro-western opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko had been defeated by Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, who is closely allied with Vladimir Putin’s Russian government and is looking now to assume the presidency of this former Soviet Republic.
The demonstrations are all in support of Yushchenko, who has denounced the results as fraudulent. His well-organized followers–who were expecting the Yanukovich government to attempt rampant ballot box-stuffing chicanery–immediately swung into action. The tent city, barricades, and massive stage that they have set up Kiev’s central Independence Square is now one of the largest public revolts against a government in power since Chinese students occupied Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989.
The accusations of electoral fraud and subsequent street demonstrations have been prompted by three major factors: How far off the mark the reported 49.6 percent to 46.6 percent margin is from the independent exit polls taken in Ukraine; the lopsided turnout numbers reported by electoral authorities in Prime Minister Yanukovich’s hometown power base in Eastern Ukraine, and the thousands of cases of fraud and irregularities recorded by the Yushchenko campaign and foreign observers, who were in Ukraine to monitor the voting. One of the strongest statements has come from Senator Richard Lugar, one of those observers, who said that “there was a concerted and forceful program of election day fraud and abuse enacted with the leadership or cooperation of authorities.”
The statistical evidence of a not-very-clever attempt to steal the election by the Yanukovich government is so difficult to refute that no government official has even tried to do so. To a man they fall back on the tired and true Soviet-style answer that “all the voting was conducted in accordance with law,” but the numbers contradict the everyday laws of electoral behavior.
The most authoritative exit poll in this election was taken by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology (KIIS), which has a stellar track record both for accuracy and credibility. Its accuracy to date has been far superior to exit polling in U.S. elections despite the much higher turnout of Ukrainian electoral contests. Based on its polling KIIS estimated Yushchenko’s victory margin at 54 to 43 percent. The official government tally of 49.6 percent for Yanukovich and 46.6 percent for Yushchenko, almost all polling experts agree, has been cooked to hand the election to Yanukovich.
National turnout in this election was about 79 percent. It would have been reasonable to expect a higher turnout in more politicized areas, such as Yanukovich’s hometown of Donetsk and other eastern Ukrainian cities, and in areas of the country heavily populated by Russian speakers. Yanukovich has been strongly backed not only by Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma, but also by Russian president Vladimir Putin and the political machine inside the Kremlin. He had promised to look after the interests of the Russian-speaking eastern half of the country, which has a number of disagreements with the western, Ukrainian-speaking half.
But even with Putin’s endorsement and Yanukovich’s pandering to Russian elements the turnout was only 78 percent in the Crimea, which is the most pro-Russian region of the country. In stark contrast, the official, government-produced results for the Donetsk region–where Yanukovich still controls the political machinery–were a 96.6 percent turnout. Every third polling station in the Donetsk region reported turnout at above 100 percent. Again, the results are too far above the national average not to have been padded with falsified numbers; no one in the Yanukovich camp has yet explained either the miracle of universal turnout or the even greater miracle of higher than 100 percent voter participation.
In Kiev, which is a Yushchenko stronghold, Yanukovich still pulled in almost 20 percent of the vote. In his Yanukovich’s hometown of Donetsk, Yushcencko pulled only 2.03 percent–again results too much at variance with the other regions of the nation not to have been tampered with.
But the most damning evidence comes from the international observers who monitored the election and “do not have a dog in this fight”–and thus nothing to gain by favoring one side over the other. Bruce George, who headed a delegation from the OSCE that monitored both this runoff election and the first round that took place on October 31 stated bluntly that “with an even heavier heart than three weeks ago, I have to repeat the message from the first round: This election did not meet a considerable number of international standards for democratic elections. The deficiencies have not been addressed. The abuse of state resources in favor of the prime minister continued, as well as an overwhelming media bias in his favor.”
The head of the European Parliament’s observer mission, Marek Siwiec, was less diplomatic. “It is against common sense,” he said in a report that Reuters filed from Brussels. “If you get this figure, that in some districts 99-point-something percent of people came and voted, it reminds me a little bit of the North Korean example, not a European one.” Yushchenko’s campaign, which conducted its own nationwide parallel vote count in anticipation of this sort of fraud, claims to have tallied over 11,000 documented cases of election law violations by the Yanukovich camp.
[img_assist|nid=458|title=|desc=Opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko and his chief opposition partner, Julia Timoshenko, march to the Ukrainian parliament house. (11/23/04)|link=none|align=right|width=432|height=282] WITH EACH PASSING DAY more stories appear in local and national papers about “dead souls” voting, students being handed a stack of absentee ballots and voting five times or more, people having voted absentee and then being bussed to their hometowns to vote for a second time, soldiers and sailors being driven to polling stations and told by their commanding officers to vote for Yanukovich, and so on. The tragedy is that President Kuchma could have prevented this crisis.
Aware of the many abuses with absentee ballots and other trickery that occurred in the first round, the Ukrainian parliament passed a law last week that would have outlawed the opportunity for any candidate to abuse the system in this manner. Kuchma was handed the bill the day before the balloting but refused to sign it. Had he done so, it is doubtful that the country would be on the brink of civil strife as it is now. “Whatever happens as a consequence of this election–as a consequence of the election fraud and the ensuing revolt in the streets–is literally on Kuchma’s hands,” said one western diplomat.
Unfortunately for many Ukrainians it is difficult to know what is really going on and what (or, more important, what not) to believe. Only one TV channel in Ukraine is not under direct or indirect government control, and it has been broadcasting reports on the crisis from the beginning. The other stations at first pretended–Soviet-style–that nothing unusual was happening. As the demonstrations have grown to the point where they cannot be ignored, these other networks have taken to running public affairs programs and talk shows stacked with pro-Yanukovich spokesmen. There is still more reliable information on western news outlets on the Ukrainian situation than in local media.
This may be the biggest reason that the pro-Yushchenko demonstrators refuse to give up and their numbers keep growing despite bitter cold weather and heavy snowfall. The behavior of the government in this election reminds them all too much of how this country was run during the Soviet period–by Moscow, for Moscow, and to the benefit of Moscow–and without a hint of integrity. A growing number of Ukrainians now see the toppling of Yanukovich’s government and Yushchenko’s victory as the only way to make a clean break with this past. It’s hard to say how this will play out. Will the Ukrainian government and Yanukovich’s cadre try the 1989 Chinese Communist solution to their crisis with a company of tanks, or will they be forced to fold their hand like the 1991 coup in Moscow that attempted to depose then Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev?
Reuben F. Johnson is an American writer living in Kiev.
