Freedom's front line

Europe must give immediate and total support to Ukraine's velvet revolutionaries

Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday November 25, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/ukraine/story/0,15569,1359099,00.html

Can Europe's velvet revolution claim another prize? When Ukrainian demonstrators on the frozen streets of Kiev place flowers in the perforated metal shields of their country's riot police, they are sending us two desperate yet dignified messages: "We want to join Europe" and "We want to do this in a European way". Peacefully, that is, supplanting the old Jacobin-Bolshevik model of violent regime change with Europe's new model of velvet revolution - as in Prague and Berlin in 1989, as in Serbia's toppling of Milosevic, as in Georgia, where exactly one year ago the people's president marched into parliament bearing a long-stemmed rose. If we, comfortably ensconced in the institutionalised Europe to which these peaceful demonstrators look with hope and yearning, do not immediately support them with every appropriate means at our disposal, we will betray the very ideals we claim to represent.

Tomorrow may already be too late. I'm typing these words on Wednesday afternoon. Who knows what will have happened in Ukraine by the time you read them? As I write, both sides are still just about respecting the first commandment in Europe's new catechism: no violence. But for how much longer? During the presidential election campaign, leather-jacketed thugs beat up supporters of the pro-European candidate Viktor Yushchenko. But the young female protester in Kiev can still express her hope for a peaceful solution: "as in Georgia a year ago ... as it should be in a civilised country".

The learning chain of Europe's velvet revolutions is fascinatingly direct. One of the most active groups in Ukraine's democratic opposition is called Pora. Pora means "It's time", which is exactly what the crowds chanted on Wenceslas Square in Prague in November 1989. The student activists of Pora received personal tutorials in non-violent resistance from Serbian students of the Otpor ("resistance") group who were in the vanguard of toppling Milosevic. Those same Serbs also helped the Georgian vanguard movement Kmara ("enough is enough"). On Tuesday, a Georgian flag was seen waving on Independence Square in Kiev. In Tbilisi, the rose-revolutionary Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili interrupted his first anniversary address to speak a few words of encouragement, in Ukrainian, to his "sisters and brothers" in Kiev. Now the Ukrainian opposition has asked Lech Walesa, once the leader of Solidarity, that Polish mother of all east European peaceful revolutions, to come to Kiev and mediate.

The tricks on the other side are familiar too. Most important of all is the grotesque abuse of state television to favour the pro-Russian candidate, Viktor Yanukovich. (State television stations are today's Bastilles.) Then heavy-handed interventions from Moscow, including two visits by the Russian president and former KGB-officer Vladimir Putin. Intimidation. Censorship. Lies. Dirty tricks, including a novel variant in which Yanukovich supporters were apparently given multiple voter registration cards so they could "vote early and vote often" in several different constituencies. The Ukrainian opposition refers to them ironically as "free voters". Miners from the Donbass region are reportedly being bussed in to sort out these pansy urban liberals. (Something very similar happened to keep Ceausescu's successors in power in Romania.) Then there are the incredible turnout figures, as in east European dictatorships of old, including one marvellous return of more than 100%.

Who says Europe is boring? Yet until Tuesday, many west Europeans probably did not even know that there was a presidential election going on in Ukraine. We were all focused on that other crucial presidential election, in the US. And, shamingly, Americans probably have done more to support the democratic opposition in Ukraine, and to shine a spotlight on electoral malpractices, than west Europeans have. Poles, Czechs and Slovaks have been more actively engaged, understanding how much is at stake.

What's at stake is not just the future of Ukraine: whether it turns to Europe, the west and liberal democracy, or back to authoritarianism and Putin's Russia. It's also the future of Russia itself, and therewith of the whole of Eurasia. A Russia that wins back Ukraine, as well as Belarus, will again be an imperial Russia, as Putin wishes. A Russia that sees even Ukraine moving towards Europe and the west, has a chance of itself becoming, with time, a more normal, liberal, democratic nation-state. But at the moment, under Putin, Russia is launched on a different, worse trajectory, and western leaders have been united in their pusillanimity towards it. We have all been appeasers there.

Of course, there's a global power play involved, too. Georgia, under its new government, has become a closer partner of the United States. Ukraine under Yushchenko might do the same. But above all, it will be turned towards Europe. These days, the most fervent pro-Europeans are to be found at the edges of Europe, and none more so than westward-looking Ukrainians. It's the European Union they hope one day to join, not the United States of America.

In the short term, there's a limit to what we can do. For once, the leadership of the EU has spoken out as plainly as Washington. "We don't accept these [election] results," said the Dutch foreign minister, Bernard Bot, speaking for the current presidency of the EU. "We think they are fraudulent." Well said, Mr Bot. And Javier Solana, the nearest thing the EU has to a collective foreign minister, has warned that Ukraine's relationship with the EU will depend on its relationship to democracy. Yet clearly, the immediate crisis has to be resolved internally, between the Ukrainians themselves.

It should, however, be our unambiguous position that peaceful civil disobedience is a legitimate, even a necessary response to electoral fraud. And that the use of military or police force to deny people the right to peaceful protest is something we do not accept in 21st-century Europe. Actually, it's in places like Kiev, rather than in Brussels, that you see what a great story Europe has to tell, if only we knew how to tell it. It's the story of a rolling enlargement of freedom, from a position 60 years ago when there was just a handful of perilously free countries in Europe, and virtually the whole continent was at war, to a position today where there are only two or three seriously unfree countries in Europe, and almost the whole continent is at peace. Today, the front line of that forward march is in Ukraine.

Orwell writes somewhere that "from inside, everything looks worse". Whatever its faults seen from inside, and they are many, seen from outside the European Union is a great magnet and promoter of freedom. Most of our neighbours want to join it in order to become more free (as well as richer), and so as to secure the freedoms many of them have fought for in velvet revolutions.

In the longer term, to say, as I believe we should, that a democratic Ukraine has its proper place in the EU, is the best support we could give Ukrainian democrats. Immediately, though, we need the hardest, sharpest warning that Europe, the US and any other democracy that has influence in Kiev or Moscow can deliver. A group of students in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv send us this appeal via the BBC website: "We just hope Yanukovich decides not to turn the guns on us ... Don't let them kill our will."