Monitors pour in to Ukraine for election rerun

By Jan Cienski in Kiev
Published: December 20 2004 18:03 Last updated: December 20 2004 18:03

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/c104ac96-52b0-11d9-8845-00000e2511c8.html

Ukraine's December 26 rerun of its presidential election promises to be one of the most closely monitored votes ever, with 8,295 election observers already registered to make sure that the fraud that accompanied the November 21 vote is not repeated.

The observers come from across the world, some from as far away as Australia, but many more from Europe, particularly Poland, Ukraine's western neighbour.

About 5,000 monitors were on hand for the November 21 vote, and most concluded that the election was severely flawed. Their judgment helped lend weight to complaints from Viktor Yushchenko, the opposition leader, that he had been cheated out of victory by government intervention and fraud on behalf of Viktor Yanukovich, the prime minister.

The preliminary results of that vote, later invalidated by the Ukrainian supreme court, gave Mr Yanukovich 49.46 per cent to 46.61 per cent for Mr Yushchenko.

The orange revolution that then gripped Kiev persuaded Ukrainian authorities to restage the election and also revamped voting rules to make fraud more difficult.

On December 26 there will be many fewer absentee ballots and travelling ballot boxes. Observers have also been given more authority to ensure they have access to polling stations. The most influential missions for monitoring the vote will be led by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe and by the Council of Europe.

OSCE was supplying more than 1,000 observers, which made it the organisation's largest undertaking, said spokeswoman Urdur Gunnarsdottir. The observers will fan out in teams of two across the country. A preliminary report is expected the day after the election.

Another large mission is the more than 1,000 monitors from the European Network of Election Monitoring Organisation, an umbrella group for non-governmental organisations from 16 countries in central Europe and the former Soviet Union.

Canada, which has a large Ukrainian minority, is sending a mission headed by John Turner, a former prime minister. About 100 observers are attached to the OSCE mission with another 400 official delegates.

A further 500 or so are expected from Ukrainian ?migr? groups. Perhaps the largest delegation will come from Poland. Ukraine and Poland have a difficult and sometimes bloody past and many older Poles are still resentful over the post-war shift in borders that gave Ukraine a large slice of territory that had belonged to prewar Poland.

But the wave of people power that has swept Ukraine has found an echo in Poland, where orange is almost as popular as in Ukraine. Thousands of people protested in front of the Ukrainian embassy in Warsaw in early December and Aleksander Kwasniewski, Poland's president, helped to defuse the conflict after the November 21 vote.

"This could create a revolution in relations between our two countries," said Adam Lipinski, deputy head of Poland's Law and Justice centre-right opposition party, which is sending at least 1,000 observers.

Polish non-governmental organisations are sending about 500 more observers. For Poles, the Ukrainian protests bring to mind their own uprising against communism during the Solidarity movement in 1980.

There is an added impetus to help Ukraine break free of Russian influence, a longstanding goal of Polish foreign policy.