Phwoar!
Article published: Saturday, January 3rd 2009
Ukrainian politics is all man. The poster on the left, being displayed just before Christmas just off Nezalezhnosti Square in Kiev, reads ‘Farewell to weapons, Farewell NATO’. By contrast the leaflet on the right, advertising ‘No to NATO’ protests in Strasbourg, was being handed out last month by UK Stop the War activists in Manchester. It seems clear that Ukrainian opponents of NATO would be unimpressed by the namby peacenik-ing to be found in Western European anti-NATO movements. If NATO expansion is to be stopped, the Kiev poster seems to say, it’ll be done by thrusting men with their own tanks.
The poster is emblematic of the way in which ostensibly progressive political positions get twisted through the factional lens of Ukrainian politics. The camo-jacketed heart-throb sweeping NATO’s tanks from the map of Europe is Valery Konovaluk. A deputy in Ukraine’s parliament, Konovaluk is a leading opponent of President Viktor Yuschenko, and of his support for NATO membership. He was formerly a member of Viktor Yanukovych’s pro-Russian ‘Party of the Regions’ (tellingly, the party’s website is available in Russian and English, but not Ukrainian); abruptly left the party in 2005, and was immediately elected leader of the ‘Labour Ukraine’ party instead (which has since re-merged with the ‘Party of the Regions’).
But Konovaluk is no socialist, and certainly no peacenik. Instead, he’s at best a strident Ukrainian nationalist, at worst a (perhaps unwitting) conduit for Russian influence in Ukraine. He’s certainly a darling of Russia’s state-owned version of BBC World, Russia Today, on which he regularly pops up to denounce Yuschenko as a creeping authoritarian, seeking to steal Ukrainian democracy (a viewpoint also pushed by RT’s own ‘impartial’ anchors). Konovaluk was also formerly spokesman for Yanukovych, famously swept from power in the December 2004 ‘Orange Revolution’ when mass demonstrations in Nezalezhnosti Square and elsewhere forced his disputed election victory to be overturned in favour of pro-EU and NATO-friendly Viktor Yuschenko.
The Orange Revolution marked the end of the ‘Kuchma era’ in Ukraine during which its opponents claim that President Leonid Kuchma and his associates, supported by Moscow, bribed and connived their way through a decade of rule. But far from fading from view, Yanukovych, Kuchma’s chosen successor, and his colleagues like Konovaluk, have thrived. Yanukovych returned to the Prime Ministership in August 2006 – an extraordinary come-back into Yuschenko’s government for a politician not only accused by OSCE election observers of censoring media, disrupting polls and abusing state resources to steal the 2004 election, but also widely accused of being connected to Yuschenko’s alleged poisoning, which Yuschenko claims is responsible for the facial scarring requiring him to wear thick make-up whenever he appears in public.
The Airfix arms to which Konovaluk is bidding farewell may not just be NATO warships and missile shields. Konovaluk is currently chairing a parliamentary inquiry into allegations that Yuschenko illegally authorised arms sales to Georgia in the run-up to the war there last August. (Ironically, dodgy arms sales have a popular resonance in Ukraine because Kuchma’s regime foundered partly on allegations of illegal arms sales to Iraq and elsewhere). Illegal Georgian arms sales ought to be a difficult case to make: certainly arms sales took place, but even Yuschenko’s arch-rival Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko admits that as president, Yuschenko has the legal authority to authorise arms export permits; and it hardly seems likely that arms sales to Georgia during 2007 would have been openly reported by Ukraine’s government to the United Nations if they had been undertaken illegally. At the root of the controversy, of course, is not so much Ukrainian arms export laws, but Caucasus geopolitics. As Russian tanks rolled into South Ossetia, the Russian government vocally criticised several countries – including Ukraine – for supporting what they insist was unprovoked Georgian aggression by supplying arms to Georgia. The Ukrainian inquiry is not yet over, but Konovaluk has nonetheless already told Russian media that revenues from Georgian arms sales were diverted from state funds, and that Ukrainian mercenaries also took part in fighting in Georgia.
In short, Konovaluk’s ‘No to NATO’ poster campaign, as its aesthetic would suggest, has a profoundly authoritarian and conservative context: a Ukrainian ‘national idea’ backed up by Russian desires to maintain its sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union and the Caucasus.
In comparing it to the leaflet I picked up in Manchester, I’m not suggesting a Nick Cohen-esque conspiracy of the progressive European left to support Russian imperialism. Admittedly the UK Stop the War Coalition have picked some unsavoury allies: last August during the Georgia war they hosted a panel to discuss NATO’s role in the Georgia conflict which included Mark Almond – an Oxford-based pundit with a mission to defend Eastern European sovereignty against Western meddling. Amongst other things, this has included defending Belarussian dictator Alexandr Lukashenko’s landslide 2006 election ‘victory’ on the grounds that Lukashenko had “protect[ed] Belarus from the ravages of free-market fundamentalists…deliver[ed] economic growth and prosperity for the mass of Belarussians… [and] sown the seeds of a pluralistic society”. (Almond failed to mention the “routine” harrassment, detention and arrest of opposition campaigners observed by OSCE election observers, and the lengthy prison sentences handed out to opposition campaigners – including one 2006 rival presidential candidate, sentenced to five-and-a-half years imprisonment for ‘hooliganism’). Elsewhere Almond’s ‘British Helsinki Human Rights Group’ has denied the systematic persecution of Roma in the Czech Republic, insisting that the country is “a model of inter-ethnic harmony†and condemning the exodus of Czech Roma to Britain and Canada. Almond’s BHHRG colleague John Laughland, another favourite pundit of Russia Today on Georgia and Ukraine affairs, is ‘European Director’ of the anti-EU European Foundation, whose patron is, er, Margaret Thatcher.
But those in Western Europe opposing resurgent US and NATO military faction-building are a far more diverse group than StW. The progressive left as a whole has long Cold War experience of picking their way between opposing empires seeking to harness their moral legitimacy. And if we’re picking sides, just as in the Cold War, neither side appears to have acted with particular restraint in the Caucasus: UN monitors reported that as well as Russian testicle-touching on the Georgian border, the Saakashvili government in Georgia – perhaps the USA’s fondest friend in the Caucasus – was also breaching the region’s Separation of Forces agreement with overflights of Abkhazia as early as April.
It’s nonetheless worth remembering how in 1999 the lines between humanitarian opposition to NATO’s bombing of Kosovo, and the Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic, became uncomfortably blurred in some small but embarrassingly prominent places. If European peace movements are hoping for a new resurgence through opposing NATO faction-building in the former Soviet Union, they’ll need to take more care in alliance-building.
The converse, of course, is also true. Russia’s opponents are equally open to misinterpretation. Ukraine’s Orange Revolution was feted both by the Bush administration and by European liberals as the long-awaited flowering of grass-roots democratic movements across post-Soviet autocracies. But a middle-aged Ukrainian man I met who had protested in Nezalezhnosti Square in December 2004 explained it to me somewhat differently. He didn’t much care for electoral democracy – the stupidity of the electorate or of politicians were equal liabilities in his eyes. Kuchma and his cronies, he said, fell because they failed to understand history. More precisely, because they failed to understand tenth-century history, when the Grand Princes of Kiev founded the Russian state. The Ukrainian nation, he said, was older than Russia, and upstart empire-builders from Moscow – Tzarist, Stalinist or Putinist – forgot it at their peril.
There’s nothing intrinsically progressive about colonial nationalisms, and European solidarity movements – post-war, Cold War or post-Iraq – forget it at their peril.
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