Ukraina i inne historie

[Gość: warakomski donald]

Going bananas in the Ukraine - flora and fruit revolutions of former USSR
By Ajay Goyal

Not so long ago, a reporter from Kommersant newspaper of Moscow made a
suggestion to Mikhail Sakashvili after he had taken power through street
demonstrations in Tbilisi. This could be a Rose revolution, the reporter said.
Sakashvili liked the tag. And without any credit to the Russian source, the
Rose revolution has become the brand-name for last year's change of power in
Georgia.

Eduard Shevardnadze, then President of Georgia, the Soviet despot turned
perestroika reformer, turned local despot again, had been on friendly terms
with the Americans, and on unfriendly terms with Moscow. In theory, the
Russians could have seeded a revolution against him, but the Kremlin is more
afraid of grass-roots democracy than it is of Chechen terrorists, and
therefore couldn't predict what it could unleash against itself. The Americans
on the other hand, who are largely credited with funding Sakashvili's Rose
revolution, rely neither on the despots nor the home-grown democrats. They
trust only those who are on the take from them; the more they take, the more
they are trusted to stay in Washington's pay. In these American financings,
there are no stock options for the local stakeholders. These new democracies
are run as corporate colonies, with heavy repayments due quickly.

After direct warfare in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Afghanistan and Lebanon replaced
covert putsch-making for the Americans between 1960 and 1990, the Americans
have returned to their old techniques with a success in Serbia three years
ago. That was when the CIA's rent-a-crowds refused to budge from the capital
Belgrade until the target, President Slobodan Milosevic, was ousted. Compared
to the pot-and-pan banging of the Santiago crowd rented to topple Chilean
President Salvador Allende thirty years before, the Serbian rockers and car
drivers who honked their rulers out of office, were relatively high decibel.
And not too many people in the Kremlin at the time were sorry to see Milosevic
go to prison. Most understood that the Americans had bought themselves a fresh
problem. The Serbs are not as good at taking American orders as Georgians. For
a start, they are not nearly so poor, and so the American cost of buying their
loyalty is several magnitudes greater. The Georgian revolution could be
produced out of fully imported rosewood from the nurseries of McLean,
Virginia. But in Serbia the imports have failed to take root, and are dying off.

Now comes the orange revolution of Ukraine. There is plentiful evidence that
through democracy, union, media and other fronts

cd

[Gość: wd]

Five years have gone by since a new revolution started in Russia to rectify that
wrong. Russians have understood that it is time to stop the grand larceny, and
return some of the national wealth. Perhaps Putin thought he could sell the same
idea to Kiev. He should be more worried about an apple, papaya or mango
revolution in Moscow, instead. The revolutions of the west that are on Russian
door step today will be in Moscow tomorrow. What he should have recognized,
before he started, was that there was no one he could trust, no one the
Ukrainians could trust, to convey the message to Ukrainian voters. Putin has
struggled for five years now to rid his own government of the Russian clansters
on retainer to the oligarchs. He isn't half-finished in that job. He should be
watching out lest he slips on banana peels left over and rotting from the last
decade within Kremlin and the Russian white house. Or perhaps for the
possibility that some place west of Moscow, some exotic fruit cocktail is being
mixed for Russia, 2008.

It looks inevitable now that the Ukraine should go through its own banana
revolution first. The Yuschenko-Timoshenko combine are no different from
Russia's fruit reformers. They will try to sell what they can of the Ukraine's
wealth to western corporations so that the west Ukrainian people can have the
orange juice they think right now they badly want. Whether Ukraine ends up in a
banana split, between east and west in the process, is a different matter. And
Russia has both the time, gas and the electricity, to wait.

If Putin is genuinely committed to democratizing Russia and its resource wealth,
and liberate it from the oligarchs trying to sell it to the west, he should be
biding his time. Exotic imported flowers and fruits don't last long in the harsh
climate of the Ukraine. The Kremlin backed rotten tomatoes and poison mushrooms
when it should have been pickling cucumbers, aiming for elections in the
Ukraine, four years from now. Cold necessity will market the cucumber more
effectively, when the imported orange and banana will have lost their taste.