The price of People Power
The Ukraine street protests have followed a pattern of western orchestration
set in the 80s. I know - I was a cold war bagman
Mark Almond
Tuesday December 7, 2004
The Guardian
People Power is on track to score another triumph for western values in
Ukraine. Over the last 15 years, the old Soviet bloc has witnessed recurrent
fairy tale political upheavals. These modern morality tales always begin
with a happy ending. But what happens to the people once People Power has
won?
The upheaval in Ukraine is presented as a battle between the people and
Soviet-era power structures. The role of western cold war-era agencies is
taboo. Poke your nose into the funding of the lavish carnival in Kiev, and
the shrieks of rage show that you have touched a neuralgic point of the New
World Order.
All politics costs money, and the crowd scenes broadcast daily from Kiev
cost big bucks. Market economics may have triumphed, but if Milton Friedman
were to remind the recipients of free food and drink in Independence Square
that "there is no such thing as a free lunch", he would doubtless be branded
a Stalinist. Few seem to ask what the people paying for People Power want in
return for sponsoring all those rock concerts.
As an old cold war swagman, who carried tens of thousands of dollars to
Soviet-bloc dissidents alongside much better respected academics, perhaps I
can cast some light on what a Romanian friend called "our clandestine
period". Too many higher up the food chain of People Power seem reticent
about making full disclosure.
Nowadays, we can google the names of foundations such as America's National
Endowment for Democracy (NED) and a myriad surrogates funding Ukraine's Pora
movement or "independent" media. But unless you know the NED's James Woolsey
was also head of the CIA 10 years ago, are you any wiser?
Throughout the 1980s, in the build-up to 1989's velvet revolutions, a small
army of volunteers - and, let's be frank, spies - co-operated to promote
what became People Power. A network of interlocking foundations and
charities mushroomed to organise the logistics of transferring millions of
dollars to dissidents. The money came overwhelmingly from Nato states and
covert allies such as "neutral" Sweden.
It is true that not every penny received by dissidents came from taxpayers.
The US billionaire, George Soros, set up the Open Society Foundation. How
much it gave is difficult to verify, because Mr Soros promotes openness for
others, not himself.
Engels remarked that he saw no contradiction between making a million on the
stock market in the morning and spending it on the revolution in the
afternoon. Our modern market revolutionaries are now inverting that process.
People beholden to them come to office with the power to privatise.
The hangover from People Power is shock therapy. Each successive crowd is
sold a multimedia vision of Euro-Atlantic prosperity by western-funded
"independent" media to get them on the streets. No one dwells on the mass
unemployment, rampant insider dealing, growth of organised crime,
prostitution and soaring death rates in successful People Power states.
In 1989, our security services honed an ideal model as a mechanism for
changing regimes, often using genuine volunteers. Dislike of the way
communist states constrained ordinary people's lives led me into undercover
work, but witnessing mass pauperisation and cynical opportunism in the 1990s
bred my disillusionment.
Of course, I should have recognised the symptoms of corruption earlier. Back
in the 1980s, our media portrayed Prague dissidents as selfless academics
who were reduced to poverty for their principles, when they were in fact
receiving $600-monthly stipends. Now they sit in the front row of the new
Euro-Atlantic ruling class. The dowdy do-gooder who seemed so devoted to
making sure that every penny of her "charity" money got to a needy recipient
is now a facilitator for investors in our old stamping grounds. The end of
history was the birth of consultancy.
Grown cynical, the dissident types who embezzled the cash to fund, say, a
hotel in the Buda hills did less harm than those that launched
politico-media careers. In Poland, the ex-dissident Adam Michnik's Agora
media empire - worth ?400m today - grew out of the underground publishing
world of Solidarity, funded by the CIA in the 1980s. His newspapers now back
the war in Iraq, despite its huge unpopularity among Poles.
Meanwhile, from the shipyard workers who founded Solidarity in 1980 to the
Kolubara miners of Serbia, who proclaimed their town "the Gdansk of Serbia"
in October 2000, millions now have plenty of time on their hands to read
about their role in history.
People Power is, it turns out, more about closing things than creating an
open society. It shuts factories but, worse still, minds. Its advocates
demand a free market in everything - except opinion. The current ideology of
New World Order ideologues, many of whom are renegade communists, is
Market-Leninism - that combination of a dogmatic economic model with
Machiavellian methods to grasp the levers of power.
Today's only superpower uses its old cold war weapons, not against
totalitarian regimes, but against governments that Washington has tired of.
Tiresome allies such as Shevardnadze in Georgia did everything the US
wanted, but forgot the Soviet satirist Ilf's wisdom: "It doesn't matter
whether you love the Party. It matters whether the Party loves you."
Georgia is of course a link in the chain of pipelines bringing central Asian
oil and gas to Nato territory via Ukraine, of all places. Such countries'
rulers should beware. Fifty years ago, Zbigniew Brzezinski argued that the
"politics of the permanent purge" typified Soviet communism. Yet now he is
always on hand to demand People Power topple yesterday's favourite in favour
of a new "reformer".
"People Power" was coined in 1986, when Washington decided Ferdinand Marcos
had to go. But it was events in Iran in 1953 that set the template. Then,
Anglo-American money stirred up anti-Mossadeq crowds to demand the
restoration of the Shah. The New York Times's correspondent trumpeted the
victory of the people over communism, even though he had given $50,000 and
the CIA-drafted text of the anti-Mossadeq declaration to the coup leaders
himself.
Is today's official version of People Power similarly economical with the
truth?
· Mark Almond is lecturer in modern history at Oriel College, Oxford
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Mark Almond is also the "other half" of the British Helsinki Human Rights
Group.