Re: new Yugo war?

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>And I, Néstor, with a long historic experience in Argentina on this
>kind of preparations, want to add that an election can also be a kind
>of war.
>
>Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
>gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxx


The New York Times, March 31, 1997, Monday, Late Edition - Final

Political Meddling by Outsiders: Not New for U.S.

By JOHN M. BRODER

Members of both political parties express horror at accusations that the
Chinese may have tried to use covert campaign donations to influence
American policy, but the United States has long meddled in other nations'
internal affairs.

Congress routinely appropriates tens of millions of dollars in covert and
overt money to use in influencing domestic politics abroad.

The National Endowment for Democracy, created 15 years ago to do in the
open what the Central Intelligence Agency has done surreptitiously for
decades, spends $30 million a year to support things like political
parties, labor unions, dissident movements and the news media in dozens of
countries, including China.

The endowment has financed unions in France, Paraguay, the Philippines and
Panama. In the mid-1980's, it provided $5 million to Polish emigres to keep
the Solidarity movement alive. It has underwritten moderate political
parties in Portugal, Costa Rica, Bolivia and Northern Ireland. It provided
a $400,000 grant for political groups in Czechoslovakia that backed the
election of Vaclav Havel as president in 1990. For the Nicaraguan election
of 1990, it provided more than $3 million in "technical" assistance, some
of which was used to bolster Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, the presidential
candidate favored by the United States.

(clip)

===

The Washington Post, September 19, 2000, Tuesday, Final Edition

U.S. Funds Help Milosevic's Foes in Election Fight

John Lancaster , Washington Post Staff Writer

Charges of Chinese influence-buying in the 1996 U.S. presidential campaign
caused a political storm in Washington that has yet to fully abate. By some
measures, however, that episode pales by comparison to American political
interference in Serbia, locus of a $ 77 million U.S. effort to do with
ballots what NATO bombs could not--get rid of Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic.

In the run-up to national elections on Sept. 24, U.S. aid officials and
contractors are working to strengthen Serbia's famously fractured
democratic opposition. They have helped train its organizers, equipped
their offices with computers and fax machines and provided opposition
parties with sophisticated voter surveys compiled by the same New York firm
that conducts polls for President Clinton.

More generally, they have sought to foster what one aid consultant calls
"democracy with a small 'd'," funneling support to student groups, labor
unions, independent media outlets, even Serbian heavy metal bands that
stage street concerts as part of a voter registration drive called "Rock
the Vote."

With Milosevic running well behind in the polls--the latest surveys give
his main opponent, Belgrade lawyer Vojislav Kostunica, a 16-point
lead--administration officials are mulling a variety of possible outcomes,
from capitulation by Milosevic (considered a long shot) to massive
electoral fraud (probably the safest bet). Either way, the election is
shaping up as the most important test for U.S. policy in the Balkans since
the 1998-1999 Kosovo crisis, which led to Milosevic's indictment as a war
criminal and triggered the American-led campaign to drive him from power.

"For the first time over the last year, we've seen the emergence of a real
democratic opposition," said a senior State Department official. "These
elections are a way station on that process."

There is nothing secret or even particularly unusual about the U.S.
democracy-building program in Serbia, which is closely coordinated with
European allies and is similar to previous campaigns in pre-democratic
Chile, South Africa and Eastern Europe, among other places. U.S. officials
say they are careful in such situations to focus their energy on building
broad-based democratic institutions rather than backing individual parties
or candidates, as the Chinese were accused of doing here in 1996.

"There's a specific sensitivity because people assume we pick candidates,"
the State Department official said. "Our efforts don't do that. We just
make sure there's an architecture for a fair election."

But in Serbia, it's a very fine line, in part because the stakes are so high.

U.S. officials dealt with Milosevic as a negotiating partner, albeit
reluctantly, during the mid-1990s. But the Kosovo crisis persuaded them
that peace cannot prevail in the Balkans as long as he remains in power.
They are particularly concerned about his designs on Montenegro, Serbia's
smaller partner in the Yugoslav federation, whose pro-Western president,
Milo Djukanovic, accused Milosevic in an interview earlier this month of
trying to drum up a "pretext for military intervention" in his tiny republic.

Underscoring worries about Serbia and Montenegro, the Pentagon yesterday
began a global shift of forces to bolster the U.S. military presence in the
Balkans. A carrier battle group led by the USS Abraham Lincoln left Thai
waters ahead of schedule and headed toward the Persian Gulf, which will
free up another carrier group, led by the USS George Washington, for
movement to the Adriatic Sea, Defense Department officials said.

Dismissing Serbia's charges of unwarranted interference in its internal
affairs, U.S. officials say they are seeking only to level the playing
field in a country whose authoritarian leader thinks nothing of shutting
down critical media outlets or tossing opponents in jail.

Fostering democracy in such conditions is ticklish. Milosevic routinely
cites American meddling to justify his crackdown on opposition movements
and media. According to a senior U.S. official, Serbian police recently
arrested and tortured an opposition member after intercepting an e-mail
sent to him from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID),
which, along with the Washington-based National Endowment for Democracy
(NED), is one of the major conduits for American aid to the opposition.

Mindful of such risks, the endowment recently stopped posting details of
its Serbian program on its Web site. In a similar vein, a NED official
smiled apologetically as he acknowledged that while information on grant
recipients in Serbia is a matter of public record, he could not release
such data without a formal request under the Freedom of Information Act--a
process that would extend long past Sept. 24.

Because Americans no longer are permitted to work in Serbia, and U.S.
officials are afraid of compromising Serbs who receive their help, aid
recipients typically travel to Hungary and other neighboring countries for
training, strategy sessions and infusions of cash. Some of the American
help also takes the form of humanitarian aid to opposition-led local
governments.

There are signs that the American effort has generated something of a
backlash. Kostunica, the front-runner, makes a point of telling audiences
that he accepts no Western aid. Pro-Milosevic posters show a picture of
another leading opposition figure--former deputy prime minister Vuk
Draskovic--kissing the hand of Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright.

Partly for that reason, some analysts accuse the administration of placing
too much emphasis on opposition parties and the election rather than on
building broad-based movements, such as student organizations, with a
long-term commitment to civil society and democratic rule.

"In the last year, the administration has focused clearly, at long last, on
the notion that Milosevic is part of the problem, not part of the
solution," said a former U.S. diplomat with long experience in the Balkans.
"The question is whether they've done a good job of it. Have they put us on
a path that's going to lead to success? Well, they've put us on a path to
elections . . . that will almost certainly lead to Milosevic's reelection
in unfree and unfair conditions. And where will we be then?"

State Department officials acknowledge, as one put it, that "a democratic
Serbia is more than just an election." But they also suggest that if
Milosevic resorts to massive fraud, it might not be such a bad thing.

"If he steals these elections, he'll be further de-legitimized in the eyes
of the Serbian people and the international community and that makes his
hold on power more tenuous," said James C. O'Brien, special adviser to the
president and secretary of state for democracy in the Balkans.

The pro-democracy campaign did not begin in earnest until the end of last
year's NATO air campaign to drive Serbian forces from Kosovo. It has since
grown rapidly, from an authorized $ 10.7 million last year to $ 25 million
this year; the administration has requested $ 41.5 million for the next
fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, for a total of $ 77.2 million over three years.

The largest share of that money goes toward "civil society" programs, such
as those that support independent media, with no direct connection to
specific parties or elections. Nevertheless, the administration has
associated itself closely with leading Serbian opposition figures such as
Zoran Djindjic, president of the Democratic Party in Serbia, who was part
of a delegation that received a warm reception in Washington last November.

In a similar vein, USAID this year will spend $ 3.8 billion on "political
process" programs, including "technical assistance" to political parties,
get-out-the-vote campaigns and efforts to help opposition parties "develop
an economic reform . . . agenda for use in election campaigns," according
to an agency fact sheet.

Much of the assistance is channeled through nongovernmental organizations
such as the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, a
Washington-based group that among other things has coordinated extensive
public opinion surveys in Serbia by Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates,
Inc., Clinton's polling firm.

Such surveys can benefit opposition candidates seeking to plot campaign
strategy. But Kenneth D. Wollack, the group's president, says the
organization is careful to make all the poll results public so that it
cannot be accused of backing one candidate against another.

"We try not to inject ourselves into a campaign," he said, adding that the
group has, for the same reason, suspended "material assistance" to
political parties in the run-up to the election. "We're not in a campaign
mode," Wollack said. "We look at our work on a much longer-term basis."



Louis Proyect

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