By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo

 

FOUND an article entitled, “US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev” written by Ian Traynor of the Guardian dated Fri 26 Nov 2004. It summarizes thus:

“But while the gains of the orange-bedecked “chestnut revolution” are Ukraine’s, the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavoury regimes. 

Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box.”

Within the same year, after the success in Belgrade, a US operative who implemented similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organized a similar campaign in Belarus but failed. The collective experiences gained in Serbia, Georgia and Belarus has been invaluable in the successful installation of Zelenskyy, former actor and comedian, the sixth and current president of Ukraine. “The operation – engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience – is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people’s elections…. Officially, the US government spent $41m (£21.7m) organising and funding the year-long operation to get rid of Milosevic from October 1999. In Ukraine, the figure is said to be around $14m.”

There are so many interesting details in this article, I suggest you read it. The strategies in Ukraine seem to have similarities with the experiences of the 1986 People Power Revolution, also known as the EDSA Revolution in the Philippines. Both anchored on civil disobedience against “a regime of violence and electoral fraud” and employed creative slogans, songs and prayers. It is different in the sense that it was a bloodless revolution. As to how not one drop of blood was spilt in this particular revolution, please refer to Al Mendoza’s article entitled, “Bongbong’s inconsequential role in Edsa ‘86”.

Installing and uninstalling regimes do not happen very quickly. In Ukraine, a series of protests and political events were conducted from November 2004 to January 2005, dubbed as Orange Revolution, and continued for some time before Zelenskyy was installed in 2019. In 2020, he was persuaded to abandon Ukraine’s non-aligned status, to become a de facto member of NATO.

Bear in mind that in today’s technology, regime change can be facilitated by computer-literate professionals who can be hired to subvert the prevailing system and institutions that control “the mass media, the courts, the security apparatus and the voting stations.” More important, the overthrow of a regime can be managed from outside, as in the case of Serbia, where, given the hostility in Belgrade, “the Americans organised the overthrow from neighbouring Hungary – Budapest and Szeged.”

 

A view to a kill

after a patient wait, a graceful dive,

precise, respectful, in reverence of the life

about to be taken, the solemn execution

of a prayer

 

it wiggles, a furious struggle to flee

in a second, acceptance

weakly, she dances,

she dances on the throat

of the mighty

 

swallowed without ceremony

it glides, into the depths of a tunnel

smoothly, slowly, in bits and pieces

in the deafening silence

of an epitaph

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