Yanukovich's friends
Please let me know if you want ON or OFF my Yushchenko vs. Yanukovych/Ukraine election ping list!. . .don't be shy.
Posted on 01/04/2005 10:34:49 AM PST by Lukasz
A human-rights group that defends dictators
DURING the cold war, the leafy streets of north Oxford were a hotbed of anti-communism. Dons had close links to dissident and émigré outfits and spent their holidays enjoying the frisson of semi-clandestine trips behind the Iron Curtain to help subvert the evil empire. Now, at the Oxford-based British Helsinki Human Rights Group (BHHRG), some veterans of that struggle are playing a rather different role: noisily defending a grim lot of east European politicians against the imperialism of western do-gooders.
At first sight it seems baffling. Characters such as Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, Alexander Lukashenka of Belarus, and Viktor Yanukovich, the purported winner of the Ukrainian election, are so vilified in the west that it is hard to imagine they have any fans at all.
Yet that is, in effect, what members of the British Helsinki group are. The group sends observers to eastern Europe, usually to elections, who produce lengthy, annotated first-hand reports, with controversial (critics say bizarre) interpretations of events. They find plenty of evidence to back Russia's foreign-policy grievances, for example. In Ukraine, they found numerous violations by supporters of the western-backed Viktor Yushchenko, but no significant ones by the other side.
John Laughland, one of the three people who run the BHHRG, and a regular contributor to British newspapers and magazines, thinks that the money pumped into pro-western causes in eastern Europe in the name of supporting democracy is a “scandal”. The west's talk of democracy is riddled by double standards, he argues: when pro-western politicians win elections by dodgy methods, nobody cares; when pro-Russian ones use the same tricks, there are howls of protest.
Mr Laughland used to have more colleagues. In the early 1990s, sticking up for patriotic east European leaders against politically correct criticism from naïve human-rights outfits was bold, but not batty. But the group lost almost all its supporters when it threw its weight behind people like Mr Milosevic. Another leading member, Christine Stone, has also written approvingly of Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe.
The common thread to the group's thinking is an intense dislike of liberal internationalism, whether of the European Union's kind, or the more muscular American/British variant. Mark Almond, the group's third member, argues that American interference in Ukrainian politics is funded by both George Soros and George Bush—which, in his view, is scandalous.
Big international human-rights outfits are certainly not beyond criticism for pomposity or partiality. And western policies in the post-communist world over the past 15 years are not unblemished. But the tiny Oxford outfit is finding it hard to gain credibility to match its stridency.
ping!
Gentlemen, I'd like to make some introductions here.
Lukasz and others here rightfully suspicious of the Kremlin, allow me to introduce you to two of my fellow Americans. One is apparently retired military the other, I cannot make a responsible comment on here. They are Poohbah and hchutch. Both are fixated on the notion that Soros is somehow the master pupeteer, who has deposed the wonderfully "pro Western" yet somehow also pro Kremlin aparat, via his reputed false front, Yushchenko.
I must say that I do not agree with these fellow Americans. However, I thought it might be a great learning experience for all of us to observe the debate here.
Yanukovich's friends
Please let me know if you want ON or OFF my Yushchenko vs. Yanukovych/Ukraine election ping list!. . .don't be shy.
You sound like an ass.
Now what sort of introduction is that? Do you always start off on this sort of footing?
No, I don't. Perhaps I misunderstood your post.
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