sleepless in kyiv
March 30, 2006 09:49 AM
Still recovering from the Rada elections. It is Thursday and, as it happens, the votes have still not been fully tallied across Ukraine. This is unsurprising. By the time my will gave out Monday morning at around 6:00, election officials at the station where I was posted in Kyiv had only counted the first of four ballots. (That was the Rada ballot; the others were for local and regional spots, such as mayor.) By this point, the observation "process" consisted of sitting in a chair along the edge of the room and trying not to sleep. Alas, the latter of these tasks was too much for me to bear, and I wandered off to a dark corner of the school building for a nap.
Maybe the least best thing that can be said here is that, by this point, there did not seem to be reason to worry about the soundness of the vote. Nowhere we ventured in the course of the day did we find anything that might have created serious concern. In fact, for anyone who has chanced to descend into the depths of the Ukrainian bureaucracy, it was almost shocking to see the dedication and conscientiousness with which election officials did their work. This is not to say that my team did not come across the odd violation. But these were all of the technical variety -- the results of minor lapses in the application of the rules or, in instances where we found Ukrainians voting outside the designated booths, problems with overcrowding and poor traffic management. (I intend to post pictures of the polls soon.) Observers who had been to the Zhytomir region said that some polling places were so packed with voters that they (the observers) could not physically reach the ballot urns.
Of course, my group was in Kyiv, and while vote fraud is not an exclusively provincial phenomenon in Ukraine, Kyiv is certainly not among the places where concern would be greatest. We learned from other observers on Tuesday, for instance, that there had been significant problems at polling station 13 in Donetsk, including an apparent attempt to slow down the count and somehow invalidate the vote. That station did not open its first voting urn until 8:20 Monday morning, more than 10 hours after the polls officially closed. But then, that station had not seen its first vote until 9:22 in the morning on Sunday -- more than two hours after the polls "opened" -- because of a procedural dispute. Observers who had been to Kharkiv reported that several attempts had been made to intimidate them -- for instance, by demanding and writing down their names.
Still, all this was more or less the exception. At the Tuesday debriefing, reports suggested reasonably similar trends in the balloting across-the-board, with the usual exceptions. Local officials in Crimea had evidently used Russian in all their election materials, and even expressed anti-Ukrainian sentiments when they encountered Ukrainian speaking observers. Yet many of the stories were inspiring: Ukrainian election officials tended to be very excited to see that international observers had come to ensure the soundness of the vote. One observer reported that a commissioner at one station effused, "You are like doctors who have come to this country without scalpels!"
There were four of us in my observer team: In addition to myself there was Anya, a Polish university student, Pascal, a Frenchman who is currently campaigning for parliament (in France), and Stefan, a Brit with a yen for (left-of-center) political crusades and a girlfriend in Kyiv. The chemistry turned out to be very good, in large measure because our strengths were complementary. All of us would have been quite lost without Anya's language skills; she not only translated between English, Russian and Ukrainian, but could communicate with Pascal in French, when necessary. For his part, Pascal is surely one of the more tenacious (if that's the right word for it) observers the world has known. He spent much of the day disallowing this and permitting that. At 6 a.m. Monday he was still looking over the shoulder of our station commissioner to make sure everything was being properly accounted and adjudicated. He did all of this on two hours sleep, since he had cruised the local discos the night before the balloting, and it may well be that his aggressive performance reflected a certain fatigue-related psychopathy. Stefan, meanwhile, showed great diligence in documenting our visits, which in turn ensured that they could be made useful eventually. It hadn't even occurred to me to mark down the numbers of the poll sites we visited, and without Stefan's record we may well have gone to the same station again and again. Variety is not a recognizable achievement of Ukrainian urban planning, let's just say. Anyhow, Stefan had quite an appetite for international law, as it turned out, and it was easy to see how this impulse directed him to document our visits very carefully.
In retrospect, the three of them could probably have handled the day's work without me. But I did provide a bit of conversation on the side. My American background also provided the group with the occasional effigy to burn or bag to punch when the issues of global politics arose. Just like us Americans: always going the extra mile for our allies.
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Back from America...
March 24, 2006 05:41 AM
...and credentialed to serve as an international observer for this Sunday's parliamentary elections in Ukraine. It's a daunting business, in part because the concepts of process and accountability are rather new to these parts. (Witness the vote in Belarus last weekend.) In the training that took place yesterday we were told to be attentive to the prospect that many local officials who will be managing the actual polling sites may be unfamiliar with the particulars of the election law and have only a limited notion of how proper balloting ought to be conducted. So we observers were advised to offer guidance and recommendations if things seem to be getting off-track, provided we don't disrupt the voting.
Of greater interest to me, at least, was the political briefing we were given at the beginning of the workshop by an analyst from the Democratic Initiatives Foundation. He mostly showed us some recent polls taken by his organization, and the results were surprising. Most surprising was the finding that voters who said they plan to vote for Yushchenko's party, Our Ukraine, were actually the most motivated. This rubs against conventional wisdom, which is that Yushchenko has been such an all-round let-down that he would have a very difficult time turning out his base, which is young and upwardly mobile. Still, while his backers may be the most motivated, they are also now a far smaller segment of the overall electorate than might have been the case a year ago. Our Ukraine is hovering around 15 percent right now, only slightly ahead of the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc. And both trail far behind the Party of the Regions, led by Viktor Yanukovich, the one-time goat of the Orange Revolution who has enjoyed a political renaissance because of Yushchenko's troubles. Regions has about 30.4 percent in the latest poll, which is just about where it's been for months. If those numbers hold, they would translate into about 186 deputies -- give or take 10 -- in the next Verkhovna Rada, according to the pollster.
The level of voter interest is striking. According to the polls we were shown, 91 percent of Ukrainian voters said they plan to cast a ballot, and 79 percent said they would do so "definitely." Meanwhile, only 10 percent of the electorate claimed to be either undecided or disinclined to support any of the choices available. Since there are 45 parties on the ballot, one is left to wonder what kind of political platform the "none of the above" types are holding out for. In any case, the analyst suggested that turnout in Kiev, where I'll be stationed, will probably be around 65 percent. And while that's not quite at the level projected for the rest of the country, it is still high enough to create the prospect of long lines and long waits, which could themselves become a factor in the outcome. Fewer than 50 percent of the likely voters indicated they would stay on line "as long as it takes" -- but again, it was Yushchenko's base that indicated the greatest willingness to see things through. As for myself, seeing matters through may turn out to be a 24-hour process, according to others with whom I've discussed "observer" status. We will have to be at the polls by 6:15 in the morning, and the balloting technically ends at 10:00 that evening. Officially, however, voters who are on the premises at closing time are entitled to cast a ballot. There's no telling how long that might drag things out. And then there's the tabulation of the votes, which will continue on into the morning -- even without any hitches. Here's hoping I don't wind up as one of the observers who then has to accompany the ballots as they are delivered to the central election headquarters in Kiev....
P.S. Asked for his opinion, the political analyst who briefed us predicted that an "Orange" coalition -- led by Yushchenko's and Tymoshenko's parties -- would emerge from the parliamentary vote, but would soon fall apart. No one here would be surprised to see that happen. But the analyst suggested the succeeding arrangement would involve some combination of Our Ukraine and Regions, and to me that's fairly implausible. Such a coalition could be formed only if Yanukovich is to be appointed prime minister. And while there have been murmurs around Kiev about a creeping rapprochement between Yushchenko and Yanukovich forces, it is almost inconceivable that Yushchenko would assent to this. Even Tymoshenko has forsworn any alliance with Yanukovich, and the arrangement would almost certainly scuttle Yushchenko's principal policy goals, beginning with membership in NATO and the WTO. (The latter is critical if Ukraine is to compete economically with Russia.) More likely, in the event an Orange coalition collapses, is that parliamentarians would be unable to agree on a new government and would then be dissolved, with new elections called for the fall.
BDS: The Dumberator
March 4, 2006 09:19 PM
Not really interested in the Katrina hype. The AP has clarified that "topping" and "breaching" are not the same thing. Score one for the English language. Still, there's an angle yet missing from the denouement of this latest tempest: the kinetic, maniac ignorance caused by Bush Derangement Syndrome. Really, is there anyone beside Chimpy W. Bushitlerburton who could cause ordinary denizens of the Anglosphere to miss the distinction between these two words? I suspect that if the situation were reversed, and it was Bush who confused "topping" and "breaching," we'd be hearing a lot about someone being an idiot....
Jesus, it's cold here in Kyiv. Confined more than usual to my apartment, I've been checking in with the journalists at the BBC. And I have an observation. If BBC producers would just instruct the reporters to end every field segment with the words, "But what does this mean for global warming?" they would be able to slip seamlessly into the next report - and maybe save a few quid on staffing the presenter desk. A modest proposal.
February 22, 2007 11:19 AM · 
A middle-aged Ukrainian woman told me last night about her experiences as a member of the Komsomol, the Communist Youth organization during the Soviet era. On Christmas and Easter, she and other members of the group were ordered to the local churches, where they were instructed to form two concentric rings around the buildings by locking arms. These rings were intended as a defense perimeter that would keep people from going to church on religious occasions. This peculiar Soviet abhorrence of religion is one reason that in Ukraine gifts are not exchanged on Christmas, but rather (last night) on New Year's Eve. In 2007, let's all of us, and especially us Americans, make a little more effort to keep in perspective our astonishing good fortune, and be grateful for what some sacrifice to preserve it. America may not be perfect, but it's the closest thing we've got.
January 1, 2007 06:51 AM ·
Kofi Annan has stepped down at the U.N. - at least a decade too late. I predict future historians will find it difficult to judge whether this ineffectual dupe was the puppet of genocidal regimes and autocrats or just their indispensable enabler. It is tough to fully enumerate the sins and consequences of this repugnant figure, but this WSJ editorial begins the grim task.
December 17, 2006 05:59 AM ·
