DEMOCRACY
In this section:
Agency Publishes Democracy Magazine
Orange Revolution
Rose Revolution
Tulip Revolution
Cedar Revolution
Agency Publishes Democracy Magazine
Many people watched in wonder as the multicolored revolutions
took place—the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Rose
in Georgia, the Cedar in Lebanon, the Tulip in Kyrgyzstan.
Each country had a different form of government, but all
were denying people a chance to choose new leaders through
fair elections.
Few realized that for years, the United States and other
countries and organizations had been supporting this homegrown
desire for democracy.
Support for democracy around the world is not new. After
World Wars I and II, the United States supported self-determination
and democracy in Czechoslovakia, Germany, Japan, Greece, and
many other countries. After the Cold War ended, U.S. support
helped democracy take root in former Soviet-bloc countries.
Support continues today for freedom of speech, press, religion,
and assembly in the Middle East and other regions.
To explain how the United States supports democracy, USAID
published a magazine in 2005, Democracy Rising, based on reporting
by FrontLines editor Ben Barber in Ukraine, Georgia,
Lebanon, the West Bank-Gaza, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Following
are selections from the magazine, which is available at www.usaid.gov
by typing “Democracy Rising” as the keyword. The
publication is being released along with USAID’s democracy
strategy.
Orange Revolution
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Ukraine election official Andriy Mahera (left), who
disavowed government victory, and parliament official
Ostap Semerak, both joined democracy training projects.
Ben Barber, USAID |
KIEV, Ukraine—Observers had reported massive
vote fraud in favor of Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich. Two
independent polls of voters reported that Yushchenko had won.
But the government said he lost. The appearance of fraud unleashed
widespread anger and the determination by many ordinary people
not to stand by while the country of 50 million slid back
towards authoritarian rule. The Supreme Court agreed and a
new election Dec. 26, 2004, gave Yushchenko a clear victory.
The world lauded the unexpected peaceful, democratic revolution.
When the Orange Revolution began, 29-year-old television
anchorman Andriy Shevchenko was news director of Channel 5,
the only regional independent TV network. He had received
media training through Internews, a USAID-funded NGO, and
visited U.S. TV stations where he learned about investigative
reporting, balancing many points of view, and other aspects
of the free press.
“At 2:30 a.m. Monday, after the second round of elections,
strange results came from the election commission,” said
Shevchenko. “Yushchenko left the commission building
and said ‘we don’t trust the results.’ He asked
people to come to the Maidan Nezalezhnosti [Independence Square]
in the morning. At the station, we realized we would not go
to sleep that night, and we kept coverage of the square for
15 days nonstop.
“The first days we were the only channel covering it.
Then other channels followed.” Soon hundreds of thousands
would leave their homes and villages to join mass demonstrations.
“People were fed up with corruption, election fraud,
and the slide back to authoritarian rule which the independent
press was reporting,” said Shevchenko, one of 2,000 Ukrainian
journalists trained over the past decade. Support from the
United States, Internews, and the European Union created a
feeling that others stood with them “in the trenches,”
said Shevchenko. Election observers from Ukraine, the United
States, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation
in Europe also issued widely publicized reports of fraud.
Building Credibility
Credible polls helped push the public into action.
“U.S. aid helped us to conduct the poll that showed
Yushchenko won while the authorities intended to falsify the
elections,” said Anatoliy Rachok, director of the Razumkov
Ukrainian Center for Economic and Political Studies which
received U.S. and Eurasia Foundaion aid.
“For five years, we polled people and reported that
the attitude of people towards the government was very negative.
The population believed in those figures,” said Razumkov.
Then, when the Center reported that Yushchenko had really
won the election, “our poll was believable and it was
used by the Supreme Court” in overturning the official
tally.
“U.S. aid help for the poll was absolutely important—the
poll results after the second round made people go to the
street,” he added.
Rachok rejects critics who say U.S. support caused revolutions
in Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine: “There must be natural
conditions—wise people use assistance right.”
Another NGO—Development Associates —did its own
democracy preparation work with the Central Election Commission,
training 100,000 commissioners for the 2004 elections.
Even so, the second election round was stolen through fraud,
and it was only when the Supreme Court threw out the second
round that the commissioners carried out an honest election
count. People stood up for democracy because they were sick
of corrupt police, schools, and tax inspectors as well as
sales of big state companies to government cronies below cost.
Rose Revolution
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Chants organized by Kmara movement call for new elections
and an investigation of government fraud. Kmara is a
nonviolent prodemocracy group created by students in
Georgia.
Kmara |
TBILISI, Georgia—In November 2005 it was two
years since this ancient Black Sea country produced the Rose
Revolution, when tens of thousands of people came from across
the land demanding freedom, fair elections, and democracy.
Without violence they came, after an independent parallel
vote count showed the government claim to have won the Nov.
2 parliament election was a fraud.
Waving red and white banners bearing the St. George’s
Cross—now on the national flag—demonstrators grew
in number and determination for 20 days until President Eduard
Shevardnadze left his office peacefully. After 12 years in
power, he was replaced by opposition leader Mikhail Saakashvili,
who in January 2004 was elected president by a landslide.
Georgia’s was one of four corrupt postcommunist governments
to fall since Serbians ousted Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.
The Rose Revolution came next in 2003—Georgians borrowed
many Serbian pro-democracy innovations. Ukraine’s Orange
Revolution followed in 2004; and Kyrgyzstan’s Tulip Revolution
took place in March 2005.
Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan quit the Soviet Union in
1991. But corruption remained entrenched and old, repressive
systems of control were returning.
In 2003, Georgians thronged the main square of this city
to say they would not stand for the pale reincarnation of
communist rule with its corrupt bureaucracy, fixed elections,
muzzled media, crony capitalism, and authoritarian police.
The Rose Revolution—named after the flower Saakashvili
held as he faced down police ringing the parliament—shocked
the world. But not Georgia’s advocates of democracy.
They had been working for a decade to build a base for freedom
and the rule of law, with help from U.S. and other foreign
aid donors.
“The success in Georgia is a result of the people’s
commitment to democracy, but without foreign assistance I’m
not sure we would have been able to achieve what we did without
bloodshed,” said Levan Ramishvili of the Liberty Institute,
an NGO that received U.S. funds since 1996.
Although he was threatened and even beaten up by ultra-religious
thugs opposed to his work on religious tolerance, Ramishvili
continued to work with U.S. aid to “promote democratic
and liberal values in the broad classical sense—transparency,
accountability,” he said in his office. “The Rose
Revolution was the climax of these efforts.”
For example, in 1999, U.S. funding helped Georgians draw
up and build support for a Freedom of Information Law, which
the government adopted. That law allowed the media and NGOs
to investigate government budgets, force the firing of a corrupt
minister, and give people a sense that they should regulate
the government, Ramishvili said.
U.S. democracy grants also paid for experts from the American
Bar Association (ABA), International Republican Institute
(IRI), National Democratic Institute (NDI), the University
of Maryland, and other groups to train lawyers, judges, journalists,
members of parliament, NGOs, political party leaders, and
others.
“From the start, U.S. aid supported civil society and
created a network of civic minded people” who supported
democracy and were ready to join the Rose Revolution, said
the Liberty Institute leader.
Many have become leaders in the new government, such as
President Saakashvili and Zurab Chiaberashvili, who was mayor
of Tbilisi until July, 2005.
“Under U.S. assistance, new leaders were born,”
said the former mayor. “The U.S.…helped good people
get rid of a bad and corrupted government—without it
what choice did we have?”
The mayor said that “there is a conspiracy theory—that
what happened was planned in D.C. …It’s not true.
What this assistance did, it made civil actors alive, and
when the critical moment came, we understood each other like
a well-prepared soccer team.”
Tulip Revolution
The Rose and Orange Revolutions were inspiring democracy
advocates around the world. Now the democracy movement was
to have its impact on Central Asia.
The Tulip Revolution that rushed across the plains of Central
Asia in March was one of the first signs of democracy in the
former Soviet republics of Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan,
Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan.
Typical of the grassroots programs that supported democracy
in Kyrgyzstan were grants to train 60 representatives of community
self-help bodies or local NGOs in human rights and lobbying
tactics in 2003 in the Jalalabad region.
The groups then published a guide to the courts explaining
how they worked, the names of court members, and meeting dates.
In the Naryn Oblast (region), the NGO Chinar Bak used a small
grant to run seminars and create information centers in libraries
on women’s rights.
The group trained 160 women in six villages and this led
to advocacy actions and a change in the way the state dealt
with some of the women’s issues. They won free seeds
and a cut of 20 percent in water and land tax—all critical
in the dry plateau—and unemployed women got help starting
businesses. The group also planned budget hearings.
While many people only see elections and freedom of the
press as signs of democracy, these efforts to help people
bring their issues before the government, and lobby officials
to provide help, are fundamental to democracy.
They allow people to take the initiative instead of waiting
for a remote and cumbersome central government to act—the
pattern under Soviet rule for 70 years.
For example, Islamic clerics or mullahs visited a civic
education class in Karakol organized by the U.S.-based democracy
NGO IFES. Students asked the mullahs why they bless the increasing
number of forced marriages involving kidnapped brides. After
an uncomfortable moment, one mullah said unless the woman
agreed, the marriage was improper and he would not perform
it.
In other towns, internet service was provided to open up
the flow of information to previously isolated people.
Other grants to Kyrgyz NGOs trained journalists on the practical
aspects of balanced reporting; and political party members
got training on organizing, spreading their message, and getting
out the vote.
Before the February 2005 parliamentary elections, thousands
of voters were taught that everyone was required to have a
finger marked with indelible ink after voting; it would prevent
cheaters from voting twice. NGOs supported local TV coverage
of the voting in Bishkek, the capital, and in smaller cities
and towns.
Cedar Revolution
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Lebanese demanded and won the withdrawal of Syrian
troops after 20 years, and new elections.
Daily Star, Beirut |
BEIRUT, Lebanon—Growing throngs of people protested
after a bomb killed former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. A
month after the killing, March 14, 2005, almost 1 million
protestors took to the streets, bringing down the government
and forcing Syria to withdraw its forces after 29 years of
occupation.
Syria withdrew April 30, and by late June Lebanese voters
completed a four-round election that was widely seen as free
and fair.
The new parliament, dominated by a group formed around Hariri’s
son Saad, set to work trying to unite the communities whose
civil war in the 1970s and 1980s led to Syrian intervention:
Maronite and Orthodox Christians; Sunni and Shiite Muslims;
and Druze.
Standing behind Lebanon’s current effort to build democracy
are U.S. and other international aid groups. Many had spent
the past years building the foundations for democratic change.
Now they can help ensure the success of what is known as the
Cedar Revolution—named after the national tree depicted
on the Lebanese flag.
Because honest local government builds support for democracy,
aid groups helped more than 900 municipalities improve tax
and financial records. In efficient offices equipped with
internet access for the public, people can now directly access
their tax bills on a computer without dealing with tax officials.
Reducing those meetings tended to reduce corruption.
Guides were published for citizens who needed licenses or
permits. These explained fees, the time to process applications,
and the paperwork needed to open a store, put up billboards,
or change the outside of a home.
Next, Lebanese NGOs backed by U.S. funding printed guides
to advise municipal councils how to make meetings productive
and reach decisions, not fall into chaotic, rhetorical sessions.
City and village officials were trained to write up minutes
of meetings and submit them to the Interior Ministry for permanent
recordkeeping.
Revenue officials received assistance in reforming the tax
system and balancing budgets. USAID and the U.S. State Department’s
Middle East Partnership Initiative also provided election
support.
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