Concerning Mr. Laughland (1)

[Natalia Pylypiuk]

Dear Colleagues,

With your indulgence, I am posting some responses that appeared in
The Ukraine List, which is compiled by Professor Dominique Arel 
(Ottawa),
a list where Mr Laughlan'ds article had also been posted.
If you wish to subscribe the UKL, please write to <darel at uottawa.ca>

Kind regards,
Natalia Pylypiuk (University of Alberta)

****
  (1) From Dominique Arel:
**I don't normally comment on newspaper articlesthat I post on UKL, but 
the item by John Laughland is something else. This fellow is from an 
organisation that calls itself OSCE Watch and that produced a report 
that claims to "[challenge] the widely-disseminated media image of 
government-sponsored fraud" (available at www.oscewatch.org) based on 
an election observation mission conducted exclusively in areas 
dominated by Yushchenko (Kyiv, Chernihiv, Uzhhorod). The observers were 
quite critical of alleged pro-Yushchenko biases in what they saw, while 
concluding that "in spite of concerns, [we find] no reason to believe 
that the final result of the 2004 presidential election in Ukraine was 
not generally representative of genuine popular will," even though this 
mission did not observe at all how the election was conducted in 
oblasts dominated by Yanukovych. In the Guardian item, each 
interpretation based on electoral figures (paragraph four) is 
disingenuous. "Turnouts of over 80%" in pro-Yushchenko areas can hardly 
be related to "fraud," when the national turnout stands at 80%, and 
that of L'viv is a mere one percentage point higher. The issue in 
Donets'k is not the overwhelmingly statistical majority of Yanukovych 
(96 percent) per se. As Aleksandr Kynev wrote in UKL285 ("How Voting 
Fraud Was Committed in Donbas"), the real vote in Donets'k was probably 
up to 85 percent in favour of Yanukovych (and perhaps even higher), 
which is still enormous. I come from Quebec where some anglophone 
ridings reported a 96 percent majority against independence in the 1995 
referendum, and no one claimed the result was fraudulent. In critical 
elections, the vote can be extremely polarized in certain regions of 
electoral democracies, and this happened repeatedly in Galicia since 
1990. It is not the fact that we see such figures that is necessarily 
suspicious. The fraud in Donets'k was mostly about an impossible 
turnout, which fabricated nearly one million votes for Yanukovych. As 
for Saakashvili, he did poll 96 percent in the repeat Georgian election 
of last January, and for a simple reason: he ran unopposed. That may 
not have been good for democracy, but it certainly explains the figure. 
If there is to be a third round in Ukraine, Yushchenko will not run 
unopposed **

(2)
  Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2004 12:30:15 -0500
  From: Roman Senkus <r.senkus at utoronto.ca>
  Subject: Re. "The revolution televised" by  John Laughland

  Sir,
          I am amazed the Guardian would pay good sterling for Mr. 
Laughland's obviously biased piece of low-quality journalism.The tone 
and content of his article sounds suspiciously like something 
Yanukovych's or Putin's (and, in the past, the Soviet Communist 
Party's) propaganda machines would produce. As in an earlier article by 
him in the Guardian, Laughland tries to blacken the entire Ukrainian 
opposition by focussing on the views of some marginal UNA-UNSO 
neo-fascists. Yet, deliberately or out of ignorance, he does not 
mention that Dmytro Korchynsky, the (former?) UNA-UNSO leader, is part 
of Yanukovych's team. More importantly, he avoids the issue of Russia's 
brazen intervention in the democratic politics of Ukraine and does not 
provide any proof that "Pora is an organisation created and financed by 
Washington." The only real fact Laughland presents in his article is 
that Yushchenko, Moroz and Tymoshenko spoke out against the court order 
closing down  Sil's'ki visti_  for stupidly publishing an anti-Semitic 
article. But they did so, as even Mr. Laughland admits, at a time when 
Kuchma's regime has muzzled the media and even killed journalists, and 
they did so for that reason. This is a far cry from "support for 
anti-semites," and I doubt Mr. Laughland could cite any anti-Semitic 
statements Yushchenko, Moroz or and Tymoshenko have ever made.

  Sincerely yours,
  Roman Senkus,
  Director, CIUS Publications Program <www.utoronto.ca/cius>
  Managing Editor,  www.encyclopediaofukraine.com
  Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, Toronto Office

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