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Subject: [WW]  Media silence cloaks U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine
Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 08:24:05 -0500
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-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Feb. 17, 2000
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------

MEDIA SILENCE CLOAKS U.S.-BACKED COUP IN UKRAINE

By Bill Wayland

Washington is deeply involved in a full-scale coup d'etat
in the second-biggest former Soviet republic.

It is part of a dangerous plan to expand NATO deep into
the former Soviet Union. But not a word of these events has
appeared in any major U.S. news outlet.

Early in the morning of Feb. 8, right-wing deputies and
state-security forces seized the main hall of the parliament
(Verkhovnye Rada) as armed police commandos surrounded the
building. Opposition deputies, led by Progressive Socialist
Party leader Natalia Vitrenko, resisted the takeover but
were overwhelmed. Vitrenko is now on hunger strike.

The struggle began Jan. 21 when deputies loyal to U.S.-
backed President Leonid Kuchma illegally constituted
themselves a new parliament. They voted to remove elected
parliament Speaker Oleksandr Tkachenko, who had charged
Kuchma with falsifying the results of last year's
presidential election.

Tkachenko was evicted from his office Feb. 3.

KUCHMA MET WITH GORE

Before organizing the coup in the Rada, Kuchma met
privately with U.S. Vice President Al Gore in Washington.
Lest anyone doubt Washington's role, U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark
was expected in Kiev, Ukraine's capital, on Feb. 8, the day
the parliament was seized.

Clark, the commander of U.S. forces in Europe, directed
the terror bombing of Yugoslavia last spring. He also
ordered British Gen. Michael Jackson to attack Russian
troops at Pristina airport in Kosovo last June. Jackson
refused, saying, "I'm not going to start World War III for
you."

What's at stake for the U.S. ruling class in all this?

The opposition legislators from the Communist, Socialist,
Progressive Socialist, Peasant and Slavic parties all oppose
Kuchma's plan to bring Ukraine into NATO. They have also
blocked Kuchma's budget, which was designed to please U.S.
banks and the International Monetary Fund. It calls for
major price increases for food, gas, heat and electricity on
a schedule dictated by the IMF.

It also orders privatization of land--overwhelmingly
opposed by Ukraine's farmers--and further shutdowns of
Ukrainian industry. The PSP's Vitrenko and Communist Party
leader Petro Symonenko want Ukraine to leave the IMF.

A Feb. 4 report on the CIA-linked Radio Liberty beamed to
East Europe threatened: "Whether the parliament is
controlled by the pro-reformers or leftists is of vital
importance for Ukraine, which must pay $3 billion in
interest on debt this year. The country has to convince its
creditors, principally the IMF, that it is serious about
economic reform if it hopes to get more loans to avoid a
financial meltdown. The budget for this year, prepared by
Prime Minister Viktor Yuschenko, has the necessary elements
to please the IMF but stands no chance of being approved by
the leftists."

The report didn't mention that any new loans would go to
pay interest on old loans. Nor did it say that Yuschenko was
appointed by Kuchma on Al Gore's recommendation.

Kuchma himself was re-elected president in November in a
campaign marked by vote buying, ballot-box stuffing and
terrorist attacks on his opponents. In one such attack,
Natalia Vitrenko was wounded by a hand grenade.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, IMF-imposed budget
cuts have shut down major industries across Ukraine, causing
widespread hunger, especially in the Donbass coal-mining
region. The republic's population has dropped from 52
million to less than 50 million in less than two years.

Old-age pensions are under $13 a month.

In Soviet times, Ukraine was considered the breadbasket of
the USSR. A report from Ukraine in the Feb. 24 New York
Review of Books says most people there feel "it is a great
misfortune that the Soviet Union no longer exists."

TALBOTT ENCOURAGES RIGHT-WING IN BELARUS

The coup in Ukraine coincides with other bellicose moves
by the United States in Eastern Europe. On Feb. 3, three
opponents of Belarus President Aleksander Luka shenko met
with U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott in
Washington.

A Reuter dispatch reported ominously: "The United States
has poor relations with Belarus, which it sees as the least
reformed of the newly independent states to emerge after the
collapse of the Soviet Union. Talbott encouraged the three
Belarussians to continue working with the international
community for an independent and democratic Belarus, the
State Department said."

Ukrainian opposition leaders have warned that a NATO
Ukraine would become a base for war against Belarus. Such a
confrontation would inevitably involve Russia as well.

A leaflet distributed in the United States by the
International Action Center said, "The U.S.-backed
presidential coup in Ukraine is of a piece with the bloody
war against Yugoslavia and the occupation of Kosovo."

It is part of NATO's drive to the east, a dangerous step
toward a new and larger war.

The corporate media's curtain of silence about events in
Ukraine must be seen as complicity in this criminal plan.

"We must not allow another Chile in Ukraine, with Kuchma
as Pinochet," said the IAC. "The democratic forces in
Ukraine are fighting the same forces of corporate tyranny
that workers and students were fighting last year in
Seattle. They urgently need the support and solidarity of
labor, anti-war and pro-justice forces here and around the
world."

[This article is based on telephone and fax communication
with deputies inside the Rada in Kiev, articles from the
Ukrainian press and information provided by International
Action Center representatives who have just returned from
Ukraine. The only U.S. establishment media source known to
have mentioned these events is the U.S. government-backed
Radio Liberty, which broadcasts to the former Soviet Union.]



                         - END -

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