"People power" replacing violence in Ukraine

By Michael T. Kaufman
The New York Times

JEROME DELAY / AP Supporters of opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko hold candles yesterday on Independence Square in Kiev, Ukraine. Yushchenko's supporters vow to maintain their vigil until the parliament passes changes to prevent fraud during the rerun of the election.

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It has been an evocative sight. The bird's-eye views of the crowds in Independence Square in Kiev over the past two weeks challenging the results of Ukraine's presidential election recalled many other spontaneous assemblages in recent years, most chillingly the pro-democracy protesters who filled Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989, only to be fired on by Chinese troops.

The tensions and risks remain high in Ukraine, but at times last week the prospect of violence seemed to recede, as a compromise emerged that would void the disputed election and allow for a new one.

That would make the orange-draped Kiev crowds less reminiscent of Tiananmen and more suggestive of the protesters who, through peaceful free assembly, won union rights at the shipyards in Gdansk, or cheered a "velvet revolution" in Prague, or rejoiced in Berlin as the wall came down.

In fact, over the past 30 years, the stereotype of mass uprising has changed radically.

Largely gone are the bricks and barricades and calls to arms. Much more common now are hordes of unarmed people, often young, filling the streets to voice their hopes and wishes to their countrymen, their leaders and, perhaps most importantly, to the world watching on television.

	JEFF WIDNER / AP A Chinese man blocks a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square in Beijing during pro-democracy protests in June 5, 1989.

The remarkable thing about the "people power" tactics of nonviolent mass protest is how often they have worked. They are not foolproof, as the Chinese experience shows.

But by the reckoning of Stephen Zunes, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco, they have advanced democracy in Bolivia (1977 and 1982); Sudan and Haiti (1985); the Philippines (1986); South Korea (1987); Chile, Poland, East Germany and Czechoslovakia (1989); Mongolia and Nepal (1990); Mali (1992); Madagascar (1993); Bangladesh (1996); and Indonesia (1998).

Coups thwarted

On top of that, he notes, spontaneous nonviolent action thwarted coups in Argentina (1987), Russia (1991), Thailand (1992) and Paraguay (1996 and 1999).

People power often prevails because national leaders fear the loss of international legitimacy and acceptance that would come from cracking down.

"The idea that there are international standards in these areas has grown sharply over the last 20 years, and many leaders have realized that unless they comply, they can really lose ground in the world," said Carol Bogart, the deputy director of Human Rights Watch.

Certainly, the kind of shunning that led to economic sanctions against Poland after it outlawed Solidarity in 1981 and against the apartheid regime in South Africa are object lessons for today's leaders.

Ultimately, though, much depends on the particular character of the rulers being challenged in the streets, said Aryeh Neier, the president of George Soros' Open Society Institute.

"I do not believe that Gandhi's tactics of civil disobedience in India would have worked at all if the colonial rulers were Nazis instead of Englishmen," he said. "

Neier said that before the 1975 Helsinki Accords, when Moscow first agreed to accept that civil and human rights were legitimate issues of diplomatic discussion, the Soviet Union routinely dismissed any discussion of civil or human rights as "unacceptable interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state," and other countries followed suit.

Now the pendulum has swung so far that two foreign statesmen — President Aleksandr Kwasniewski of Poland and Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign-policy chief — are mediating a dispute between rival Ukrainian political parties.

Factors that are unique to one country or one moment in time can make a big difference, Neier noted.

For example, when South Korean students protested against the military government in 1987, the Olympic games scheduled for Seoul the following summer weighed heavily on the country's rulers. They ultimately agreed to step down rather than risk the national humiliation of a boycott of the games, as in Moscow in 1980 after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Neier said he wondered whether the course of the Ukrainian crisis would be different if the country's capital were an eastern city like Kharkiv, where most people support Viktor Yanukovich, the winner of the disputed election. As it is, the focus of government power and media attention is in Kiev, a western city where most people back the challenger, Viktor Yushchenko.

Immune to world opinion

China and Myanmar, the two countries that have most adamantly resisted the pressure of pro-democratic protesters and their foreign supporters, are special cases as well, Zunes said. Both are unusually immune to world opinion.

"China is just too big, powerful and self-sufficient to be influenced" by foreigners in setting domestic policy, he said, while Myanmar's hermetic military dictatorship has isolated that country so much that it had little to lose by suppressing the pro-democracy movement.

Andrew Nathan, an expert on China at Columbia University, said that China had paid no real price for the crackdown in Tiananmen Square.

"The official position is that the Chinese leadership did what it had to do, and that their action saved the party from the sort of things that happened in Russia," Nathan said. The rest of the world largely shrugged and moved on, he said, and among China's own people, "recent polls show that the party is very popular."

While huge peaceful assemblies have sometimes brought about sudden and decisive changes at the top, as in Czechoslovakia or Lithuania, in other cases they have been dispelled by force, only to become the legendary platforms for future mobilizations and struggle.

The communist government of Poland sent troops to crush the independent Solidarity union and impose martial law in 1981; by 1989, the crowds were back, and this time, they forced a change in government.

Maureen Aung Thwin, a New York-based associate of the pro-democracy movement in Myanmar, says something similar is unfolding in her homeland, where the movement's leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, is under house arrest.

But international pressure is mounting, she said, and the generals are increasingly nervous.

"It's not over, not at all," she insisted.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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