REFLECTIONS OF ELECTION OBSERVERS: The scene in Sevastopol (02/06/05)

REFLECTIONS OF ELECTION OBSERVERS

The scene in Sevastopol

by Paul de Zardain

On New Year's Eve, Kyiv's Independence Square might as well have been Tibet. Snowflakes were falling on the maidan as hundreds of orange banners fluttered in the wind. Children marched down Institutska Street with flags strapped to their fishing poles. Further down on the Khreschatyk, Kyiv's main boulevard, student protesters roasted chestnuts in an improvised tent city. Kyiv was entranced by its commitment to a cause. Were these the architects of revolution? Yes - and they could hardly believe they had won.

The maidan, a popular name for Independence Square, has been at the center of Ukraine's democratic revolution. Bright orange is the color of Our Ukraine, the party of Viktor Yushchenko. Since November, politicians have stepped onto a techno stage here to denounce the election fraud that would have handed the presidency to Viktor Yanukovych. After considering 11,000 election violations, Ukraine's Supreme Court ordered a rerun on December 26. This time, Mr. Yushchenko managed a 7.8 percent lead over Yanukovych - an ample margin of 2.27 million votes. Homo Sovieticus was on his deathbed, said an analyst. With him, on the night table, was the ossified regime of Leonid Kuchma.

At dusk, the insignias of Georgia began to converge on the stage. The presence of President Mikhail Saakashvili, Georgia's reformist leader, had been announced on large video screens. Mr. Yushchenko himself was due to address the crowd ahead of the midnight fireworks. His name was already being chanted in bursts of spontaneity. Close to the loudspeakers, a group of Iranian teenagers soaked up pop music, yelling at each other in Persian slang. Flags from several countries were captured by a camera panning the audience: Canadian maple leaves, half-moons from Azerbaijan, blue fields from the European Union, dragons from Wales and a grizzly bear from California.

Kyiv had never been so hip. Last November it taught the world a lesson. By rejecting a rigged election, it found a new national consciousness. Following independence in 1991, Ukraine's 48 million citizens had been conditioned to think like a monolith. Bureaucracy was of the surrealist genre and payoffs for services were common from the polyclinic all the way to higher education.

Neither East nor West, Ukraine was stuck with a template of oligarchic capitalism, followed by a plate of managed democracy à la Putin. Russians felt sorry for their southern cousins, casting them as rough-hewn peasants. A popular restaurant in Moscow displays Ukrainians in theme-park style, with a live granny caring for her chickens.

Meanwhile, President Kuchma presided over a fiefdom in which clans had a stab at policy-making in the Verkhovna Rada. Only in this environment of corruption could assets like Kryvorizhstal, a giant steel mill, be sold to his son-in-law. In 2000, a tape recording also linked Mr. Kuchma to the killing of investigative reporter Heorhii Gongadze. His body was later found by a roadside. Ukrainians rebelled against this model, best exemplified by the cult of the black Mercedes-Benz. Given a choice between systems, they opted for European liberal democracy.

This is a hard pill to swallow if you are a former naval officer from Sevastopol, Crimea. That is where I was posted with a group of seven other international observers on December 26. Sevastopol is almost 750 kilometers south of Kyiv and far from the high-flying chants of the Orange Revolution. Founded as a naval stronghold in the days of Catherine the Great, it entered Russian lore for resisting an Anglo-Gallic siege in 1855. Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev transferred the whole of Crimea to Ukraine in April 1954.

Today, 19th century limestone buildings grace the embayed harbor and tree-lined promenades. The strategic city has evolved into a balmy seaside resort despite its aura of secrecy. This is, after all, the main base for Russia's Black Sea Fleet. The population of 400,000 is predominantly ethnic Russian, an anomaly in a peninsula long a melting pot for Greeks, Tatars, Jews and Genoese. What makes the city truly different, however, is its legal status. Sevastopol is an independent metropolitan district on par with Kyiv.

A record 12,400 international observers turned up in Ukraine for the rematch between Messrs. Yushchenko and Yanukovych. Many were Canadians with family roots in Ukraine. Others, with experience at polling stations in transition states, were sent by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe from Sweden.

My team was a handful of rugged individualists. Roman is a biomedical inventor from New Jersey who left Ukraine as a child refugee. Masha is a journalist working at Moscow's last independent radio station, Echo Moskvy. Viola is a German agricultural economist specializing in Eastern European development. Donat is a Fokker pilot from Luxembourg with a second home in Odesa. Richard is a political science professor from Sacramento, with a hankering for Yalta. Ruslan, our team leader, is a strong-willed financial analyst from Edmonton. Then there was Robert, a resettled Manitoban with a love interest in Kyiv. As for myself, I work as an economics analyst in Moscow. All of us flew to Crimea after two days of chaotic training.

On December 26 I was assigned to polling station No. 41, a public school outside of Sevastopol. District 224, formerly a string of villages on the road to Balaklava, has grown into a charmless housing project for former civil servants. The side streets are cratered and reflect the level of infrastructure you might expect in eastern Turkey, just south of here. The previous day our team had decided to keep an eye on this precinct because of its group dynamics. Observers develop a sixth sense after visiting an average of three polls per hour. Some tip-offs include lukewarm welcomes or brusque movements, as when we stumbled into two commission members copying lists from a previous election. At my poll, the young secretary, Irina Sulimenko, seemed easy prey for Olga Zabyamova, a commandeering commission president.

Taras, our regional leader, had told us that election observing is like playing spy. I began election day at 7:15 a.m by checking the names of the first and last entries on the voting lists. No names can be added or marginal notes annotated. According to the list, 2,056 people were entitled to vote and the Territorial Electoral Commission had provided 2,092 ballots. I then tested the pens for invisible ink. Documenting each step on an official checklist can help back up any allegations of fraud. Part of my job was to remind the commission to stick to the regulations drawn up by the Central Election Commission in Kyiv. Checking IDs is also important in Sevastopol, where 73 percent of the population retains Russian citizenship. Although technically illegal, dual citizenship has proven a useful hedge against post-Soviet insecurities.

A local OSCE consultant, Liubov Bogdanova, said voters here see Mr. Yushchenko as a usurper of their inalienable rights. After years of scuffles over sovereignty, Moscow and Kyiv agreed to grant Sevastopol de-facto autonomy from the rest of Crimea. "But people continue to tune into Moscow, not Kyiv. Mr. Putin promised them visas and Mr. Yanukovych promised to make Russian an official language," explained Ms. Bogdanova.

During the day, people walked over to offer snacks and chat me up. The local marriage market was a recurring topic, but so was the amount of money I allegedly was being paid by U.S. authorities to "secure" Sevastopol. I explained that I had paid my own way from Moscow. The Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) was covering meals and our hotel expenses downtown, but the rest was out of my pocket. Then I must be of western Ukrainian descent, they concluded.

With a cursory look at my last name, the conversation quickly reverted to capital flows.

In the logical warp of post-Soviet democracies, election rigging is accepted as a way to counteract the power of money. Forget civil society or the human drive to adopt the innovations of others. Money is the kingmaker.

Marina, a middle-aged Yanukovych supporter, wondered whether international observers should not be dispatched to Ohio instead of Crimea. She had a point, but her comments reflected Kremlin propaganda rather than reasoned criticism. Russian PR men like Gleb Pavlovsky have accused Washington of bankrolling agitators on the maidan. Moscow has been rife with speculation about how much they get paid per hour. Fed ad nauseam through Russian-language TV stations, Sevastopol needed little convincing.

The only serious violation at Ms. Zabyamova's polling station was when I noticed she had not posted the campaign platforms of both candidates. According to Ukrainian election law (Article 74.5), the official material should hang at the entrance to each poll. A series of snapshots on my camera show the school janitor, a former naval officer, running away with the posters to cut them up in a room down the hall. "We do things differently here," he said. "Go back to America." That was the only ugly incident during a day in which I visited 11 other precincts in District 224.

The tedious process of counting unused ballots, control ballots, spoiled ballots and valid ballots lasted until 2:30 a.m. Ms. Zabyamova developed a transitory speech impediment after pronouncing the word "Yanukovych" so many times. Yes, Yanukovych won in my district by 88.52 percent. The final tally at polling station No. 41 was 1,426 for Mr. Yanukovych and 107 for Mr. Yushchenko. Thirty-seven people voted against both candidates.

Paul de Zardain works as an economics analyst in Moscow. He was an international election observer in Sevastopol with the delegation organized by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress.

| Home Page |