From Otpor! and Tamarod to Today

I went to bed last night thinking about Egypt. I arrived there in my mind after reading a piece that appeared on the TomDispatch web site at the beginning of last month. "Three Times When the World Broke Open -- and Two When It Might Again: In Praise of Impractical Movements," by Mark Engler and Paul Engler, is a refutation of gradualism in politics, where change is engineered in piecemeal fashion by consensus of ruling elites, in favor of sudden paradigm shift powered by the ruled masses.

Nothing to argue with there. The problem I had with the essay was one of the three examples of nonviolent change offered as proof of the potency of spontaneous revolt. The Englers applaud the Serbian student group Otpor! for sparking the movement that removed Slobodan Milosevic from power in October 2000 (what is commonly classed as a color revolution though it is named after a bulldozer), something that the military might of NATO was unable to achieve the prior year. But it is well established that Otpor! received substantial assistance from the U.S. government, including training in nonviolent resistance.

This brought to mind Tamarod, the youth-led Egyptian protest movement that purportedly collected 22 million signatures calling for early presidential elections and sparked the June 2013 mass demonstrations that prefigured the July 3rd coup. It turns out Tamarod was part of the military takeover all along.

Two stories this morning provide insight into the rough shape of "astroturf" popular uprisings a few years on. The first, "Egypt Gives Saudi Arabia 2 Islands in a Show of Gratitude," by Declan Walsh, describes how the el-Sisi government has signed over two islands at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba in exchange for agreements with the Saudis worth billions. The second, "Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Ukraine’s Premier, Quits Amid Splits in Post-Revolution Alliance," by Andrew Kramer, explains how the U.S. has finally eaten its Maidan prodigy, "Yats," forcing him out in favor of the "chocolate king" Poroshenko.

Re-branding coups as popular revolts does not a revolution make. These ersatz rebellions are a ruse to maintain the old, exploitative privileges which motivate the popular uprisings to begin with. It is not a sustainable model for social transformation, to say the least.

Franz Ferdinand Assassination Centenary

John Burns has been in Sarajevo the last couple of days reporting on the centenary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his consort by Serbian nationalist teenager Gavrilo Princip. The assassination is the event that led to World War I.  The Central Powers (Austria-Hungary & Germany) declared war on the recently independent nation of Serbia. And the Allied Powers (France, United Kingdom, Russia), who backed Serbia, declared war on the Central Powers. The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra performed yesterday.

I tried to find the concert online and was unsuccessful. It was made available for broadcast by EUROVISION. The 100th anniversary commemoration was underwritten by the European Union. Here is the Vienna Philharmonic program:

Dušan Šestić
National Anthem of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Joseph Haydn
Joseph Haydn: String Quartet, op. 76/3 (Hob. III:77), "Emperor Quartet", 2nd Movement

Franz Schubert
Symphony No. 7 in B minor, D 759 (“Unfinished Symphony”)

Alban Berg
Three Pieces for Orchestra, op. 6

Johannes Brahms
Schicksalslied (Song of Destiny) for Choir and Orchestra op. 54 (Hölderlin)

Maurice Ravel
La Valse, Poème choréographique pour orchestre

Ludwig van Beethoven
European Anthem (Arrangement: Herbert von Karajan)

Burns published two stories: "In Sarajevo, Divisions That Drove an Assassin Have Only Begun to Heal" yesterday, and "Revelry in Sarajevo, Where Shots Started a World War" today. Bosnia-Herzegovina is a mess, undergoing a "Bosnian Spring" earlier this year when there were massive riots over privatization and unpaid salaries and pensions. As Burns describes in his Saturday story,

Despite the boycott by hard-line Serbs, the hope is that the centenary can be used to move sectarian groups toward a new sense of the benefits of a shared political life, and away from the political paralysis that has characterized Bosnia since the Dayton agreement.

That accord, which ended the 1990s blood bath, gave Bosnia a multilayered political structure, with more than a dozen governmental and parliamentary bodies — all elected on sectarian lines, and all now tottering under the weight of endemic corruption and fierce personal rivalries. 

Nearly two decades later, Bosnia remains one of the poorest nations in Europe. It has an official youth unemployment rate nearing 50 percent and an economy that is still 20 percent smaller than it was when the fighting broke out here in 1992. Hundreds of thousands of refugees remain scattered across Europe, wide areas of the country are virtually depopulated, and tens of thousands of homes are still abandoned and in ruins. Seething popular discontent led to days of protests and rioting this year, including the firebombing of government buildings in Sarajevo and other cities.

After those upheavals, Mayor Ivo Komsic of Sarajevo, a Bosnian Croat, appealed to the country’s 3.8 million people to make the 1914 centenary an occasion to renounce sectarian animosities in favor of a new beginning that could carry Bosnia to membership in the European Union — a status Croatia has already achieved and Serbia is nearing. “The eyes of the world will be focused on Sarajevo once more,” Mr. Komsic said, “and it is important that we send messages completely different from the messages of war we sent in 1914 and 1992.”

The Dayton Agreement is normally trumpeted as a great foreign policy achievement of the Clinton administration. But reading a broadside by Ron Jacobs, a writer I trust, against Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, I stumbled across this nugget:

Two years later, spring of 1999. Bill Clinton was under fire in Congress for his misguided and manipulative dalliances with Monica Lewinsky. The Dayton Accords concerning the growing civil war in Yugoslavia had created the intended scenario, leading Belgrade to insist on its historical right to keep Kosovo under its governance. In response, Washington and other NATO governments began an intensive bombing campaign. Bill Clinton and his war cabinet began an around-the-clock assault on the Serbian people. Liberals and progressives drank the kool-aid and offered their whole hearted support. Bernie Sanders made it clear he was completely on board with the action. Indeed, after antiwar activists in Burlington, Vermont marched through downtown Burlington stopping at the offices of each Senator and ending at Sanders’ office where they staged a sit-in, Bernie instructed his office staff via telephone to call the police and clear the office. A week later at an emergency town meeting on the bombing in Montpelier, Vermont Sanders showed up with a couple staff members and a panel of pro and antiwar speakers. Bernie vehemently defended the bombing and actually told at least two members of the audience to leave if they didn’t like what he was saying.

Bosnian Serbs ended up holding their own non-EU sanctioned commemoration for Princip. In today's story Burns describes how Dayton has failed to alleviate tensions between Croats, Serbs and Muslims:

An academic conference to debate the causes and consequences of the war became eerily anodyne when scholars from France, Germany, Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia and other European nations fell into a dispute ahead of the gathering about the topics to be discussed and the speakers who would address them. In the end, the program for the conference, held at the Hotel Hollywood in the mainly Serbian town of Ilidza, where the archduke and his wife spent their last night before taking a brief train ride into Sarajevo, was devised to avoid any open disputes about the role of Princip or other issues touching on war guilt. 

The compromise was guided by the European Union and its diplomatic mission here, which tries to draw rival Bosnian sectarian groups into a less wary and abrasive posture on Bosnia’s future than the main protagonists among the Serbs, Croats and Muslims have shown since the United States-sponsored Dayton agreement that ended the sectarian killing of the 1990s. Peter Sorensen, a Danish diplomat who is the European special representative to Bosnia and Herzegovina, describes his role as that of a referee overseeing a “fierce fight, on a daily basis, over maintaining the political space” allotted to the groups under the Dayton pact. 

But Mr. Sorensen and other European diplomats failed to persuade the Bosnian Serb political leaders to join in shared commemorations of the centenary of the Sarajevo assassinations. Instead, Milorad Dodik, the most militant of the Bosnian Serb leaders, led his followers on Friday in erecting a seven-foot statue to Princip in a hardscrabble park in Lukavica, a suburb of Sarajevo and a Serbian military stronghold during the fighting of the 1990s. On Saturday, Bosnian Serbs held more celebrations of Princip and his fellow conspirators in Visegrad, 70 miles southeast of Sarajevo, where they also re-enacted the assassination.

U.S. Prefers New Cold War and a Ukraine Modeled on Kosovo

Fighting continues in Slovyansk. Both the Associated Press and David Herszenhorn of the New York Times turn once again to putsch interior minister Arsen Avakov's Facebook page for the details. According to the AP account:

Ukrainian military operations that began Monday to expunge pro-Russia forces from the city of Slovyansk were the interim government’s most ambitious effort so far to quell weeks of unrest in Ukraine’s mainly Russian-speaking east. 4 government troops and 30 militants were killed in the gun battles, Ukraine’s interior minister said Tuesday. The pro-Russia militia said 10 people were killed, including civilians. There was no immediate way to reconcile the figures. Interior Minister Arsen Avakov gave the death toll on his Facebook page Tuesday, adding that 20 government troops were also injured during fighting in Slovyansk. He said about 800 pro-Russia forces in and around Slovyansk used large-caliber weapons and mortars on Monday. By Tuesday morning, Ukrainian forces had taken hold of a key checkpoint north of the city, dealing a blow to insurgent lines of communication.

Herszenhorn's story, "As Ukrainian Election Looms, Western Powers and Russia Campaign for Influence," outlines the West's attempt to push through the May 25 Ukrainian presidential election despite an active military campaign in the southeast:

Russia has made clear that it wants the election to be delayed. Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov pressed the point again on Tuesday, insisting that the interim government end bloodshed and amend the Constitution to devolve power to the regions — and that it do so before Ukrainians are asked to choose a new leader. 

Such changes would presumably address the demands by some pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine for a new system that would weaken the central government and expand the authority of regional and local officials. 

“Holding elections in a situation where the armed forces are being used against part of the population is rather unusual,” Mr. Lavrov said at a news conference in Vienna, where about 30 foreign ministers met under the auspices of the Council of Europe to discuss the situation in Ukraine. 

“The criteria of any process involving citizen choice are well known to all,” Mr. Lavrov said, according to the Interfax news service. “Elections and referendums must be free and fair, and they must proceed in a situation excluding violence and under objective and unbiased international monitoring.” 

At the Vienna meeting, the British foreign secretary, William Hague, said that Russian worries about violence were disingenuous as the Kremlin had fed the conflict in Ukraine to undermine the presidential election. “Russia is clearly intent on preventing or disrupting those elections,” he told reporters, according to The Associated Press. He added that the foreign ministers at the meeting supported the vote being held without outside interference.

I suppose Hague doesn't consider the United States underwriting the Ukrainian presidential election to the tune of $11 million as "outside interference."

The U.S. is threatening Russia with another round of sanctions if it doesn't support the May 25 poll and if it does support the upcoming autonomy referendums in Donetsk and Lugansk. The noxious Victoria Nuland appeared yesterday before uber-corrupt Bob Menendez's Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Let's recall here what the United States and its EU toadies are trying to accomplish. You have a Kiev junta that came to power via a violent putsch led by neo-Nazi organizations. An interim government, the current junta, was hastily slapped together with input from the U.S. It is a combination of corrupt Fatherland Party politicians and neo-Nazis from Svoboda and Right Sector. The May 25 election is meant to confer legitimacy on the putschists.

The problem with this is Ukraine is historically divided between a Ukrainian-speaking west and a Russian-speaking east. The junta has no representation from the east. To deny this, to argue that an election can proceed while a western-dominated Kiev junta is attacking with heavy armor "Occupy"-type protests rocking the country's east is delusional.

My feeling is that the U.S. suffers from this delusion because for decades it has been able to rely on unchallenged force, usually air power, to terrorize its enemies into submission. The overarching precedent here seems to be Kosovo and the bombing of Belgrade. USG planners forever seem to be returning to that NATO campaign as a template for success. It was the model for Libya, and it was constantly being bandied about in the run up to the aborted attack on Damascus last summer.

But the reality of Kosovo is that it was not a success. The Chinese embassy in Belgrade was blown up, risking relations with China, and NATO Commander Wesley Clark almost began World War III when he ordered troops to attack Russian forces at the Pristina airport. And, after near cataclysm, at the end of the day, today, you have a tiny, criminal rump state that exists at all because of United Nations administration. Is this the future we want for a large, important state like Ukraine? Apparently the U.S. does.

But it is not clear that the important member states of the European Union do. The Kosovo template breaks down immediately when you try to apply it to Ukraine. First, and critically, Putin is no Milosevic, a politician that was easily cowed. Second, the citizens of the Donbass will never agree to be subjects of the Kiev junta. A real federalized system for the regions, along with Ukrainian neutrality, is the only way forward. The U.S. is unwilling to let this happen. It prefers a New Cold War and a dysfunctional Ukraine on the Kosovo model.