I recently took one of those rare “trips back in time,” when
I saw the award-winning docudrama No, Chilean director Pablo Larrain’s
look at the 1988 plebiscite which dealt the death blow to General Augusto
Pinochet’s 15 year dictatorship. Mexican actor Gael García Bernal plays
a young Ad Man who helps create the TV campaign that led Chileans to an
overwhelming No vote against the dictatorship.
His ad agency boss runs the Yes TV campaign.
I was there,
in Chile, between broadcast jobs, on the State Department’s dime, conferring
with the country’s media elite about the future of television, pushing the idea
that the coming age of satellite-driven communication was going to make
everyplace equidistant from the global center stage, and make Chile’s “end of
the road” self-concept an anachronism.
Some Chileans
thought that was an interesting, if radically counter-cultural idea, but most
of them were rightfully preoccupied by something else: the role television was then
playing in the upcoming national vote on the political future of Chile.
It was quite
eerie to see on the movie screen in Albuquerque the very spots and programs I’d
seen in Santiago, in production, or as they ran on Chilean TV, to see my best
Chilean friend of the visit, Patricio Banados back in the No anchor chair.
It was a fine
madness, bred no doubt by a serene confidence in his own re-election, which led
Pinochet to approve a perfectly fair plebiscite. It was also plu-perfectly Chilean. Part of the horror of America’s Henry
Kissinger-led intervention in support of Pinochet’s 1973 coup was that it wrecked
the most civil, democratic society south of the United States.
Thus, in
1988, after 15 years of state violence and deadly “disappearances,” a Chilean
plebiscite still had to be real and fair and open. Even a dictator’s credibility and honor
depended upon fidelity to democracy.
In TV terms,
this meant that the ground rules of the plebiscite required that the 2 sides on
the ballot – Yes, Pinochet rules for another 8 years; No, he doesn’t, and has
to leave at the end of his term – share a half-hour of prime time, seen on
every TV channel in the country, to make their cases directly to the voting
public. The order of the nightly 15
minute packages alternated, day by day.
The Yes
packages argued that 15 years of economic progress (and there had indeed been some
under the Dictator) equaled happiness.
The argument was made with a lot of intentionally old-fashioned images
of national pride and productivity and a lot of haranguing by “important
people,” including most often, Pinochet himself. This stale concoction was hard to watch,
except when the General was on screen, usually in an ornate military uniform,
speaking in a voice sounded almost exactly like a chicken. Then, even to Chileans, it was chillingly
hilarious.
The No
packages were a mix of jaunty young people singing and dancing in praise of
freedom, gentle reminders of a more civil time from the comfortable,
confidence-building anchorman Banados, who was famous in Chile for having been
disappeared from the TV screen by Pinochet, and a few moments of brilliant
political video.
One of these
showed a notorious newsreel of a policeman beating an unresisting demonstrator,
labeling both men as “good Chileans,” and insisting that both could, as that
American icon of unnecessary violence and conflict Rodney King said, “get
along.”
To a foreign
media observer, there was no question which was the more effective campaign,
but, as I wrote in the NY Times at the time, pre-election polls had the result
“too close to call.”
Clearly a lot
of people who didn’t feel safe telling some pollster they were against the
government, did feel safe when casting their ballots. The final score was 56% to 44% for the No. Not even close.
At the climax
of the film, after the National TV Channel’s announcement that the No had won a
clear majority, there is a moment of terror at the No headquarters when there
is a report that General Pinochet has summoned the heads of the security
services to the Presidency. Everyone
there knows someone for whom a crackdown could mean prison or death.
People hold their breaths, until a follow up makes it clear,
there will be no second strike against democracy: the Chiefs of Staff will have
none of that. They’ve told Pinochet he
will have to recognize the vote and move away from power.
For many of the folks I had met in Chile on that trip, and
an earlier one for The Committee to Protect Journalists to protest to
Pinochet’s Justice and Defense Ministers the dictatorship’s use of military
courts to suppress newspeople, that moment of personal pleasure was followed by
a surge of national pride. This is
Chile, they congratulated themselves, here we prefer civility and democracy.
Which brings me (hold tight, this is something of a 180) to
today and Ukraine.
One of the first scenes in the movie No, shows an early
planning session of the No media team.
There are many points of view, many ideas that someone on the team
thinks are essential to the campaign against Pinochet, freedom of speech, the
right to organize, the crimes of military, the collaboration of the Church,
(you should pardon me) blah blah blah (or as the fabulous Banados titled his
first book Bla ble bli blo blu).
“No!” says the Garcia Bernal character, there is only one
essential idea: gaining enough votes to win the plebiscite.
And so it was: people voted for freedom, civility, kindness,
and comfort and against oppression, violence, cruelty and discomfort. The No won big.
Unlike Chile, whose perception that it was the last place
anyone could or would go had bred not just insularity but a national identity,
Ukraine is riven by an ongoing history of division and conflict, that is not
just conceptual but geographic. South
and East Ukraine has a longer and closer (if not much happier) history with
Russia, the Russian language, the Russian Orthodox Church, and more recently
Sovietized industry and collective agriculture.
In the north and west of the country, the same cultural-historic lines
lead more to Poland, Austria and Hungary; the Ukrainian language; the Ukrainian
Catholic Church, and less mass-oriented economic and political institutions.
Those fractures are real and deep and active and were
highlighted at the beginning of the current crisis when President Viktor Yanukovych
withdrew from a promised entente with the European Union in favor of closer
collaboration with Vladimir Putin’s plan for a renewed Russian empire. “We want our Europe,” those first protestors
seemed to shout, even as they looked nervously over their shoulders to the
not-necessarily-on-board East.
But recent polls suggest that those reasons for division may
be receding in the face of awidely-shared national disgust with Yanukovych, his
government, his predecessors, and their co-dependents, co-defendants, the powerful
apparatchiks and oligarchs.
As I was told again and again during my one reporting visit
to Kiev and its rural surroundings in 2008, “They’re all assholes, thieves,
thugs.”
It must be said, the historical record supports this harsh judgment. Here’s hoping it sustains to a successful
conclusion today’s ongoing “popular uprising.”
After all, Ukraine already had its “Orange Revolution,” 10
years ago, in which today’s Russian-leaning President Yanukovych was booted out,
after a clumsily cooked election and replaced by the European-leaning Viktor
Yushchenko. Yuschenko, who doctors
believe was not-quite-fatally poisoned by his opponents, was less Soviet than
his predecessors, but not more effective.
Worse, he left office with wealth and real estate that could not have
been purchased from his official earnings. His replacement, also regarded as
pro-EU, Yulia Tymoshenko has been
imprisoned by Yanukovych’s people, who charge her with making billions in corrupt
dealings in natural gas with Vladimir Putin.
The judicial process in the Tymoshenko case has been widely judged to be
deficient, but not absent of apparently damning evidence that she was a grafter.
The guy before them, President Leonid Kuchma lost his hold
on his notorious kleptocracy when audiotaped evidence tied him to the murder of
Georgiy
Gongadze, the popular and respected investigative reporter who had made
Kuchma’s crimes notorious. President Kuchma’s
greatest accomplishment was creating a national consensus that he had to go.
Polls in the past week or 2, taken in all regions of Ukraine,
suggest another consensus is building: they all have to go.
A moment of great opportunity is at hand.
If that 99 to 1 consensus can be kept together, if the un-powerful
99% can put those traditional disagreements, even temporarily aside, national
unity to start over, with a new constitution, new leaders, and very new
adherence to democracy and of rule of law, might be a real possibility, and Ukraine
might be saved.
You can read that possibility, ironically enough, in the hostile
analyses of mostly-Russian “experts” quoted in the Christian Science Monitor,
and echoed in the Washington Post, which propose – in headline form in the
Monitor, less brashly in the Post – an alleged threat of civil war.
“Amid ‘civil war’ talk, Kremlin keeps wary eye on Ukraine,” is
what sits atop Fred Weir’s report in the CSM, which cites 3 Moscow
sources. Alexei Vlasov, director of the
Center for the Study of the Post-Soviet Space at Moscow State University says,
"The most dangerous variant for Russia is the threat of destabilization in
Ukraine. If the situation goes out of control there, it could lead to civil
war." Meanwhile, Alexander Konovalov,
president of the independent Institute of Strategic Assessments in Moscow
projects an even greater threat: "The idea that people can take to the
streets and force changes in government and policy orientation is something
Putin worries about all the time,” he says. “Though the Ukrainian example is
not spreading in Russia at the moment, that doesn't mean it won't have any effect."
These fellows sound like the advisors who told
Pinochet he should reject the No vote and “:save Chile from chaos.”
They are referenced and reified by Max Fisher,
the WaPo foreign policy blogger: “There
is chatter among analysts,” he writes, “ in Moscow as well as Washington, that if
Yanukovych panics and calls in the military to disperse protesters it could
lead to a civil war.”
Would civil war in Ukraine (with or without
some implicit threat it could ignite rebellion in Russia, too) provoke
intervention by Putin? “No way,” says
the man himself. “Not yet,” murmur his
local analysts.
“Russia has no intention of ever intervening,” Putin declared at
a Russia-EU summit in Brussels. Then he accused European leaders of butting in
themselves. “I can imagine how our European partners would react if at the
height of the crisis in Greece or Cyprus, say, our foreign minister turned up
at one of the anti-European Union meetings there and began making appeals to
the crowd."
The reference, Weir writes, is clearly “a dig at EU foreign
policy chief Catherine Ashton and other EU officials who have addressed
protesters on Kiev's Independence Square, or Maidan, over the past two
months.”
Weir
quotes “Sergei Strokan, foreign affairs columnist with the pro-business Moscow
daily Kommersant: ‘Putin seems to have come to the conclusion that Ukraine is
like a volcano that will erupt from time to time. It's a natural disaster and
you just have to get used to it. That's why he comes off looking far more
pragmatic, even phlegmatic, than he did [in 2004].’”
So,
is this war talk to sell papers, or paper the way to Russian intervention?
I
don’t think it matters because I don’t think civil war is coming to
Ukraine.
This
is not a country or a culture in love with violence. It is the government’s resort to force and to
repressive legislation that has discredited the Yanukovych regime with this
growing majority of Ukrainian citizens.
And by the way, the use of violence attributed to the opposition
produces only popular denunciation and disconnection. The provocateurs are widely suspected of
acting for the government, or of being useless nutballs. Ukraine today, like Chile 25 years ago, has a
civil opposition.
In
Ukraine, there is a near monopoly on violence that resides in the state and its
institutions. There is no popular army
to oppose them, and no popular wish to translate the political battle into
literal bloodshed. Ukrainians will
neither support nor sustain terrorism, even to oust their political oppressors
and economic exploiters.
Furthermore,
as there was in Chile, there is a strong suspicion inside Ukraine’s security
services and on its streets, that the state’s violence monopoly cannot
successfully be used, because significant numbers of troops and cops would side
with the people against their bosses, the generals and politicians.
Putin’s
so-called calm in the face of the Kiev uprising may actually be his Obama
moment, in which realizes that in Ukraine, as for Obama in Syria, he has no
good option. Russian interference would
only trigger Ukrainian resistance and raise the possibility of truly dangerous
instability and chaos.
Hence, today’s standoff continues in Kiev’s
Independence Square and in provincial offices around the country. Hence, the possibility exists that tomorrow
could bring real political change to Ukraine. As a media guy said to me about
Chile, “It could all happen, if we can just get enough people to say No.”
Certainly from what we see reported from
Ukraine, no one there is saying anything better.
