ON SUNDAY, November 21, after almost two years of wrangling, the Paris Club of creditors finalized their joint position on Iraq’s Saddam-era debt. Newspapers around the world praised the Paris Club for their generosity and good will, announcing this debt forgiveness as the first bit of good news for Iraq for many dark months. However, when, on the following morning, Saad Salih Jabr, the chairman of the Iraqi National Assembly’s Economic Committee, took the podium in the assembly his words were less effluent: "You heard yesterday’s news. The world media is marketing this as the deal of a lifetime. It is not. This is yet another crime committed against the Iraqi people." To explain this apparently strange response to an offer of debt relief, which one might expect Iraqis to welcome, it is necessary to look beyond the headline figure of 80 percent debt relief to the details of the Paris Club’s proposal and the assumptions which underlie it.
The key points in this statement are: 1) the debt relief will total 80 percent; 2) the basis of reduction is Iraq’s "repayment capacity"; 3) relief is phased over a period of at least three years linked to an IMF program; and 4) the deal does not cover all creditors.
Firstly, the debt is so vast that the 80 percent offered by the Paris Club is inadequate on economic grounds alone. Assuming all other creditors agree to the 80 percent, which is far from certain, Iraq would still be shackled with over $25 billion of debt, on top of more than $31 billion in war reparations and new loans from the IMF, World Bank, and others. This compares with Iraq’s meager health budget this year of only $947 million and education budget of $544 million. Even if creditors offered 90 percent this would have still left Iraq with a credit rating of at least four notches below investment grade, on par with Ukraine. As Fitch Ratings states, "Iraq’s debt stock would need to fall to $14 billion for its interest service burden to compare with the median for sovereigns rated B+." Frederick Barton, director of the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said "This is not anywhere near as far as it should go," explaining that Iraq’s shattered economy will not be viable without much greater reduction in debt and reparations. Planning Minister Mahdi Hafez said: "[It] evokes reservations in Iraq because it is less than the 95 percent requested by the IMF."
Thirdly, the debt relief is very bluntly conditional on Iraq obeying the dictates of the IMF on economic policies such as privatization and foreign ownership, ending food rations and fuel subsidies, and restricting salaries and pensions. These policies could further exacerbate the poverty and instability in Iraq. Iraqi economist Dr. Saleh Yasir says, "IMF conditions neglect the social consequences of economic policies. An IMF structural adjustment program would create more social tension which might destroy the transition to democracy." Another Iraqi economist, working as an adviser to a Western government, says anonymously: "When I look at past IMF policy errors I get frightened. Iraq stands no chance of success if the IMF makes policies like those it made in the past." Furthermore, irrespective of the correctness of IMF policies, the very fact that control is being taken from Iraqi hands mere weeks before elections will certainly increase Iraqi cynicism about the degree of sovereignty they will really be allowed to exercise. The non-governmental organization World Development Movement, which has examined the role of the IMF in many developing countries, writes in the Financial Times, "Now from the very first day that the new Iraqi parliament sits it will find virtually every important economic decision predetermined by the coterie of rich countries that runs the IMF." Former Oil Minister Ibrahim Bahr Al-Uloum, himself a proponent of IMF-style policies, nevertheless declared, "Iraq was the cradle of civilization and I don’t want to see anyone controlling our economy by any means."
Finally, the Paris Club’s 80 percent does not cover the full $130 billion of Saddam-era debt (let alone the war reparations) as has been misreported in many sources. More than two-thirds of the claims come from countries outside the club like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bulgaria, and Romania. Statements by many of the creditors have revealed that few are willing even to match the Paris Club’s terms. The Economist reports that some private creditors are insisting on no more than 30 percent reduction, while Kuwaiti MP Ali al-Hajeri said that the Kuwaiti parliament is "unanimously opposed to conceding a single dinar." So Iraq’s final debt burden could be much worse than the $25 billion implied by an 80 percent cut across the board.
So is there an alternative? Saad Salih Jabr outlined one in a resolution that was passed enthusiastically by the Iraqi National Assembly. The resolution appeals to the doctrine of odious debt as the basis for repudiating the debt but offers creditors the option of a fair arbitration tribunal to prove that their claims are not odious but come from loans which benefited Iraq. If the soon-to-be-elected Iraqi government takes up this resolution, it could get rid of most of the debt quickly and without the conditions of the IMF and Paris Club. This would enable Iraq to focus its resources on the many other pressing issues which need resolving to build a peaceful and prosperous state, instead of being bogged down for long years in negotiating and repaying Saddam’s old debts. Of course some creditors will complain loudly, but they will get little sympathy from international opinion, and claims that this would affect Iraq’s future credit worthiness are unfounded, as the Wall Street Journal has argued: "We wouldn’t blame (Iraq’s) leaders if they decided that some of those financial obligations are indeed odious. And given that this is such an extreme case, international lenders probably wouldn’t hold it against them for long."
Justin Alexander is the director of Jubilee Iraq. For more information and the latest news on the issue of Iraqi debt, see www.jubileeiraq.org.
By LEE SUSTAR
THE IMPASSE in Mexican politics since the election of Vicente Fox Quesada as president in 2000 has come to an end–and as a result, workers are once again the targets of free-market neoliberal "reform." This time, however, the attacks have spurred some of the biggest strikes and labor demonstrations in decades amid a growing political polarization.
As the ISR went to press, the Mexican legislature was considering passage of comprehensive labor law reforms that would virtually eliminate the right to strike and make it nearly impossible for workers to achieve collective bargaining contracts or vote out the state-dominated labor organization and replace it with independent unions. Moreover, the law would allow employers to extend the workday. As the online newsletter Mexican Labor News and Analysis put it, the law would "make new union organizing all but impossible, leave existing unions virtually powerless, abolish longstanding labor protections, and turn over all power in the workplace to employers."
The proposed labor law follows the passage of earlier anti-worker "reforms" in August–massive cutbacks in the social security system (IMSS) that increased the retirement age, raised workers’ contributions and cut benefits. Next on Fox’s chopping block is the public sector workers’ social security system, ISSTE. The president’s proposed privatization of electric power generation would also hit labor hard–especially the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME), one of the pillars of the National Union of Workers (UNT), which in the 1990s split from the state-dominated Confederation of Mexican Labor (CTM). (The CTM, true to form, is backing the labor law reform, which would strengthen its hand against its rivals.)
The UNT responded to the attacks on social security with a mass protest in Mexico City’s Zócalo plaza July 23, initiating a series of mobilizations that peaked August 31 with a strike by hundreds of thousands of workers. While some walked out for as little as an hour or two, the Zócalo saw one of its biggest marches in decades–perhaps ever.
This anti-labor campaign resumes the neoliberal offensive that Mexican workers have suffered since the 1980s. It was made possible by a deal between Fox’s National Action Party (PAN) and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled Mexico’s federal government as a virtual one-party state from the post-revolution era of the 1920s until Fox’s victory.
The PRI which had previously blocked most of Fox’s initiatives in the Mexican congress, was widely seen to have made the deal in order to secure a whitewash for the PRI officials involved in the "dirty war" against the Left in the 1970s. As the social security cuts were being debated in July 2004, a judge blocked the prosecution of former President Luis Echeverría Álvarez, who was accused of organizing a death squad, known as halcones, or falcons, which massacred twenty-five students in a demonstration in 1971–beating several to death with clubs and chains. According to a declassified State Department report, U.S. officials in Mexico believed that Echeverría "may well have given his blessing to the use of the group" to attack the demonstrators.
Fox had helped create the office of special prosecutor that brought the charges against Echeverría. Yet the current president kept silent when the prosecution of his predecessor was blocked. As a columnist for the left-wing daily newspaper La Jornada put it, Fox "isn’t able, and above all, doesn’t want" to hold anyone responsible for the dirty war, since he relies on the same state bureaucracy and individuals as Echeverría and other PRI presidents.
Indeed, the PRI’s opposition to Fox’s promised "government of change" has less to do with policy than control of political spoils. It was under tremendous U.S. pressure that former president Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León gave up the PRI’s policy of dedazo, literally, pointing to (the next presidential candidate), whose election was assured. Zedillo came to power only after the PRI’s original candidate was assassinated, reportedly by drug lords or party rivals (which may amount to the same thing). The crisis in the PRI deepened amid disclosures of enormous scandals involving Zedillo’s predecessor, Carlos Salinas de Gortari–widely believed to have stolen the 1988 presidential election from the center-left Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) through sheer fraud. Then came the armed uprising by the Zapatista National Liberation Army in the state of Chiapas on January 1, 1994–the same day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect. Finally, a financial crash later that year and the austerity measures that followed cut living standards in half.
The rest of Zedillo’s term saw mounting devastation brought by neoliberalism on Mexican society, including the ruin of two million Mexican farmers undercut by cheap agricultural imports from the United States. Moreover, the U.S. recession and weak recovery of 2001 took an even greater toll on Mexico, owing to economic integration under NAFTA. The rising death toll of Mexicans crossing U.S. borders in the desert highlights the rising desperation of millions. A recent World Bank study showing a reduction in Mexican poverty is highly misleading. Extreme poverty–income of less than $1 per day–fell from 24.2 percent to 20.3 percent of the population, the study showed. The overall poverty rate–set at just $10 per day–dropped as well, from 53.7 percent to 51.7 percent. Yet 75 percent of the employed population–about thirty-two million people–has an income of between $4 and $19.50 per day, a figure that gives a more accurate view of inequality in Mexico.
Social polarization, along with the crisis in the PRI, opened the door for Fox. A former Coca-Cola executive, Fox had the enthusiastic backing of Washington, where the backlash against NAFTA had left politicians anxious to prove that Mexico was a democracy. For his part, Fox spiffed up the image of the PAN, distancing himself from the party’s roots as a reactionary Catholic party of wealthy northern ranchers. To that end, Fox recruited well-known former socialist Jorge Casteñada as foreign minister and made an alliance with the Green Party. Besides promising to root out the PRI’s corruption and the guilty parties of the dirty war, he vowed to end the conflict with the Zapatistas in "15 minutes."
All that has unraveled. Casteñada jumped Fox’s sinking ship to nurture his own presidential hopes. The head of the Green Party has been indicted for taking a bribe to help build, of all things, a golf course and resort. Today, Fox is the weakest of lame ducks. "The president looks not so much tired as beaten, his deep voice hollow, much like his speeches, which carry no conviction," wrote the journalist Alma Guillermoprieto. The biggest initiative from the Fox administration in recent months was the announcement by his wife, Marta Sahagún, that because Mexico was "too macho," it needed a woman president–and she gave extremely strong hints that she’s the one for the job. Meanwhile, an investigation into the charity foundation she runs has led to allegations of corruption. As for the Zapatistas, Fox has failed to deliver on promised reforms, and the unsuccessful but aggressive campaign for governor by a PRI hardliner in Chiapas has led many observers to predict a new round of fighting there.
In fact, violence is increasingly a tool of mainstream parties. In the city of Benito Júarez, the main municipality near the tourist zone in Cancún, supporters of a Green Party mayor who had been ousted by a PRI governor rioted July 21. The following week in the state of Oaxaca, PRI activists attacked their rivals in the opposition PAN-PRD coalition; one person was killed and eighteen injured, many of them shot. In the end, PRI prevailed at the ballot box, taking three of four state governorship elections on November 14. The party runs seventeen states, compared to ten ruled by PAN and three by the PRD.
The rise of Obrador
The PRD, however, runs the Federal District–Mexico City–and the mayor, Mexico City Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has become the most popular politician in the country and the favorite in the 2006 presidential elections. The problem is that López Obrador is facing prosecution on corruption charges pursued by both the PAN and the PRI. Compared to the incalculable levels of PRI corruption for the past seventy-five years, the charges against López Obrador are laughable: the illegal handling of the construction of a road. A bigger scandal, however, has involved a top aide, who was caught on videotape in March 2004 taking huge amounts of cash from Argentine businessman Carlos Ahumada, who has contracts with Mexico City (and who had an affair with López Obrador’s predecessor as mayor, Rosario Robles). While López Obrador hasn’t been implicated, the scandal has hurt his reputation of personal honesty and austerity in government.
The effort to oust López Obrador for corruption dovetailed with another campaign against him–a mobilization by the capital’s middle class and wealthy against kidnappings and crime. A "megamarch" June 27 saw the mobilization of people rarely seen on demonstrations–the middle class, the wealthy, and the powerful. "The message seems to be the following: ‘We are the class that has the right to lead the country.’ The message is, thus, ominous," observed Santos Oaxaca in El Grito, a Mexican human rights newspaper. The anti-crime campaign is a signal that Mexico’s capitalists fear a president who could raise expectations among the country’s poor.
A look at López Obrador’s past explains the political establishment’s opposition to him. He was among the PRI operatives who joined with the Left in the late 1980s to found the PRD, and won election as governor of his home state of Tabasco in 1994. He never took office, however; armed goons installed his PRI rival instead. Two years later, López Obrador joined with thousands of farmers from the Chantal indigenous group to seize oil wells on the Gulf Coast; in 1998 he led a march of Tabasco residents to the Zócalo to protest corruption in their state.
As mayor of Mexico City, López Obrador has tried to strike a balance between meeting the expectations of the city’s poor and proving himself a responsible politician capable of running the country. Those conflicting pressures overwhelmed former PRD leader Cuathémoc Cárdenas Solórzano, who became mayor in 1997. Cárdenas–the PRD candidate in the stolen 1988 presidential election and son of the populist Mexican president of the 1930s–ran a mainstream administration. Unable to cope with the enormous social problems of a city with more than ten million people, Cárdenas saw his once vast popularity diminish. In the 2000 presidential election, he won just 16.64 percent of the vote, taking third place behind Fox (who won with 42.52 percent) and PRI candidate Francisco Labastida Ochoa, who obtained 36.10 percent.
López Obrador has learned from that experience. He’s sought to match his populism with a can-do approach calculated to appeal to the middle class. He hired former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to devise a "zero tolerance" policy on crime and teamed up with billionaire telecommunications magnate Carlos Slim to finance restoration of the city’s historic districts. At the same time, he’s delivered on some of his promises to the poor–for example, presiding over the construction of new schools and roads and instituting financial aid programs for retirees over seventy, as well as the children of single mothers.
Nevertheless, López Obrador’s efforts to appeal to the mainstream have been thwarted by the scandal involving his aide and the PRI-PAN effort to have him prosecuted. He responded by swinging to the left, making common cause with the UNT and the social movements against the social security cuts and labor law reforms. Indeed, the August 31 march to the Zócalo fused with a rally in support of the mayor, with thousands carrying signs and banners backing him. When López Obrador finally addressed the rally, the crowd was "without a doubt hoping for a rain of fiery rhetoric," observed a journalist for La Jornada, but instead, "there was a rain of ideas." This included a twenty-point plan for a new government–and a "new social pact." López Obrador’s increasing criticism of neoliberalism–and the Right’s efforts to oust him–has led many Mexican observers to speak of the "Venezuelanization" of Mexican politics. Certainly López Obrador has learned from the success of Hugo Chávez’s populism in Venezuela as well as the center-left governments in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay–that there’s political advantage in placing himself at the head of the discontent over poverty and social inequality. Moreover, a PRD victory would send a shockwave through Mexican politics that would be felt north of the border as well. Yet in the end, the PRD isn’t seeking to transform Mexico, but to manage it.
It’s far from clear whether López Obrador will avoid prosecution, let alone become president. But the growing pressure from Mexican capitalists to move ahead with the neoliberal offensive will lead to more political clashes and more struggles from below. The Mexican Left, while sizeable, remains fragmented into various social movements, indigenous groups, and solidarity efforts, inside and outside of the PRD. The Zapatistas continue to hold tremendous moral authority and influence on the Left, but have largely abstained from politics since their historic march to Mexico City in 2001. Their approach has been described by a key intellectual supporter as a proposal to "change the world without taking power."
But as recent Mexican politics show, the minority of capitalists and their hangers-on are trying to tighten their grip on that power to prevent any positive change at all. The task of the Left is to build the organizations and struggles with the social power that can provide a serious challenge. The revival of struggle in recent months has opened up important new possibilities for doing so.
Lee Sustar, a contributing editor for Socialist Worker, writes regularly for the ISR.
UKRAINE
Behind the Election Standoff
By LEE SUSTAR
THE ELECTION standoff in Ukraine is portrayed in the U.S. media as a battle between pro-Washington democrats and pro-Moscow authoritarians. But it’s really a scramble for power within a ruling class dominated by corrupt politicians and their wealthy backers.
The rerun of Ukraine’s presidential election runoff December 26, 2004, is likely to lead to the victory of Viktor Yushchenko, whose followers staged mass protests and blockades following the disputed November 21 elections. Supported by the U.S. and the European Union (EU), Yushchenko almost certainly won that vote. But widespread fraud allowed Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich–backed by outgoing President Leonid Kuchma–to try to claim victory. But according to election observers, there were also reports of fraud in Yushchenko’s western Ukrainian strongholds.
Yushchenko’s supporters captured the attention of the world by mobilizing more than 100,000 supporters in the streets of the capital city of Kiev for nearly two weeks, blockading government buildings and, at one point, calling for a general strike while demanding a new election. The opposition benefited materially and politically from the West, following the playbook used by pro-Western groups that in recent years ousted governments in Serbia and the former USSR republic of Georgia. Yet Yanukovich also had mass meetings in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, the economic powerhouse of the country where the majority of the population is Russian-speaking. In the end, however, the scale of the fraud and the size of the protests forced Yanukovich to back down and agree to an election rerun.
Adding to the drama was a report by Yushchenko’s doctors that the disfiguring illness he suffered during the campaign is the result of dioxin poisoning. Aides to Yushchenko have claimed that this was the result of an assassination attempt by government security services.
The election crisis plays on the historic divisions in Ukraine between the Russified east of the country and the Ukrainian-speaking west, which has only been under Moscow’s rule since 1940, when Stalin’s USSR invaded and took over. But if the candidates have played up such differences, it’s because their real policy differences are minimal.
The notion that the crisis is simply Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine versus west Ukraine is "pure nonsense," Russian author and activist Boris Kagarlitsky told the ISR. "The key place where you have most of the resistance to the government is Kiev, which is Russian-speaking," he said. "In class terms, it is petty bourgeois protests against the oligarchs of the East–and the oligarchs are Russian-speaking. You cannot describe this in purely class terms, unfortunately. Both sides are quite reactionary." Kagarlitsky compared the mobilization to the "people power" mass protests in the Philippines in 2001, which forced out one conservative government–and led to its replacement by another.
If Yanukovich got the backing of Russian President Vladimir Putin, it’s in part because the Russian government concluded that Kuchma, was going to help the prime minister steal the election–and that it was better to go with a winner. In his campaign, Yanukovich made populist appeals by claiming that western Ukraine is a parasite on the industrial east, which accounts for an estimated 80 percent of gross domestic product, and played the Moscow card by promoting Russian as an official state language.
But despite the U.S. media’s simplification, Yanukovich isn’t simply the Moscow candidate. Rather, the election standoff reflects an ongoing battle within the Ukrainian ruling class over how the country can orient to both Russia and the West. For example, Yanukovich, the supposed Russian lackey, has sent 1,600 Ukrainian troops to Iraq and ordered the Ukraine military to ferry NATO troops to Afghanistan.
There was a similar dynamic in business dealings. When a Russian steel firm tried to buy out a major Ukrainian one for $1.2 billion, Yanukovich blocked the deal and arranged for a sale to a wealthy Ukrainian government insider–Viktor Pinchuk, Kuchma’s son-in-law–for just $800 million. Pinchuk cultivated ties to the West, meeting with former President George Bush, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and currency speculator George Soros, the New York Times reported.
If Yanukovich isn’t simply Putin’s puppet, neither is Yushchenko the pro-Western democratic hero he’s made out to be. He’s a former central banker who used his term as prime minister to impose austerity measures that hit working people hard–in a country where the average monthly wage was just $80 in 2002. His top ally is Yulia Tymoshenko, one of the country’s wealthiest oligarchs. She is part of the tiny circle of former Communist Party members and industrial managers who won out in the corrupt privatization of state industry when Ukraine became independent after the USSR collapsed in 1991. After "making" her fortune importing Russian oil and gas, Tymoshenko used her position as energy minister in Yushchenko’s government to squeeze her rivals until Kuchma forced her out on corruption charges. Yushchenko himself was pushed out of office in 2001 after trying to discipline the oligarchs with economic and political reforms. Yushchenko–the supposedly Western agent–sold off four major oil refineries to three Russian oil companies in 2000.
"Despite Putin’s public support for his counterpart Leonid Kuchma’s chosen successor, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, Russian businesses are more likely to get better access to Ukrainian markets under Viktor Yushchenko, a former prime minister and Yanukovich’s more Western-leaning opponent, said analysts who track Russian-Ukrainian economic relations," the Russian Independent Internet Digest observed during the election campaign.
Moscow, Washington, Kiev
Moscow’s attempt to influence the outcome of the elections in Ukraine is an attempt to maintain influence in its former empire. The Ukrainian capital of Kiev was home to the first "Russian" kingdom in the Middle Ages, but Ukraine developed a distinct language and culture. With the rise of Moscow, Ukraine was conquered by the expanding Russian Empire of the tsars, with the western region ultimately taken over by the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
In the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Ukrainian struggle for national self-determination took center stage. A pro-German monarch ran the first independent Ukraine–and the Ukrainian peasants swung behind the communists in the civil war that followed the revolution. Ukraine later joined the USSR as a republic equal to Russia–but the dictator Stalin’s counterrevolution of the late 1920s recentralized power in Moscow under a state capitalist regime.
Stalin’s forced collectivization of agriculture caused a famine in Ukraine in the 1930s that led to the deaths of six to seven million people. Stalin effectively recast the empire of the tsars–and following the Second World War, used his troops to bring Eastern European countries under Moscow’s control. Ukraine provided much of the agricultural production–and the military-industrial complex–of the USSR in the post—Stalin era.
The economic and political reforms in the USSR in the late 1980s led first to revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989 and then the collapse of the USSR two years later. Since then, Ukraine, while still closely linked economically with Russia, has gradually become more integrated with the West as well–setting the stage for the current conflict.
Putin’s meddling gave George W. Bush the pretext to declare that Ukraine’s upcoming election rerun "ought to be free from any foreign influence." The U.S. media dutifully ignored the fact that the U.S. government had exerted far greater "foreign influence." The International Republican Institute–chaired by Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.)–and the National Democratic Institute, run by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright– were active in Ukraine supporting Yushchenko’s candidacy. Both institutes are part of the government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
Following the model used successfully in Serbia and Georgia, and unsuccessfully in Belarus, much of Yushchenko’s operation has been "funded and organized by the U.S. government, deploying U.S. consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and U.S. non-government organizations," Britain’s Guardian newspaper noted. Representatives of the Serbian student movement–who had extensive training from the NED–set up shop in Kiev during the election campaign.
BusinessWeek explained why the U.S. is interested. "With its vast swathe of fertile black earth and well-educated population of 49 million, Ukraine is an emerging market worth playing for." As a major producer of steel and machinery, Ukraine is benefiting enormously from demand in China. The economy is on track to grow by at least 11 percent this year–the fastest in Europe–and the stock market is up 100 percent.
No one should be fooled by the U.S. claims of supporting democracy in Ukraine. Washington has turned a blind eye to election fraud across the former USSR–from Russia to the oil- and gas-rich states in the Caucuses and Central Asia. If the U.S. is concerned about democracy in Ukraine today, it’s to try to pull that country into Washington’s orbit.
A genuine struggle for change?
To be sure, there is a historic conflict between the Ukrainian-speaking west of the country and the Russian-speaking east. But this divide has been manipulated by both Yanukovich and Yushchenko as a vehicle for getting votes and mobilizing support. There is, nevertheless, a hunger for real democracy and change on the streets of Kiev, where people are fed up with a corrupt and authoritarian government–and outgoing President Leonid Kuchma’s bid to hold onto power by installing Yanukovich in the fraudulent election.
Yushchenko is favored to win the election rerun. But the size and duration of the protests raises the possibility that an independent movement for democratic change will emerge. Socialist groups independent of the two camps intervened in the mass protests to argue for such a direction. These efforts are critical. If Yushchenko takes office, he’ll move to mend fences with the oligarchs and politicians who backed Yanukovich–and the protesters will be told to demobilize and return to work.
"Everybody will be happy–with the exceptions of those who demonstrated in the streets," Kagarlitsky said. However, he added, "it will be much harder to control Ukraine when the new government comes to power. There is a genuine democratic movement, and it is very much out of control of the current leadership."
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