The Mythology of People Power

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The mythology of people power

The glamour of street protests should not blind us to the reality of US-backed coups in the former USSR

John Laughland
Friday April 1, 2005
The Guardian

Before his denunciation yesterday of the "prevailing influence" of the US in the "anti-constitutional coup" which overthrew him last week, President Askar Akayev of Kyrgyzstan had used an interesting phrase to attack those who were stirring up trouble in the drug-ridden Ferghana Valley. A criminal "third force", linked to the drug mafia, was struggling to gain power.

Originally used as a label for covert operatives shoring up apartheid in South Africa, before being adopted by the US-backed "pro-democracy" movement in Iran in November 2001, the third force is also the title of a book published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which details how western-backed non-governmental organisations (NGOs) can promote regime and policy change all over the world. The formulaic repetition of a third "people power" revolution in the former Soviet Union in just over one year - after the similar events in Georgia in November 2003 and in Ukraine last Christmas - means that the post-Soviet space now resembles Central America in the 1970s and 1980s, when a series of US-backed coups consolidated that country's control over the western hemisphere.

Many of the same US government operatives in Latin America have plied their trade in eastern Europe under George Bush, most notably Michael Kozak, former US ambassador to Belarus, who boasted in these pages in 2001 that he was doing in Belarus exactly what he had been doing in Nicaragua: "supporting democracy".

But for some reason, many on the left seem not to have noticed this continuity. Perhaps this is because these events are being energetically presented as radical and leftwing even by commentators and political activists on the right, for whom revolutionary violence is now cool.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1449989,00.html

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