Yesterday, it was Simon Jenkins in the Times describing the crowds in Kiev as a "mob". (Dictionary definition: "a riotous or disorderly crowd of people; rabble".) Last week, it was Jonathan Steele in these pages, responding to my enthusiastic column about the Kiev events with such arguments as this: "Nor is there much evidence to imagine that, were he [the opposition candidate, Viktor Yushchenko] the incumbent president facing a severe challenge, he would not have tried to falsify the poll." Unpick that contorted hypothetical if you can.
In between, we have two representatives of a pressure group with a highly dubious track record, Mark Almond and John Laughland, informing us that somewhere behind or among the demonstrators were, respectively, agents of George Soros and Ukrainian, anti-semitic neo-Nazis. In the Berlin Tagesspiegel, I read a comparison of the opposition's tactics with those of Lenin in 1918; in Italy's La Repubblica, a commentary suggesting that Warsaw and Vilnius are trying to foist on the European Union a policy of destabilising the region. And so it goes on.
For 25 years, I have heard these same old arguments against supporting the democratic oppositions in eastern Europe. Those oppositions, we are told, threaten European "stability". Behind or beside them are nasty nationalists and/or the CIA. We must respect the legitimate security interests of Moscow (an argument originally used to justify the continued existence of the Berlin Wall). A ghastly Pandora's box will be opened by ....... (fill this space with: Poland's Solidarnosc, Charter 77, the Leipzig demonstrators - sorry, mob - in 1989, anti-Milosevic students in Belgrade, Georgian rose revolutionaries, or now Ukrainians).
Oh yes, and tu quoque: someone else is just as bad, so a plague on both their houses. "Vladimir Putin," writes Simon Jenkins, "obliterated his opponents in Russia's last presidential election without a peep from the west." Well, exactly. But what follows from that is that we should have criticised Putin's election-rigging more strongly, not that we shouldn't criticise election-rigging in Ukraine.
Behind all these contorted reservations, we hear an inner voice which says, in effect, "Why won't all these bloody, semi-barbarian, east Europeans leave us alone, to go on living happily ever after in our right, tight, little west European (or merely British) paradise?" And, quite often, "Why are those bloody Americans stirring them up to disturb us?" For this is not a simple left-right divide. It's a divide between, on the one side, central and east Europeans inside the EU, together with Americans of left and right, and, on the other, west Europeans of both left and right. Not all west Europeans, to be sure. In fact, the EU has spoken out remarkably clearly on the election fraud, through its Dutch presidency and Spanish foreign minister. But many west Europeans.
Before I address some questions to the Reluctant West European, let me first acknowledge a few obvious home truths. This is a very dangerous situation. There is a real possibility of violence (a little has already happened in the east of the country), and of a painful split between Ukraine's more Russian-oriented east and the more western-oriented west. We must keep talking to Moscow as well as Kiev. And there is no such thing as the immaculate victim. The Bosnians in besieged Sarajevo were not immaculate victims, nor even were the Czechs in Charter 77. In Ukraine, a country with a tortured history of oppression (remember Stalin's deliberate famine, the "harvest of sorrow" in which around 14.5 million Ukrainians died), division and occupation, of evils done to and returned with interest by Ukrainians, that is especially true.
Ukraine has an appalling level of corruption, involving those on the opposition as well as the government side. Members or supporters of both do have connections to a mob, in its other sense, meaning mafia. What follows an opposition victory will be messy, disappointing to most of those young orange supporters in Kiev's Independence Square, and sometimes unsavoury, as in all post-communist countries. None of this means they don't have the right to try, if their candidate wins a new monitored election which is as free and fair as is possible in such circumstances.
Now my six questions to the Reluctant West European:
1. Can't you see the wood for the trees?
You point out some bad trees, but here's the shape of the wood: An election was stolen. Most of the orange revolutionaries want their country to enjoy more of the freedoms, rights and opportunities that we in western Europe enjoy, rather than being tied back closer to an increasingly authoritarian Russia. Wouldn't that be a good thing, for them and for us?
2. Do you think Ukrainians don't deserve democracy?
Please examine your attitude and see if it doesn't reflect some deep-seated prejudices of west Europeans towards the continent's other half, typecast for centuries as distant, exotic, mysterious, dark etc. A good test is to substitute, say, "Spaniards" or "French" for "Ukrainians" in any statement, and see how it reads.
3. Are you reluctant to support the orange movement just because the Americans do?
Put thus starkly, most people would say no. But some of the west European unease undoubtedly comes from the fact that American pro-democracy organisations have actively supported the Ukrainian opposition, and Washington does have a geostrategic agenda involving the expansion of Nato, military bases across central Asia etc. Yet the knee-jerk leftist or Euro-Gaullist reaction - "if the Americans are for it there must be something wrong with it" - is silly. Please consider the Ukrainian case on its own merits, not through an American or anti-American prism.
4. Why is Russia entitled to a sphere of influence, including Ukraine, if the United States is not entitled to a sphere of influence, including Nicaragua?
The truth is, neither Moscow nor Washington is entitled to such a sphere. There are hard realities of economic, military and political power with which the smaller, weaker neighbours of great powers have to deal. In the case of Ukraine, this is further complicated by the cultural and ethnic identification of many eastern Ukrainians with Russia. But these are constraints with which Ukraine must deal itself, as a sovereign state. The country of Yalta (a town in the Ukrainian Crimea) should not be subjected to a new Yalta.
5. Would you rather have George Bush or Vladimir Putin?
Preferably neither. Given the choice between Bush and Putin, I choose Marilyn Monroe. But it's incredible that so many west Europeans, including Chancellor Schröder of Germany, seem to prefer as their partner an ex-KGB officer currently reimposing authoritarian rule in Russia over a man who, for all his faults, has just been re-elected in a free and fair election in one of the world's great democracies.
6. If you don't like the Americans taking the lead in Ukraine, why don't we?
To some extent we already are. At the negotiating tables in Kiev yesterday, there was Javier Solana from Brussels, the Polish and Lithuanian presidents, and a senior Russian official, but not, so far as I know, any senior American. And that's right. This is a version of our European model of peaceful revolution, with the aim of rejoining Europe, not America. Now it's up to us to support it, with all the peaceful means at our disposal. These include saying that, in our interest as well as theirs, a democratic Ukraine deserves a place in the European Union. Agreed?
www.freeworldweb.net
Wiktor Juschtschenko

 Wie der in London lebende Publizist John Laughland in der deutschen Printausgabe der „Zeit“ vom 2. Dezember berichtete, erhielt die ukrainische Opposition allein von USAID, einer Agentur der US-Regierung, 55 Millionen Dollar. Über diese Einmischung in den ukrainischen Wahlkampf und Staat wurde bisher weithin kaum berichtet, zumeist war nur von einer vermeintlichen russischen Einmischung die Rede, die aber erst als Reaktion auf westliche Einmischung erfolgte.

Von westlichen Regierungen erhielten 30 oppositionelle Medien finanzielle, logistische und fachliche Unterstützung, zum Beispiel auch Laptops, Handys, Fahrzeuge und andere elektronische und technische Ausrüstungen.

Auch mehrere Wählerbefragungen am Wahltag nach dem Verlassen des Wahllokals, die Anlass oder Vorwand für die ukrainische „Orange Revolution“ waren, wurden von den USA finanziert und organisiert.

Weitere zehn Millionen Dollar direkte Wahlkampfhilfe erhielten die Kreise um Wiktor Juschtschenko vom US-Außenministerium, schreibt die Zeitung „Die Zeit“. Auch die „Konrad Adenauer Stiftung“, zahlreiche westeuropäische Regierungen und Botschaften sowie eine Gruppe des US-Milliardärs George Soros ließen Gelder an die Opposition fließen.

Von der „Zeit“ wird darauf hingewiesen, dass die USA die Juschtschenko-Partei zum Sieg führen wollen, um dann die NATO auszudehnen und die EU zu schwächen. Im Wahlkampf versprach Juschtschenko, er wolle den Plan für einen euroasiatischen Wirtschaftsraum zerreißen, sofern er an die Macht käme.