Posted on 11/27/2004 3:00:00 PM PST by Pokey78
It was 5.30pm on election day in Ukraine when the thugs in masks arrived armed with rubber truncheons.
Vitaly Kizima, an election monitor at Zhovtneve in Ukraine's Sumy region, watched in horror as 30 men in tracksuits stormed into the village polling station.
"They started to beat voters and election officials, trying to push through towards the ballot boxes," he told The Telegraph.
"People's faces were cut from blows to the head. There was blood all over."
The thugs - believed to be loyal to the pro-Russian presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovich from his stronghold, Donetsk - were repulsed only when locals pushed them back and a policeman fired warning shots.
The catalogue of abuses in the contest between Mr Yanukovich, the prime minister, and his opponent, the pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko, is growing longer by the day.
Ukraine is split, with the western, Europe-leaning regions voting overwhelmingly for Mr Yushchenko while the eastern part of the country - where many speak Russian - backing Mr Yanukovich.
Maya Syta, a journalist working at polling station 73 in a Kiev suburb, witnessed ballot papers destroyed with acid poured into a ballot box. "The officials were taking them out of the box and they couldn't understand why they were wet," she said.
"Then I saw they started to blacken and disintegrate as if they were burning. Two ballots were wrapped up into a tube with a yellow liquid inside. After a few moments they were completely eaten up."
In her polling station, 26 ballots were destroyed and had to be invalidated. Six other cases were recorded of ballots destroyed by acid.
The most common trick was "carousel" voting, in which busloads of Yanukovich supporters simply drove from one polling station to another casting multiple false absentee ballots.
In another brazen fraud recorded by observers from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, voters were given pens filled with ink that disappeared, leaving ballots unmarked and invalid.
Mr Yushchenko has refused to accept the election results, which gave him 46.61 per cent of the vote against 49.46 per cent for Mr Yanukovich. The figures are due to be reviewed tomorrow by the Supreme Court, although it cannot reverse them.
Diana Dutsyk, a member of Mr Yushchenko's campaign team, claimed that "dead souls" - late citizens' ballots used by imposters - were also used to augment his opponent's share of the vote.
And late last week Mr Yushchenko's headquarters released an audio recording in which senior members of Mr Yanukovich's campaign team were allegedly caught red-handed discussing how to fix the election result.
In the telephone conversation, a member of the team can be heard saying that he ordered a local election commission to disqualify votes.
Mr Yanukovich denies rigging the vote and claims that a "small clique" of his opponents is trying to divide Ukraine.
But mediators, including Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy chief, have hinted that a new election should be called and President George W Bush, said the world was "watching very closely" after Washington called the result into doubt.
Both candidates enjoy genuine support but election observers say that Mr Yanukovich's team used its bureaucratic muscle to rig last Sunday's election in his favour.
"The openness and cynicism of the manipulation was unprecedented," said Olexander Chernenko of the Committee of Voters of Ukraine (CVU), an American-funded organisation that has monitored elections for more than a decade.
About 11,000 complaints have been lodged so far with regional courts.
Mr Yanukovich has described the protest movement as an attempt at an "anti-constitutional coup"; Mr Yushchenko sees it as the "people's self-defence". But the scale of the indignant response from hundreds of thousands of protesters who swept onto the streets - and the extent of the election fraud - are a reflection of larger forces at work.
The state of almost 50 million people, crunched between East and West, was once Kievan Rus - the proto-state that gave birth to the Russian nation. Many in Moscow still think of the country as a southern province.
In recent years, a resurgent Russia under President Vladimir Putin has sought to reassert control over Kiev. Ukraine is an important pipeline route for Russian oil and gas, and a friendly regime will not impose high transit fees.
The country's Black Sea port of Sevastopol is also home to Russia's southern naval fleet, offering easy access to the Mediterranean.
Moscow is pushing for the creation of a "joint economic space" in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine - a project that Mr Yushchenko has said would dilute the country's sovereignty.
Mr Yanukovich, who has a criminal record and links to shady business magnates, is backed by Mr Putin, and draws his support from Russian-dominated eastern Ukraine.
However, Western countries such as Britain and the United States support Mr Yushchenko - who promises a turn towards Europe and pursuit of Nato membership. His supporters have been wooed with millions of dollars from the United States.
In turn, Mr Putin did what he could to support his preferred candidate. Immediately before the election, he made two high-profile visits to Kiev to meet Mr Yanukovich and the Ukraine's President, Leonid Kuchma.
Russian advisers, including a leading Moscow spin doctor, Gleb Pavlovsky, were said to be in effect running the prime minister's campaign.
Despite talk of an East-West showdown, many Ukrainians protesting about the election result say that Mr Yanukovich's criminal background is unacceptable, not his bias towards Russia.
The prime minister was twice convicted for robbery and battery in his youth and is seen as the protege of a group of business oligarchs known as "the Donetsk fellas" from the eastern region where he was once governor.
"How could they dare try to impose such a bandit on us?" asked Yuri, who was ferrying protesters to Kiev's Independence Square yesterday in a car festooned with orange streamers. "We will never accept it."
They should redo the election, but how can it be done in a way that ensures they are free and fair?
Mr Yanukovich's tactics are straight out of the Democratic National Committees playbook.
"...voters were given pens filled with ink that disappeared, leaving ballots unmarked and invalid."
ah yes, the old disappearing ink trick.
Obviously DNC hired hands from Philly or Detroit.
Wow.
And people complained about G'tmo & Abu Ghriab
And Dick Morris was an advisor to Yushchenko. Where are the cries of American toe suckers influencing the Ukraine elections?
The BHHRG is not a non-partisan organization - while attempting to make hay of the good will associated with the "Helsinki" organization, they're explicitly disowned by the real organization, and considering they put their dubious talents behind lending legitimacy to farces like the recent election in the Ukraine, it's no wonder why.
I just read the Drudge article about Yushchenko and his possible poisoning. I suppose if you can't beat him, get rid of him...huh?
What does this mean? The United States government was supporting the opposition in the Ukranian election? Or that millions in dollars from private citizens or companies in the U.S. was given the opposition campaign? Anyone know?
Can anything be done for him? The article didn't shed any light on a prognosis-I guess because there has been no diagnosis-but I bet someone knows what really happened to him.
Bump
The 'Rats are eagerly studying the techniques and methods for use in 2006.
Nobody is talking about the exit polls anymore because the real evidence is coming in.
Here, try this Link. From that link four former U.S. congressmen ( Larry Pressler (R-S.D.), Bob Schaffer (R-CO), John Rhodes (R-AR) and Dennis Hertel (D-MI))describe the corrupt election they witnessed.
What really stands out to me is how these congressmen clearly state that the ballot counting process is not free and open. It's closed. Yushchenko and his party were not able to witness the counting.
John Rhodes:But then the ballots left the polling station and we have no idea what happened to them later. And if the entire process is not completely open, then we have no guarantee that any part of the process is completely open.
It's from George Soros, who resides here. He hates Orthodox Christianity and Russia about as much as he hates American conservatism.
This whole topic pushes my hot button like you guys can't even believe. My husband and I are right in the middle of adopting out of Ukraine now. And I'm purposely learning Ukrainian instead of Russian, even though everyone in Ukraine speaks both -- the reason being that during Soviet rule, the Ukrainians were thrown in prison by the Russians for the "crime" of speaking their native tongue. Lovely, huh? They HAD to speak Russian or nothing at all. Today, there is such bitterness left over from the decades of oppressive Russian rule that there are many older Ukranians who refuse to speak Russian. Thus, out of respect for all Ukrainians, and our daughter-to-be in particular, I want to stand in solidarity with them, and speak their native tongue. NOT the tongue of the oppressor. (This is not to say that I think the Russian people are to blame. Not at all. I place the blame squarely on corrupt elements in the Russian governemnt.)
Then this Ukrainian election happens, and it's just sickening to see that "element" rearing its ugly head again trying to exert its stranglehold over these people again.
And to thicken the plot in our Ukrainian adoption case as it pertains to the news -- get this -- our case worker is RUSSIAN. So picture this.... Thanksgiving Day I'm on the phone with him and he's just gotten back from Russia where I'm trying to get the latest update and he asks me if I watch the news, saying "there's a revolution in Ukraine!" (don't you love it? "a revolution") (uhh, I think they call it, people recognizing fraud when they see it and not standing for it, buddro) I quickly shot back, "Yeah, I watch the news. The election was totally fraudulent. The Kremlin committed fraud and the Ukrainian candidate who really won the election was cheated out of victory." Well, at that, my case worker laughed a KGB type laugh and I thought (uh-oh) and he said,(insert your best Russian accent) "Well, this is a matter of opinion." I said, "Well, our government isn't going to recognize the Ukrainian election or government as legitmate with this guy in there."
My Russian case worker says, "Ukraine is split. The Eastern half wants the Russian choice, the Western half wants the European- American choice."
At that assessment, I thought to myself, What the "H" are you talking about, the Western half wants "the 'American' choice? The only choice the Americans want for Ukraine is the choice that represents the WILL OF THE UKRAINIAN PEOPLE, YOU KNUCKLEHEAD!!! Then he said "The one [already elected] is Putin's choice."
Yeah...he actually says "he's Putin's choice."
I'm thinking (and it's a good thing I didn't think to say this till AFTER I got off the phone or I might say something that would jeopardize my chances of ever getting our daughter) but after I hung up, I was so mad, all I wanted to do was shout at my Russian case worker:
"Who the heck gives a RIP who PUTIN wants to be the President of Ukraine???? What about the FALL OF THE SOVIET UNION DON'T YOU GUYS GET??????
Another element to consider is that if the media focuses on election fraud elsewhere, it helps undermine Bush.
I hope the situation works out in the Ukraine; everyone deserves a fair election.
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