March 21, 2002
Why are We in Ukraine?
By Rep. Ron Paul
I strongly oppose H. Res. 339, a bill by the United
States Congress which seeks to tell a sovereign nation how to
hold its own elections. It seems the height of arrogance for
us to sit here and lecture the people and government of Ukraine
on what they should do and should not do in their own election
process. One would have thought after our own election debacle
in November 2000, that we would have learned how counterproductive
and hypocritical it is to lecture other democratic countries
on their electoral processes. How would members of this body
- or any American - react if countries like Ukraine demanded
that our elections here in the United States conform to their
criteria? So I think we can guess how Ukrainians feel about this
piece of legislation.
Ukraine has been the recipient of hundreds
of millions of dollars in foreign aid from the United States.
In fiscal year 2002 alone, Ukraine was provided $154 million.
Yet after all this money - which we were told was to promote
democracy - and more than ten years after the end of the Soviet
Union, we are told in this legislation that Ukraine has made
little if any progress in establishing a democratic political
system.
Far from getting more involved in Ukraine's
electoral process, which is where this legislation leads us,
the United States is already much too involved in the Ukrainian
elections. The U.S. government has sent some $4.7 million dollars
to Ukraine for monitoring and assistance programs, including
to train their electoral commission members and domestic monitoring
organizations. There have been numerous reports of U.S.-funded
non-governmental organizations in Ukraine being involved in pushing
one or another political party. This makes it look like the United
States is taking sides in the Ukrainian elections.
The legislation calls for the full access
of Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)
monitors to all aspects of the parliamentary elections, but that
organization has time and time again, from Slovakia to Russia
and elsewhere, shown itself to be unreliable and politically
biased. Yet the United States continues to fund and participate
in OSCE activities. As British writer John Laughland observed
this week in The Guardian newspaper, "Western election monitoring
has become the political equivalent of an Arthur Andersen audit.
This supposedly technical process is now so corrupted by political
bias that it would be better to abandon it. Only then will countries
be able to elect their leaders freely.'' I think this is advice
we would be wise to heed.
Other aspects of this bill are likewise
troubling. This bill seeks, from thousands of miles away and
without any of the facts, to demand that the Ukrainian government
solve crimes within Ukraine that have absolutely nothing to do
with the United States. No one knows what happened to journalist
Heorhiy Gongadze or any of the alleged murdered Ukrainian journalists,
yet by adding it into this ill-advised piece of legislation we
are sitting here suggesting that the government has something
to do with the alleged murders. This meddling into the Ukrainian
judicial system is inappropriate and counter-productive.
We are legislators in the United States
Congress. We are not in Ukraine. We have no right to interfere
in the internal affairs of that country and no business telling
them how to conduct their elections. A far better policy toward
Ukraine would be to eliminate any U.S.-government imposed barrier
to free trade between Americans and Ukrainians.
Ron Paul, M.D. represents the 14th Congressional District of Texas in the United
States House of Representatives. |
