There’s a joke being swapped on the Ukrainian pages of Facebook just now: “If you’re in a café in Kyiv, and a man in a mask and helmet carrying a wooden club walks in, then… he’s probably got two university degrees and speaks a foreign language fluently.”
What could have happened in Ukraine to make middle-class people, professionals, businessmen, students, teachers, intellectuals, musicians, artists and office workers drop their books, tablets and pens and take up clubs and cudgels against their own government?
For make no mistake: although there are a few violent extremists among the anti-government protesters, the majority of them come from a broad cross-section of Ukrainian society.
This taking-up-of-arms by the general public didn’t happen during the Orange Revolution of 2004-2005, a revolt that was remarkable for the lack of violence that came from the opposition in response to the attempt by Viktor Yanukovych to steal the presidency.
The Ukrainian people were angry then, but they didn’t build massive barricades all over the downtown, seize Kyiv City Hall and start throwing cobblestones and Molotov cocktails at the police.
What has changed?
The difference now is that Ukrainians see a clear and present danger to their public liberty and their country’s fragile democracy. The current protests against the government were peaceful for two months, and in the same spirit as those of the Orange Revolution, right up until the point that the public first clearly saw the nakedness of Yanukovych’s ambition to seize dictatorial powers.
That Yanukovych was indeed greedily reaching for the jewel of public liberty is obvious when one considers the “dictatorship” laws he had rammed through the Verkhovna Rada on Jan. 16, illegally, and in contempt of all parliamentary procedure.
“I’m in a terrible shock,” a lawyer friend wrote to me on Facebook on that “Black Thursday.”
She was right to be shocked: Every Ukrainian who took the slightest interest in politics, economics and the future of democracy in Ukraine could now see what a serious and immediate threat Yanukovych’s continued rule now poses to they themselves, and not merely to the rather fluffy idea of a “European future for Ukraine” as had been the case before.
Yanukovych had just made it personal.
With hindsight it now seems obvious that some sort of violent confrontation would break out on Jan. 19, after the next big Sunday meeting on the Maidan, as it did on Dec. 1, when public outrage at the government was at a similar level following the savage beating of students on the Maidan by the Berkut riot-control police officers.
Moreover, rumors had been circulating for days before on the social networks that some groups were planning violent action against the government.
And when violence did break out on Hrushevskoho Street, and the stones and Molotov cocktails started to fly, thousands of formerly peaceful protesters were literally right behind the small number of extremists who launched the hostilities, shouting “Molodtsy!”
The people of the Maidan were frustrated at the lack of progress achieved by the three opposition leaders, UDAR’s Vitali Klitchko, Batkivshyna’s Arseniy Yatseniuk, and Svoboda’s Oleh Tiahnybok, who are now attempting to ride the large, powerful and very angry bull of Maidan public opinion.
It doesn’t appear they have a very good grip on its horns.
That’s because the stakes are much higher now. The stealing of a presidential election was serious, but that pales in comparison with the threat of Ukraine as we know it disappearing from the European map, and being replaced by a Ukraine-shaped Belarus, or Kazakhstan, or Russia.
The Ukrainian public is right to threaten the use of force against the Yanukovych regime. They now have no choice but to shout loudly and carry big sticks.
By attempting to take away Ukrainians’ liberties, the regime has lost its legitimacy. Yanukovych must go, by force if needs be. But what kind of force should be used?
Here, while having some sympathy with the strategy of the likes of Praviy Sektor, we must strongly disagree with their tactics. As the standoff between the anti-government protesters and the riot police on Hrushevskoho Street shows, any aggressive physical attack on the minions of the regime is only likely to result in further deaths – most if not all on the protesters’ side.
The government, of course, understands that getting the opposition to foreswear the use of force (while of course reserving its own right to use deadly force in the name of the security of the state) is vital if it is to remain in power.
“What is important today is to calm the public and stop the confrontation. Bloodshed should never be allowed. Representatives of the authorities and opposition forces understand this perfectly well,” head of Ukraine’s Presidential Administration Andriy Klyuyev said at a meeting with chairman of the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs Elmar Brok on Jan. 29 in Kyiv.
Klyuyev’s right that there should be no more bloodshed, but bloodshed there will surely be if the anti-government protesters step back from confrontation now.
The anti-government protesters shouldn’t stop using force against the government, but we have to be clear what we mean when we say “force.”
The force of the people of the Maidan is in their unity, numbers and determination to see it through to the end. It’s vital that people resist the attempts by the government to sow discord amongst their ranks. They must continue to man the barricades and attend rallies in huge numbers.
They must not stop their protests even if the government appears to be making concessions.
For if the Yanukovych regime is able to break any of the components of the anti-government protesters’ force, then the government will bring its own, much more violent force to bear on its foes, as it did on Jan, 22, when protesters’ blood was spilled in the capital.
And then the opposition will indeed, in the words of Patrick Henry, be inevitably ruined.
Euan MacDonald is a former Kyiv Post editor.
