Neocon Fugitive Given Ukraine Province
Ukraine’s President Poroshenko has tapped another international
“carpetbagger” to rule his people, ex-Georgian President Saakashvili, a neocon
hero wanted in his homeland for embezzlement and human rights abuses who now
governs Odessa, reports Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
June 02, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "Consortium
News" - The latest political move by the
U.S.-backed “pro-democracy” regime in Ukraine was to foist on the people of
Odessa the autocratic Georgian ex-President Mikheil Saakashvili, a
neoconservative favorite and currently a fugitive from his own country which is
seeking him on charges of human rights violations and embezzlement.
New York Times correspondent David M. Herszenhorn justified
this imposition of a newly minted Ukrainian citizen on the largely
Russian-speaking population of Odessa by
saying that “the Ukrainian public’s general willingness to accept the
appointment of foreigners to high-level positions underscores the deep lack of
trust in any government after nearly a quarter-century of mismanagement and
corruption.”
Mikheil Saakashvili,
President of Georgia and U.S. President George Bush at a NATO meeting.
(Photo credit: NATO)
But Herszenhorn made no apparent effort to gauge how willing
the people of Odessa are to accept this choice of a controversial foreign
politician to govern them. The pick was made by President Petro Poroshenko and
is just the latest questionable appointment by the post-coup regime in Kiev.
For instance, shortly after the Feb. 22, 2014 putsch that
ousted elected President Viktor Yanukovych, the new U.S.-endorsed authorities in
Kiev named thuggish oligarch Igor Kolomoisky to be governor of Dnipropetrovsk in
southeastern Ukraine. Kolomoisky, regarded as one of Ukraine’s most corrupt
billionaires, ruled the region as his personal fiefdom until he was ousted by
Poroshenko earlier this year in a dispute over Kolomoisky’s use of strong-arm
tactics to maintain control of Ukrainian energy companies. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine’s
Oligarchs Turn on Each Other.”]
Poroshenko also has granted overnight Ukrainian citizenship to
other controversial foreigners to hold key positions in his government,
including Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko, an ex-U.S. State Department official
whose qualifications included enriching herself through her management of a $150
million U.S.-taxpayer-financed investment fund for Ukraine. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine
Finance Minister’s ‘American Values’.”]
Beyond his recruitment of questionable outsiders, Poroshenko
has made concessions to Ukraine’s far-right nationalists, including signing
legislation to extend official recognition to Ukrainian fascists who
collaborated with the Nazis in killing Jews and Poles during World War II. In a
bitter irony, the new law coincided with the world’s celebration in April of the
70th anniversary of Russian and U.S. troops bringing an end to the
Holocaust. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “How
Ukraine Commemorates the Holocaust.”]
Now Poroshenko has given Saakashvili his own province to
govern, rescuing him from an obscure existence in the Williamsburg neighborhood
of Brooklyn, New York. According to a New York Times
profile last September, Saakashvili was there “writing a memoir,
delivering ‘very well-paid’ speeches, helping start up a Washington-based think
tank and visiting old boosters like Senator John McCain and Victoria Nuland, the
assistant secretary of state.”
McCain and Nuland were key neocon backers of the coup that
ousted Yanukovych and touched off the bloody civil war that has killed thousands
of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, while also reviving Cold War tensions
between the West and Russia. Before the coup, McCain urged on right-wing
protesters with promises of U.S. support and Nuland
was overheard hand-picking Ukraine’s new leadership, saying “Yats is the
guy,” a reference to Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who became prime minister after the
coup.
According to the Times profile, Saakashvili also “entertained
David H. Petraeus, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency,”
another neocon favorite who ran into legal trouble himself when the FBI
discovered he had shared top-secret information with his biographer/lover and
then lied about it to FBI agents. Petraeus, however, received only
a suspended sentence and a fine in contrast to intelligence-community
whistleblowers who have faced serious prison time.
Models, Nude Artist and Massage Therapist
While cooling his heels in Brooklyn, Saakashvili fumed over
charges leveled against him by prosecutors in his home country of Georgia.
According to the Times profile, Saakashvili was accused of “using public money
to pay for, among other things, hotel expenses for a personal stylist, hotel and
travel for two fashion models, Botox injections and hair removal, the rental of
a yacht in Italy and the purchase of artwork by the London artist Meredith
Ostrom, who makes imprints on canvases with her naked, painted body. …
“Mr. Saakashvili is also accused of using public money to fly
his massage therapist, Dorothy Stein, into Georgia in 2009. Mr.
Saakashvili said he received a massage from Ms. Stein on ‘one occasion only,’
but Ms. Stein said she received 2,000 euros to massage him multiple times,
including delivering her trademark ‘bite massage.’ ‘He gave me a bunch of
presents,’ said Ms. Stein, who splits her time between Berlin and Hoboken,”
including a gold necklace.
The Georgian prosecutors also have charged Saakashvili with
human rights violations for his
violent crackdown on political protesters in 2007.
However, in Herszenhorn’s May 31 article about Saakashvili’s
appointment as Odessa’s governor, the Times correspondent (who has
behaved more like a pro-Kiev propagandist than an objective reporter)
wrote that the criminal charges against Saakashvili and other officials from his
government are “widely perceived as a campaign of political retribution.”
Herszenhorn didn’t say where he had gained that perception,
but it is true that Official Washington’s neoconservatives will broach no
criticism of their longtime hero Saakashvili, who was a big booster of the Iraq
War and even named a boulevard in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi in honor of
U.S. President George W. Bush.
Saakashvili apparently felt that his close ties to the Bush
administration would protect him in summer 2008 when he provoked a border clash
with Russian troops over the rebellious territory of South Ossetia. Georgia
suffered a sharp military defeat and Saakashvili’s political star quickly faded
among his countrymen, leading to his party’s rejection at the polls and his
exile.
But Saakashvili’s love of the high life might find similar
attitudes among some of the other “carpetbaggers” arriving in Ukraine to
take Ukrainian citizenship and get top jobs in the post-coup government.
Estonian Jaanika Merilo, an associate of Finance Minister Jaresko’s, was brought
in to handle Ukraine’s foreign investments, but Merilo is best known on the
Internet for her provocative party photos.
Janika Merilo, the
Estonian being put in charge of arranging foreign investments into Ukraine.
(From her Facebook page via Zero Hedge)
Janika Merilo, an
Estonian brought into the Ukrainian government to oversee foreign
investments. (From her Facebook page via Zero Hedge)
Yet, as much fun as some of these well-connected politicians
and bureaucrats may be having in Kiev, the plight of the average Ukrainian
continues to worsen as “free-market” reforms demanded by the International
Monetary Fund take hold. Those “reforms” have included slashing old-age
pensions, removing worker protections, and hiking the price of heating fuel.
Now, the latest “democratic” reform is to appoint a neocon
politician on the run from his own country’s criminal justice system to govern
what is likely to be a hostile population of ethnic Russians in Odessa.
On May 2, 2014, neo-Nazi street fighters set fire to Odessa’s
Trade Union Building and burned alive dozens of ethnic Russians who had taken
refuge there. The building was also spray-painted with Nazi slogans, including
praise for the Galician SS, a Ukrainian force that fought with the Nazis and
slaughtered Jews. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine’s
Dr. Strangelove Reality.”]
Overseeing that tense city now is an unelected ex-Georgian
neocon politician who is facing charges in his homeland for human rights abuses
and misuse of government funds — more “democracy promotion” in the tragic land
of Ukraine.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for
The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book,
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