Ukraine | 17-12-04

Delta Orange
Horatio Morpurgo arrived in Kiev shortly after the start of the Ukrainian ‘Orange Revolution’ last November. He was en route to the Danube Delta and an ecological storm. On reflection, he found some underlying parallels.

Operating one of the makeshift check-points into the tent protest on Kreschatik Street was a young man who asked for some ID. I showed a press card and he let me inside, shutting a ‘gate’ of grimy polystyrene behind me. ‘What do you want to know?’ he asked. ‘Why are you here?’ I replied. ‘Because I have a soul,’ he answered. Amid all the comment about Ukraine’s Orange Revolution one detail has been unfairly neglected. None of the major news-gathering agencies maintain a permanent office in Kiev. The BBC, Reuters, Associated Press and the rest all cover Ukraine from their Moscow offices. Consider what follows from this. Any corporate journalist worth his or her salt must appear both instantly up to speed with the news as it breaks and effortlessly authoritative about the background culture. But how do you perform this trick without a permanent office?

You can’t. So what could be more natural than to fall back on Cold War paradigms, comforting because familiar? Left-leaning omniscience saw PR companies, the hidden hand of the US Embassy and a dangerous nationalism everywhere. Its right-leaning counterpart gloated over Russia’s discomfiture, the onward march of liberty, civilization and the rest. And so, as it has been for 300 years, Ukraine was viewed as a space for outsiders to compete over.

The results had an unmistakably mushy, re-heated feel to them. Because they were so obviously theory-driven. Because to walk through central Kiev during those protests and then sit down to write something like that must have required a heart of stone. Or maybe a head of solid wood. The city centre was a very, very interesting place, in its own right. Kreschatik Street ‘housed’, fed and organized about 12,000 people - not all young, not all students, not all from the West of the country and not noticeably under any illusions about the United States. Indeed, Viktor Yushchenko, their candidate, was committed to an immediate withdrawal of the 1,650 Ukrainian troops in Iraq. The determination of the protesters, and the level of support they enjoyed from all over the country, simply could not have been ‘orchestrated’ to any significant degree. It was much too cold out for playing geopolitical games. This was about something else.

It was much too cold out for playing geopolitical
games. This was about something else.

Beyond the wish to live in a country where the President is elected fairly, the protesters I spoke to offered a fascinating but not a coherent picture of what they were doing. The sheer scale of the protests and the variety of motivation were bewildering at first. And, as we know from other European upheavals over the last 15 years, public rhetoric at the time is rarely a good guide to what emerges afterwards. You came away from those protests at first with only the most coarse-grained and contradictory images of what was happening.

So we might try a narrower view. I arrived in Kiev on the second night of the protests - but not to write about them. I’d been following a controversy on the internet for 18 months. The Bistroe Shipping Canal was a pet project of out-going President Leonid Kuchma. It aimed to attract business to the port of Ismail, in the largely Russian-speaking south of the country, by cutting a canal through the Ukrainian sector of the Danube Delta. Ocean-going vessels would then be able to use the port.

The Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve is protected under international law from just such developments. Kuchma’s response was to re-designate the course of his canal as no longer a ‘core region’ of the reserve. Phase 1 of the project was completed in August 2004, in the teeth of protests from right across the region and the world. Opposition to completion of the project has continued as bitterly as ever. The project went ahead even though Kuchma’s own Minister of the Environment (by training an economist) cast doubt on the proposed canal’s economic benefits. Quite apart from its flagrant illegality, the minister argued that it was not clear that a third point of entry to the Danube was necessary - most shipping enters the river via two Romanian canals. The minister was sacked. Ukraine’s own National Academy of Science also opposed the scheme.

The most vocal opponents of the project locally are the staff of the Biosphere Reserve. As the crisis in Kiev deepened, local militia started arriving at their offices in the Delta village of Vilkovo at eight in the morning and carrying out ‘inspections’ until six in the evening. In a desperate attempt to discredit the opponents of the canal while they still could, ‘inspections’ were carried out on everything from administrative paperwork and electrical fittings to the personal belongings of research assistants. By contrast, the offices of the company building the canal - a Ukrainian-German joint venture - are housed on the third floor of the Border Police Headquarters in the same village, with a perimeter wall patrolled round the clock by armed guards.

On the face of it, Vilkovo offers a dramatization in miniature of the same stand-off as in Kiev. The construction company, Delta Lodsman, has alleged that foreign (Western) NGOs are simply using the canal as a good campaign theme. Its director hinted to me that the Finance Minister who opposed the project had been in their pay. At the Biosphere Reserve, for their part, they draw attention to the fact that the same Minister of Transport who had been zealous for the canal also offered Yushchenko’s opponent, Viktor Yanukovich, the trains and buses he needed to get his rent-a-mob to Kiev, in a failed attempt to organize rival protests.

the Delta offers a reservoir of images of perpetual transformation - provocative
ideas about what ‘change’ or ‘growth’ or ‘wealth’ might really signify

If we look more closely still, we see that it is not only a physical ecosystem that the canal is being cut through. The designation of the Danube Delta as a Biosphere Reserve was originally a Romanian idea - 75 per cent of the Delta is in Romania. The reserve was brought into being by the second piece of legislation passed by their parliament after Nicolae Ceau s escu’s execution. When Ukraine joined in, this was part of the tremendous upsurge of environmental concern which followed the Chernobyl nuclear power station disaster in 1986 and which contributed so much to the collapse of Soviet power in Eastern Europe. The Biosphere Reserve was from the very start bound up with an ideal about how this part of the world ought to develop after 1989. It is that ideal which the canal is being cut through.

Or we might try a different conception of time altogether. Most of the Delta is a relatively stabilized, mature environment. The Ukrainian sector, however, is also its most dynamic region. Its branch of the river carries more water and silt than any other - about 70 million tonnes of sediment each year. Where this massive flow meets saltwater the sediments are precipitated out of it, forming sandbars. These are quickly colonized by pioneer plant species and serve as nesting sites for seabirds. A strip of new land forms, lengthening until it blocks the channel which originally gave rise to it. The reduced flow through the channel now feeds a brackish lagoon, with its own biological dynamic. River-born sediment and debris from vegetation gradually clog the lagoon until it fills and is colonized by reeds - a new ecosystem again. The water flow which set all this in motion must now find another route to the open sea, where a new sandbar forms and the process is repeated.

Now whether you take a mechanical or a mystical view of nature doesn't really matter, faced with a live delta system on this scale. Such is the pace of change that anyone who works here for 10 or 15 years will have witnessed the creation of several kilometres of new land - most of this part of the Biosphere Reserve has formed over the last 250 years. It is a marvel. There are satellite images in which the growth pattern is visible as curved layers. Looked at on this time-scale, the Delta offers a reservoir of images of perpetual transformation - provocative ideas about what ‘change’ or ‘growth’ or ‘wealth’ might really signify. Some counterpoint to the tune played by most television and advertising.

The intricate ecology is matched by the area’s cultural palimpsest. The inaccessibility of the Delta and its lagoons has attracted successive waves of refugees and settlers: those fleeing religious conflict in 18th Russia - the so-called Old Believers; Bulgarians fleeing Turkish rule further south; Cossacks fleeing imperial Russia after 1708; ‘Gagaousi’ - the descendants of Turks who converted to Christianity; Greek surnames, Romanian villages, abandoned German settlements.

How much of this fine detail survives the classification of the entire region by journalists as ‘Russian-speaking’ or ‘eastward-looking’? The mass protests in the region’s biggest city, Odessa, were as strong on irritation with corrupt local officials as they were on windy theories about the nation’s destiny.

Similar ‘untidiness’ also appears around the Bistroe issue. The project is in fact popular with the local population. Environmentalist claims that the spawning grounds of the Danube herring and seabird nesting-sites will be drastically affected in the long term have not been backed up by any serious science. Suggestions that the canal will be lined with concrete and hard-core are not based on fact.

The official justification for the canal is not entirely disingenuous. Ocean-going cargo and cruise ships probably would help to revitalize desperately run-down local communities along the Chilia branch of the Danube. Suspicions about NGOs are not entirely unfounded. Corruption in government makes NGOs the natural choice for Western donors. It is true that their activities often require closer examination than they receive. ‘The Bistroe issue is a virtual protest,’ the director of Delta Lodsman, Vasily Prokopenko, told me. ‘Not a single NGO has sent someone to see what is actually happening here. They aren’t interested in what is actually happening here.’

None of this ‘untidiness’ alters the fact that the failure to consult with neighbouring states is in contravention of at least four international agreements signed by the Government of Ukraine. Riding roughshod over its own best advice is also illegal. ‘This isn’t just about the future of our reserve,’ argues Aleksandr Voloshkevich, director of the Biosphere Reserve and a leading opponent of the project. ‘The canal sets a precedent which is extremely dangerous for our country - it’s the validity of all legal safeguards for the environment in Ukraine which is at stake.’

The mass protests in the region’s biggest city, Odessa, were as strong on irritation
with corrupt local officials as they were on windy theories about the nation’s destiny.

On balance there is, clearly, a right side and a wrong one. But between these mighty opposites there are all the smaller interests - companies like Salix, which attempt to develop tourism around Vilkovo in ways that will sustain rather than degrade the environment people come here to admire (see www.salix.od.ua). It’s ideas like this that are at stake here as well.

Which brings me back to that crowd in Kiev, its flags swaying from the ends of hundreds of fishing rods. Are they still such an unmanageable theme? The protesters may have sought - and received - the blessing of the Pope, Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel. But the analogy with 1989 is not straightforward. This is a society long familiar with the trappings of consumerism and the realities of life in the West. There is little of the wild optimism in general, or the America-worship in particular, which marked the revolutions that shook Europe 15 years ago. Incandescent those crowds in Kiev certainly were, braving the bitterness of the snow and that icy wind - but in their own way.

I talked to Elena, a history student and one of the tent protest’s organizers. The French Revolution was one of her favourite subjects, she said. So I asked her which of its many interpretations she found the most compelling - economic, psychological, philosophical, meteorological (the run of bad harvests preceding it). All of these, in some ways, she answered, but there was a new approach she liked best - studying how interpretations change across time, seeing in this the best way to explore its meaning.

Alexi, a student of journalism, delivered a fiery account of Ukraine’s experience at Russia’s hands, from Peter the Great to the famine of the 1930s. When I asked how he was passing his time, he produced a book of poems by a contemporary Ukrainian writer about drug addiction, what New York is like if you haven’t got any money and what Rimbaud or Baudelaire might have thought of it.

I select these two more or less at random. Now compare them with the bizarre programming put out by the government-controlled TV channels. Much of this explored various aspects of the 20th century struggle against fascism. But there was a documentary from the 1970s showing ‘popular manifestations’ - ranks of good citizens marching under official banners, Ukrainian ‘folk dancing’ in appropriate costumes. The days when demonstrations were wholesome entertainment for all the family. Plus everybody knowing their place.

Which is just what this lot don’t, and won’t pretend to any more. They weren’t all students by any means. But those who were had been studying the same things as they are in Warsaw, Cologne or Barcelona: postmodern philosophy, economics, engineering, history - the whole madly conflictual lot. They offered no ‘coherent picture’ precisely because they were students as they are everywhere - trying on as many or as few different hats as they chose: caps with poetical feathers in them, journalistic trilbies, nationalistic helmets, hard-topped economic hats, whatever it is that philosophers wear on their heads.

So to pump them, as I did to begin with, for some 'coherent vision' was a bit like screening footage of demonstrations in Kiev in the good old days. It missed the point. A revolution, rather like a delta, is an immensely complicated system. We sin against its dynamism, its unpredictable vitality - rather like hubristic engineers - when we make exaggerated claims for a single explanation. It is the new sandbar, suddenly visible offshore after a tremendous storm. If the CIA and its millions imagine they raised that storm, they flatter themselves.

And a revolution is not like a delta, too, because everything is more precarious with us. There are no reliable satellite images showing the human spirit’s progress according to discoverable laws. The worst in it may engulf the best at any moment, or vice versa. Any 'laws' governing the human spirit appear to be a good deal more obscure than those which govern hydrology.

They are, however, analogous in this at least - that no static model can ever do either justice. Sandbar, lagoon, reed bed, new sand bar - the dynamic driving this process cannot be identified with any particular stage of it. Cold War paradigms dusted off and pressed back into service may fill air time and column space, but they do not serve any other useful purpose.

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