[Media-watch] PR in the Ukraine

[Barry White]

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Barry White
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PR man to Europe's nastiest regimes

David Aaronovitch
Tuesday November 30, 2004
The Guardian

Whenever, as this past week, eastern Europe is on the news, so too is a man
called John Laughland. Last Sunday he was playing Ukrainian expert on the
BBC's The World This Weekend, the day before he was here in the Guardian
defending the Ukrainian election "result", and at the beginning of the month
he was writing for the Spectator - also on Ukraine.
Laughland's great strength is that he sees what no one else in the west
seems to. Where reporters in Kiev, including the Guardian's own Nick
Paton-Walsh, encounter a genuine democracy movement, Laughland comes across
"neo-Nazis" (Guardian), or "druggy skinheads from Lvov" (Spectator). And
where most observers report serious and specific instances of electoral
fraud and malpractice on the part of the supporters of the current prime
minister, Laughland complains only of a systematic bias against (the
presumably innocent) Mr Yanukovich.

A quick trawl establishes this to be the Laughland pattern over the past few
years and concerning several countries. Laughland has variously queried the
idea that human rights are a problem in Belarus, or that the Serbs behaved
so very savagely in Kosovo. He has defended Slobodan Milosevic, criticised
the International Tribunal in the Hague and generally argued that the
problem in countries normally associated with human rights abuses is, in
fact, the intervention of western agencies.

It was the British Helsinki Human Rights Group hat that he was wearing last
Sunday. On its website the BHHRG - of which Laughland is a trustee -
describes itself as a non-governmental organisation which monitors human
rights in the 57 member states of the Organisation for Security and
Co-operation in Europe. Laughland is listed as a trustee, the historian Mark
Almond (to be found writing about the Ukraine in last week's New Statesman)
is its chairman.

Founded in 1992, the BHHRG sends observers to elections and writes reports
which - along Laughlandish lines - almost invariably dispute the accounts
given by better known human rights organisations. This stance has led to the
BHHRG being criticised by the International Helsinki Federation for Human
Rights (established in 1976) as preferring "the role [is to take] PR flak
for a new breed of authoritarian rulers in Europe" to the business of
actually monitoring abuses.

So what on earth is going on here? I know nothing about BHHRG's finances,
but the ideological trail is fascinating. Take the co-founder of the group,
Christine Stone. She was a lawyer before she helped set up BHHRG. Since then
she has "written for a number of publications including the Spectator and
Wall Street Journal on eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union".

This information comes from a US website called Antiwar.com where, for a
while, Stone had a regular Thursday column. But Antiwar.com was not a
leftwing site opposing the Iraq war. It was a rightwing site set up to
oppose the Kosovo intervention in 1999. Its "editorial director" was a man
called Justin Raimondo who was active in the small US Libertarian party
before joining the Republican party. In the 1992, 1996 and 2000 elections he
supported the campaigns of Pat Buchanan, the far-right isolationist
candidate.

Raimondo is also an "adjunct scholar" with the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
This is a libertarian think-tank in Auburn, Alabama, founded by one Lew
Rockwell, who describes himself as "an opponent of the central state, its
wars and its socialism". A contributor to Rockwell's own site is Daniel
McAdams, who is - in his own words "honoured to be associated" with the
British Helsinki Human Rights Group.

Trail 2. Laughland is also European Director of the European Foundation
(patron, Mrs M Thatcher), which - judging by its website - seems to spend
most of its time and energy sending out pamphlets by arch-Europhobe Bill
Cash. A synopsis of one of Laughland's own books, however, notes his
argument that, "Post-national structures ... and supranational organisations
such as the European Union - are ... corrosive of liberal values (and) the
author shows the ideology as a crucial core of Nazi economic and political
thinking."

Beginning to get the picture now? Trail 3 leads us to Sanders Research
Associates, a "risk consultancy" for which Laughland is, according to their
website, "a regular contributor" and to which companies can subscribe for
information and advice. The "principal" is a Chris Sanders. The kind of
steer Sanders gives his customers can be adduced from this report on the
morning of the US presidential election. "We will be very surprised," he
wrote, "if on Wednesday John Kerry has not won a clear majority of electoral
college votes and that his supporters are not nursing substantial post vote
celebration hangovers, if not still drinking the champagne."

Lots of people got that one wrong, and some blamed their own judgment. Not
Sanders. "Our bet," he says following the results, "is that we will soon be
adding an investigation into the biggest vote fraud in history.'"

Sanders, it seems, is not beyond the odd bit of conspiracising. In a
bulletin from June 2002 he also has something to suggest about the Twin
Towers atrocity. "It was obvious then, and it is obvious now," he writes,
"that something besides the brilliance of a band of terrorists or the
incompetence of America's security apparatus was responsible for the
disaster of 9/11." But he doesn't tell us what that "something" was.

Sanders on America and Laughland on Ukraine, however, are not the most
amazing features of Sanders Research Associates. That distinction belongs to
the report on Rwanda written for Sanders by a Canadian lawyer named Chris
Black. Black is the only person I have ever seen putting the word genocide
in quotation marks when applied to Rwanda. Rwanda, you see, was all the US's
fault, and wasn't carried out by Hutus in any case. It was all got up to
justify US intervention in the region. He condemns the "demonising (of) the
Hutu leadership".

Since 2000 Black has been the lead counsel representing General Augustin
Ndindiliyimana, chief of staff of the Rwandan gendarmerie, at the
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. He is also chair of the legal
committee for the international committee for the defence of Slobodan
Milosevic. Last year (though not for Sanders) Black went on a delegation to
North Korea. The report he wrote on his return is full of references to
happy peasants, committed soldiers and delightful guides. The North Korean
system, he suggested, being "participatory", was in many ways more
democratic than parliamentary systems in the west.

This is weird company. And what we seem to have in Laughland and his
associates is a group of right-wing anti-state libertarians and
isolationists, suspicious of any foreign entanglements, who have somehow
morphed into apologists for the worst regimes and most appalling dictators
on the planet.

And where does it all end up? A couple of weeks ago Sanders commended to his
clients "John Laughland's series of articles [showing that] the attack on
Iraq is just the southern offensive of a larger campaign to tighten the
noose on Russia." And he continued, "What is less well understood are the
risks that the unravelling political compact in Israel poses for the United
States and Great Britain, whose political processes, intelligence services,
military, media and financial establishments are so thoroughly enmeshed with
Israel's."

Read that last sentence again and then ask yourself: in what way are
Britain's media and financial interests "thoroughly enmeshed" with Israel's?

ends


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