I was forced to flee my home country a few months ago. For the outside world, it’s not easy to explain why. The country is Ukraine, a democratic state that went through a revolution six years ago, and is still fighting a bloody war started by Russia.
Indeed, Ukraine offers an important warning for other states in the midst of pro-democracy movements: safeguarding freedom of speech after the revolution is critical for its eventual success.
Overthrowing an autocrat does not mean that everything will be fine in the country that threw him out. What western institutions involved in democracy building should take into account is that after the fall of autocratic regimes, the problems are far from over – on the contrary, it’s just the beginning of a new struggle, and it’s even harder.
After the 2014 revolution, Ukraine created specialised anti-corruption bodies, and reforms followed in other sectors, including healthcare and education. The country received billions in western money aimed at reforms, military improvement and civil society development. In 2017, the Association Agreement between the European Union and Ukraine, which had been negotiated during 2007-2011 and signed in 2014, finally entered into full force.
So, one would think that everything is fine with Ukrainian democracy. But it’s not.
In July 2020, Zaborona media, an outlet I co-founded in 2018, published an article (“Neo-Nazi links of a Facebook fact-checker exposed”).
My team raised a controversial and important question: is it OK when two well-known members of a highly trusted fact-checking organisation, which became a Facebook partner earlier this year, are friends with prominent Ukrainian neo-Nazis?
Especially when a significant part of Russian propaganda and “justification” for attacking Ukraine was based on the idea that “there is rampant fascism in Ukraine”.
If you are a fact-checker, you have to tackle this kind of disinformation. But if people in your organisation have friendly relationships with real neo-Nazis, would it be fair to be involved in such an important process as fact-checking?
I always looked at these people as agents of democracy, agents of positive changes who are fighting the information war against Russia – and I thought that they should not allow themselves to pursue an agenda. It turned out that for them this is the norm.
Asking this question was like a bomb going off. Many civil society activists who went through the Maidan revolution started labeling me a “Kremlin agent”. Fact-checkers from the StopFake organisation released a statement in which they falsely accused Zaborona of continuing a pro-Kremlin attack on them. Many of them claimed that journalists shouldn’t damage the reputation of the fact-checkers. One popular Ukrainian TV anchor published several Facebook posts with death threats against me, as well as my home address and pictures of my son. I informed the police about it.
But the police didn’t react. On the contrary, the Kyiv police spokesperson told us that they deal with these kinds of cases every day – we shouldn’t be worried. The police opened an investigation a month after I filed a complaint, when a local court ordered them to do so. The reform of Ukrainian law enforcement was launched back in 2015 with great fanfare. Georgian reformers under the command of former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili and with the support of western donors introduced substantial changes into the system. But soon enough, the Interior Minister started to sabotage the ongoing reform – and by the end of 2016, the Georgian team had to quit.
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Ekaterina Sergatskova | Radio Free (2020-10-21T07:51:28+00:00) When a dictatorship falls, the problems are far from over. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/10/21/when-a-dictatorship-falls-the-problems-are-far-from-over/
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