In discussing Ukraine's need to find solutions to three fundamental challenges facing it in 1991--the consolidation of statehood, transformation of the economy, and the establishment of political democracy--Diuk noted that Ukraine surprised many contemporary observers by "successfully" dealing with several major threats to its sovereignty. These included Russia's attempts to re-claim Crimea--laid to rest with the 1997 Russian-Ukrainian border agreement--and the integration of a badly divided multi-ethnic population. Diuk also cited the 1997 NATO-Ukrainian Charter as evidence of Western acceptance of Ukraine's political importance.
In the economic arena the opposite occurred. Independent Ukraine's prospects to develop a prosperous economy initially were rated as excellent, given its wealth of natural resources and highly developed Soviet-era economy. However, Ukraine's choice of "slow" reform--while less disruptive than the "shock therapy" chosen by Poland and, to an extent, Russia--"opened the door," in Diuk's opinion, to large-scale corruption that continues to be a drag on the Ukrainian economy today.
Political democracy in Ukraine, according to Diuk, seemed a real possibility in 1991 with its ratification of independence by national referendum, and "Rukh" leader Vyacheslav Chornovil's success in garnering 20 percent of the vote in Ukraine's first post-Soviet presidential election. Diuk also said that, while media independence may have reached its high point in 1994 and has declined ever since, non-governmental organizations (NGOs)--first established in the early 1990's--are becoming stronger and less open to government influence. However, because the country continues to maintain a Soviet-style top-down political structure, Ukraine's executive branch has consolidated its authority through President Leonid Kuchma's right to make some 2,000 senior appointments at both the national and regional level, according to Diuk. Ukraine's dozens of weak political parties tend to be based on personalities--in Ukraine's case, the country's many business magnates, or oligarchs--rather than with ideologies or political platforms.
The parliamentary elections held this past March highlighted many of independent Ukraine's strengths and weaknesses--Diuk said that early publicity by NGOs of exit polling data on election night probably kept the authorities from engaging in massive vote fraud. Yet, Diuk added, when it came to the allocation of parliamentary seats, the pro-Kuchma "For a United Ukraine" party used its ties to the executive branch to effectively control the parliament in spite of its relatively weak showing at the polls.
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Personal Report from ArtUkraine Information Service (ARTUIS) News Reporter
in Kyiv
The Uprise Ukraine rally jointly organized by Yulia Tymoshenko bloc
of parties, the Socialist Party of Ukraine, the Communist Party of Ukraine
and Victor Yushchenko bloc 'Our Ukraine' took place today in all parts
of Ukraine. Over 20 thousand people participated in 'Vsenarodne Viche',
the major rally that took place in Kyiv on Evropeyska square around 3 p.m.
Carrying banners and slogans, chanting 'Away with Kuchma' people were coming up in large groups organized by the political parties with people being constantly reminded to avoid any provocations by the secret service or police agents who might try to discredit the event by provoking violence. According to the information on 7 p.m., no incidents were reported.
Among the speakers were Olexandr Moroz of the Socialist Party, Petro Symonenko of the Communist Party, Yulia Tymoshenko of the political bloc named after her, and Victor Yushchenko of Our Ukraine.
The meeting began with the minute of silence to commemorate Georgiy Gongadze, an opposition journalist kidnapped and murdered two years ago. The presence of Victor Yushchenko at the rally came as the biggest surprise for the crowd as up to the latest moment the information on his participation had been contradictory.
In what became one of his strongest speeches ever, Yushchenko called the current situation in Ukraine as the state of "misery, orderlessness and lawlessness", blaming the president and the minister for Internal Affairs for running out of Kyiv on the day of the rally. He also thanked all people who came to Kyiv from other parts of Ukraine, despite the obstacles created by the government like canceling all commuter trains to Kyiv and not allowing any buses from the regions to enter the capital.
In his speech Yushchenko also pointed out that today all TV channels broadcasting from Kyiv were shut off till late afternoon, and called on for the journalists of the national TV channels to show courage and to tell the truth about this rally, despite the instructions from the Presidential Administration. As an example of such courage he pointed out that the journalists from Novy Kanal who refused to go on the air with the news prepared in accordance with those instructions.
Yulia Tymoshenko in her speech called on to the rally participants not to stop there on the Maidan, but go on to the building of the Presidential Administration and continue picketing there until Mr. Kuchma would voluntarily step down from the office.
The gathering voted to approve a letter to the President calling on him to ask the people of Ukraine for forgiveness and to step down, a letter to the speaker urging him to call an extraordinary session of the parliament, and a letter to the heads of all diplomatic missions in Ukraine and to all members of international community calling on them not to have any official contact with Ukraine's president since he has lost support of the majority of Ukrainian people.
Then the rally divided into two groups to move to the Presidential Administration
simultaneously using different routes to continue picketing there. According
to the latest reports, participants began putting up tents to wait for
the President's return to Kyiv.
To his former boss, president Leonid Kuchma, Mr Melnychenko is a slanderer and a traitor. To Ukraine's political opposition, he is a vital source of evidence backing their claims that Mr Kuchma and his cronies have hijacked democracy and plundered the country's wealth.
Today, the opposition will mark the second anniversary of the disappearance of journalist Georgy Gongadze by staging what they promise will be the biggest protest yet against Mr Kuchma's rule. Fears that the rally could turn ugly are running high after security chiefs warned at the weekend that they would clamp down to ensure the protests remained peaceful.
As at similar rallies in the winter of 2000-2001, protesters called for Mr Kuchma to step down and answer in court to charges based on what are purported to be his secretly recorded conversations. Besides foul-mouthed tirades about Mr Gongadze, an outspoken critic of the president whose headless body was found near Kiev in November 2000, there are conversations that appear to link Mr Kuchma to the beating of a former member of parliament, embezzlement, rigging elections and selling arms to Iraq.
"It's already all over for Kuchma. Kuchma will be obliged to leave office . . . because particular steps will be undertaken in the near future that will show that he simply can't be president any longer," Mr Melnychenko said in an interview with the Financial Times.
But according to Mr Kuchma and his allies, Mr Melnychenko and the opposition are flogging a dead horse.
Ukraine is moving toward joining the European Union and Nato, the economy is growing and the recordings are forgeries.
Even most of those calling for Mr Kuchma to step down doubt it will happen. Viktor Yushchenko, who steered clear of the protests when he was prime minister in 2000-2001, says he is supporting today's rally to pressure Mr Kuchma into allowing a democratic transfer of power when his second and final term ends in 2004.
Meanwhile Mr Melnychenko is a world away, living with his wife and daughter in the US. He spent his first six months after leaving Ukraine hiding in central Europe, but had grown confident enough to invite the FT's reporter to his Long Island apartment.
Mr Melnychenko has recently been changing addresses frequently and taking other precautions, according to his lawyer, Scott Horton, who is also president of the New York-based International League for Human Rights. Mr Horton said he received a call from the FBI on August 20 telling him the agency had fresh intelligence that someone in Ukraine could be plotting to kill the former guard.
The US government has been struggling quietly to get its hands on Mr Melnychenko's library of recordings, which he says run into hundreds of hours.
As soon as Mr Melnychenko landed in the US in April 2001, he was served a subpoena from an attorney in San Francisco demanding he turn over copies of all his recordings.
Mr Melnychenko refused, saying he would turn over only those recordings that contained evidence of crimes. In a pair of closed federal grand jury hearings in San Francisco in April and May, he explained he planned to return to Ukraine and felt obliged to uphold the oath he made to not reveal legitimate state secrets.
Even some of the opposition politicians who use Mr Melnychenko's evidence have been frustrated with his insistence on keeping control of the recordings. Alexander Zhyr, who headed a parliamentary commission investigating Mr Kuchma until he was barred from running for re-election this year, says Mr Melnychenko's handling of the recordings has been a "tragedy".
His lawyer said Mr Melnychenko was "actively co-operating" with Justice Department officials in Washington, but the dispute over his refusal to turn over all the recordings "still isn't fully resolved". Justice Department officials said restrictions prevented them from commenting.
The State Department has commissioned an examination of one of Mr Melnychenko's recordings, which purports to show Mr Kuchma approving a plan to sell Iraq $100m worth of advanced air defence radars. A spokesman said so far no conclusions had been drawn.
He added: "At this point we don't have proof that the [radar] system is in Iraq, but we are looking into it."
The recording about Iraq has thrust Mr Melnychenko into an intensifying debate in Washington over how to react to Mr Kuchma's increasingly warm relationship with America's foremost enemy. Last month Mr Kuchma welcomed the arrival of Iraq's first full-time resident ambassador in Kiev and said he saw "good prospects" for promoting ties.
"Washington is divided not only on the question of how to deal with
the recordings, but also more broadly on the question of how to deal with
Kuchma and his activities," says Roman Kupchinsky, the former head of Radio
Liberty's Ukrainian-language service, a US government-funded news radio
that broadcasts in Ukraine.
Ukraine has begun its transition to the post-Kuchma era. The "velvet revolution," which began nearly two years ago with the "Kuchmagate" revelations of corruption and other executive misdemeanors, has served to galvanize popular consciousness, paved the way for a victory by opposition forces in the March parliamentary elections, and is now moving toward its climax. Ukraine currently resembles the USSR in the late 1980s when CPSU General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev struggled to keep pace with developments, instead of controlling them.
The situation since the March elections has changed the balance of forces in favor of the opposition, and the executive is now in a state of panic and disorientation. In Our Ukraine leader Viktor Yushchenko's words, Ukraine is in the depths of its worst political crisis since independence. Prosecutor Svyatoslav Piskun has promised to resolve within six months the murder of opposition journalist Heorhiy Gongadze and his office has now admitted for the first time that it was a "political murder." The opposition chose 16 September, the second anniversary of Gongadze's abduction, to launch major protests.
The actions of the authorities since "Kuchmagate" have radicalized moderates in the opposition camp, particularly within Our Ukraine, whose business group Razom now supports a referendum on early presidential elections, something backed only by the more radical Forum for National Salvation (FNS) last year. Yushchenko's open letter to President Leonid Kuchma on 29 August and the 14-15 September "For the Democratic Development of Ukraine" congress organized by Our Ukraine also reflect a growing frustration and radicalization of opinion among the moderate opposition, which is threatening to completely join the radicals if the authorities continue to turn down dialogue.
The executive and its oligarchic allies have no candidate to succeed Kuchma as president in two years' time, as a viable candidate could have been only found prior to "Kuchmagate." Deputy Prime Minister Volodymyr Semynozhenko and oligarch Oleksandr Volkov, a former presidential adviser, have openly spoken of the need for Kuchma to run for a third term. They argue that his first term should not count as it began two years prior to the adoption of the 1996 constitution, which bans an individual from holding that office for more than two consecutive terms. Our Ukraine recently asked the Constitutional Court to rule on this question, hoping it would rule against, but even if the court ruled in favor of Kuchma being allowed to run for a third term, it seems beyond the realm of the imaginable that he could be re-elected in a free vote.
A key indication that the Kuchma regime is slowly disintegrating are defections from the former pro-Kuchma For a United Ukraine election bloc to Yushchenko. At the 14-15 September congress, the Dnipropetrovsk (Kuchma's home base) clan's Party of Entrepreneurs-Labor Ukraine led by Serhiy Tyhypko, Stepan Havrysh's Democratic Initiatives faction, and Ukraine's Agrarians all defected to Yushchenko.
The next to defect could be the Donetsk clan's Ukraine's Regions led by Deputy Prime Minister Semynozhenko, established in March 2001 and initially led by Tax Administration head Mykola Azarov. Ukraine's Regions has long-standing ties to Our Ukraine through Petro Poroshenko's Solidarity party, which was a founding member of Ukraine's Regions but then switched to Our Ukraine. Other parliamentary factions that could follow suit are Power of the People and People's Choice.
The opposition is feeling increasingly emboldened despite all manner of repressive action taken against it, including arrests and interrogations conducted throughout Ukraine over the last few days and threats by the Internal Affairs Ministry to dissuade the public from joining the protests planned for 16 September. Despite a Kyiv court ban, the protest in central Kyiv attended by 50,000 people went ahead with Our Ukraine's participation, something the authorities had not expected.
Despite the similarities with the late 1980s, Ukraine's velvet revolution is slower than those that engulfed the outer Soviet empire. The Ukraine Without Kuchma movement had already called for a roundtable with Kuchma at the height of the "Kuchmagate" crisis but the authorities refused. Nevertheless, Yushchenko, never comfortable in the role of an oppositionist, has continued to call for a "dialogue" with the executive in the form of a roundtable, hoping that the authorities will now agree to this proposal.
After the manner in which the authorities reacted to the demonstrations, with mass arrests and the tearing down of tents in central Kyiv overnight, a roundtable is becoming less likely. Kuchma was demonstratively outside Ukraine on 16 September, the day of opposition protests. Another problem is the widespread lack of trust in Kuchma's word. Kuchma shows no signs of interest in "dialogue," despite his claims to the contrary, and his actions are pushing Yushchenko into the radical camp.
The Polish roundtable in September 1988 took place because of many events and factors that are lacking in Ukraine. Specifically, it followed seven years of mass clandestine opposition under martial law, mass strikes, and protests that year. Gorbachev also rejected the "[Leonid] Brezhnev Doctrine," thereby removing the threat of Soviet intervention. Poland's Solidarity was also a nationwide movement, unlike the Ukrainian opposition, which draws its main strength from the more nationally conscious Western-Central regions (with the sole exception of the Communists who have now for the first time joined the largely national-democratic opposition).
The National Executive Commission (NEC) created by Solidarity in October 1987 included the majority of the underground opposition. In Ukraine the Forum for National Salvation (FNS), created in February 2001, only ever included the radical wing of the opposition and never Our Ukraine. The ruling authorities with whom a roundtable is to take place are also different (Communists in Poland, postcommunist oligarchs in Ukraine).
But there are also similarities. The demands made by the NEC and FNS/Our Ukraine both include an end to repression and censorship as part of a radical program of democratization. Both in Poland in the late Soviet era and today in Ukraine, national democrats continue to lead the struggle for democratization.
After the successful Polish roundtable, Tadeusz Mazowiecki headed Poland's first postwar noncommunist government in 1989, and free parliamentary and presidential elections were held the following year. The attempt to create an "artificial majority" composed of pro-presidential forces in Ukraine failed and negotiations are underway to replace it with a "democratic majority" grouped around Our Ukraine. As in Poland, the main objective is to appoint a reformist prime minister, which in Ukraine's case would be Yushchenko. In such an eventuality, with 18 months' grace during which the government could not be brought down, Yushchenko would be in the best position to be elected president in 2004.
The major loser in such a process would be Viktor Medvedchuk and his
Kyiv clan's Social Democratic Party-united (SDPU-o), which Yushchenko has
said will be barred from joining the parliamentary majority. Both Medvedchuk
and his SDPU-o clan are feared and disliked by Eastern Ukraine's oligarchs.
Radical anti-Kuchma oppositionists Yuliya Tymoshenko, against whom politically
motivated charges of "corruption" would be dropped if Yushchenko became
premier, and Socialist leader Oleksandr Moroz could also be losers unless
they agree to join the new "democratic [parliamentary] majority" led by
Yushchenko and Tyhypko.
Ukraine has six national TV channels. Those that are not owned by the state are controlled by people in the president's entourage.
As protesters continued their march on Mr Kuchma's headquarters, the channels led their evening news bulletins with the story of the president attending an economic forum in Salzburg.
The stations avoided panoramic views of the protest and showed no more than a few dozen protesters at a time. State TV focused on the traffic disruption caused by the protests, showing angry commuters and traffic jams.
Most of the mainstream press, which is owned by the same businessmen close to Mr Kuchma, glossed over the demonstrations.
The Russian-language Segodnya played down the scale of the demonstrations: "The number of the protesters gathered - about 15,000-20,000 - was less than the opposition promised to summon for the 'Rise, Ukraine' event," the paper said.
"The lads in uniform were ready for the possible 'disputes' with the agitated protesters, but even they were resting in the buses tucked away in the courtyards of central Kiev."
The conservative Den newspaper, linked to the head of the national security council, confined its story to a factual account of the protest, without any comment.
Government 'scared'
The independent media, like Gongadze's Ukrainska Pravda web site, are confined to the internet. Some rely on the funding of the wealthier members of the opposition, such as Ukraine's former gas supremo, Yulia Tymoshenko.
Tymoshenko's Vecherniye Vesti derides the coverage of the demonstrations. [ . . . ]
The paper condemns other pressure tactics used by the government. [ . . . ]
Despite their powerful owners, some of the official media are also beginning to doubt the wisdom of using such tactics.
"It was not the best day to schedule TV maintenance for," ventures the
conservative Den newspaper, linked to the head of the national security
council. [ . . . ]
Washington, 17 September 2002 (RFE/RL) -- Thousands of protesters in Kyiv and around the world marked the second anniversary of the disappearance of a prominent journalist by demanding at rallies on Monday the resignation of Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma.
As thousands of people converged on central Kyiv to urge Kuchma to resign or call early elections, symbolic protests were also staged in New York, Washington, Paris, London, Brussels, Budapest, Berlin, Lisbon, and Prague. The rallies, which each had about 20 people, paid tribute to journalist Heorhiy Gongadze and other Ukrainian reporters and politicians believed to be the victims of politically motivated murders.
The body of Gongadze, who often wrote about alleged official graft, was found outside Kyiv in November 2000. A national scandal was sparked in the fall of 2001 after the appearance of audio tapes recorded by a former member of Kuchma's security detail appeared to implicate the president in the killing.
In possibly the largest demonstration in Ukraine since independence in 1991, up to 25,000 protesters converged on central Kyiv in defiance of a court order banning rallies in the downtown part of the capital. Protesters waved banners saying "No to Kuchma's regime," and they called on the president to step aside. "Kuchma out! Kuchma out! Kuchma out!" they shouted.
Kyiv television stations, which shut down in the morning for what authorities said was routine maintenance, later resumed roadcasting. But residents called the simultaneous station blackout unprecedented and likely motivated by a desire to keep the protests off television screens.
Speaking at the rally, Ukrainian Communist Party Chairman Petro Symonenko said the protesters have several demands. "Our demands are: early presidential elections, Kuchma's removal from power, a change in our system of government, changes to the constitution, [and] a new proportional- representation election law," Symonenko said.
At the rally in Washington, Gongadze's widow Myroslava told a small group of protesters in front of the Ukrainian Embassy that Ukraine's future as an independent democracy will be jeopardized if Ukrainians do not speak out against the killings.
Myroslava Gongadze has political asylum in the U.S. and works as a freelance journalist for RFE/RL. She also presided over a memorial on Sunday at Washington's monument to Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine's national poet, for her husband and other prominent figures who have died or disappeared in unexplained circumstances, such as opposition leaders Vadym Boyko in 1992 and Mykhaylo Boychyshyn in 1994. "I often think that had Ukrainian society reacted immediately to the death of Boyko or the disappearance of Boychyshyn, perhaps the horrible list of the dead would have been much shorter. I do not want my husband's death to go in vain; I want Ukrainian society to learn from its mistakes," Myroslava Gongadze said.
In conjunction with the commemorative events, some 300 prominent international scholars and activists have signed a letter urging U.S. President George W. Bush to make Washington's relations with Kyiv conditional on democratic and human rights progress in Ukraine. Myroslava Gongadze delivered the letter yesterday to the White House.
Those who signed it include renowned scholars Francis Fukuyama of Johns Hopkins University, Michael McFaul of Stanford University, and Anders Aslund of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
At Sunday's requiem, statements by prominent U.S. lawmakers were read out, including from Christopher H. Smith (Republican, New Jersey), co-chairman of the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, also known as the Helsinki Commission.
Smith said that no progress has been made on the investigations into any of Ukraine's high-profile murders despite steady pressure from the Helsinki Commission, U.S. Congress, the State Department, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Council of Europe, and other international bodies.
Although Kuchma has denied any wrongdoing, Smith concluded that the lack of investigative progress "has only served to fuel speculation about official involvement" in the murders.
That conclusion was echoed by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, or CJP. In a statement last Friday, the CPJ said it was dismayed by the lack of progress on the Gongadze case, adding that, "President Kuchma's government continues to obstruct the official inquiry."
Next week, Myroslava Gongadze will take that same message to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. The court is expected to address the issue of her husband's death, and Gongadze said she will make an appeal that the court clearly state that Ukrainian investigators are not doing enough to uncover the truth and that the murder must be considered a crime against humanity. "If those who perpetrated these killings are not brought to justice, then murder and terror against those who are deemed 'inconvenient' in Ukraine will continue until all who are not afraid to think are completely wiped out," Myroslava Gongadze said.
While in Strasbourg, Gongadze will also address the human rights subcommittee
of the Council of Europe, which has launched its own probe into Ukraine's
stalled investigation into her husband's death.
Derzhavnyky and National Democrats
From its very inception in 1989, the Rukh movement was made up of two groups with competing ideologies - derzhavnyky (statists) and national democrats. These conflicting ideologies led to two splits in Rukh - at its February 1992 congress and in 1999 shortly before the death of veteran dissident and Rukh leader Vyacheslav Chornovil in a suspicious car accident.
The derzhavnyk group included many figures from the Soviet Ukrainian nomenklatura who served in the foreign service or cultural unions (diplomat Hennady Udovenko, and the poets Ivan Drach and Dmytro Pavlychko). They were always against adopting an "oppositional" stance towards the authorities. After the 1992 split, the derzhavnyky created the Congress of National Democratic Forces, which has developed into the Christian Republican Party (CRP).
The derzhavnyk group also included nationalists, such as Mykola Porovsky and Mykhailo Horyn, who were guided by the slogan "The state above all else!" and treated questions of democratisation as secondary. The group exemplified a deeply rooted and peculiarly Ukrainian anxiety, the result of losing independence on so many earlier occasions that statehood was vulnerable, and opposition dangerous. This group also has followers in the Ukrainian diaspora, especially in the Andry Melnyk and Stepan Bandera wings of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. As one older Canadian Ukrainian asked after listening to one of my criticisms of Kuchma: "What, do you want to change Kuchma for Vladimir Putin?" The derzhavnyky agreed with Kuchma in seeing "opposition" as something that only the Communist Party should adopt because it was opposed to the state, while non communists could not be opposed to "their state."
Udovenko, leader of the derzhavnyk wing of Rukh, Porovsky, leader of the CRP, and Viktor Pynzenyk, leader of Reforms and Order, are either opposed to Our Ukraine joining the Sept. 16 demonstrations or lukewarm in their support (like Yushchenko himself). This group is susceptible to being co opted by the authorities when they talk of "zlahoda" (accord) and "consolidating society." While Reforms and Order contains some fairly strong anti-Kuchma politicians like Taras Stetskiv, Volodymyr Filenko and Taras Chornovil, this wing of Our Ukraine is therefore more akin to a loyal opposition than a real democratic opposition.
The national democratic wing of Rukh has been more adamant about supporting democratisation and is more willing to be in "constructive opposition" to the authorities. This wing was led by Vyacheslav Chornovil until March 1999, when Yury Kostenko led a second split. As well as personality clashes and generational issues, Kostenko and his followers were unhappy with what they felt was Chornovil's overly cosy relationship with Kuchma and saw themselves as the true successors of the Rukh that emerged after the 1992 split. Later Kostenko maintained links with out and out oppositionist Yulia Tymoshenko while Udovenko wanted no truck with her.
Where does Yushchenko stand in relation to these two wings of Rukh? On the one hand, he is close in spirit to the derzhavnyk group. He was until recently a member of the establishment, and he is obviously not comfortable in the role of an oppositionist.
At the same time, the mere existence of an independent state is not sufficient for him (unlike say, for Udovenko and Porovsky). Yushchenko is seeking to do what Chornovil argued for back in 1992. Namely, that Ukraine should undertake a radical program of democratisation and economic reform, and uphold the role of law. Yushchenko's support for the reforms promoted by the national democrats is also attractive to some Russophone groups who have always been turned off by the derzhavnyk tendency in Rukh.
The key to Yushchenko's success has been to unite the two competing tendencies within the center right and produce Our Ukraine, something that nobody was able to achieve throughout most of the 1990s.
Faith in the Good Tsar
At times, it is not clear whether Yushchenko is simply naive or whether he is actually playing a game in the hope Kuchma will anoint him as his successor. Yushchenko like many in the derzhavnyk wing of Rukh/Our Ukraine seems to regard the president the way peasants in the Russian empire used to look upon the tsar and Soviet citizens the general secretary of the CPSU. That is, as a good Tsar who is being obstructed in his work by those around him.
Yushchenko seems to sincerely believe that the main obstacle to democratisation in Ukraine is his arch enemy, Viktor Medvedchuk, head of the presidential administration since May and leader of the oligarchic Social Democratic United Party. Yushchenko is convinced that Medvedchuk "is to a great extent deforming the point of view of the president."
It is hard to believe that Yushchenko really believes that, in his own words, Ukraine's "worst crisis in 11 years" began only in May and that it is all Medvedchuk's fault. He still seems unwilling to say it as it is: Ukraine's political, economic, spiritual and foreign policy stagnation and high level of corruption are the fault of an executive that has to take full responsibility for the state of the country. Medvedchuk is a product of this stagnation and corruption, not the architect of it.
Strange alliances
Kuchma and his oligarchic allies have succeeded in accomplishing something nobody thought would ever happen: an alliance between national democrats and the left. Two factors contributed to the emegence of this alliance.
First, uniquely in the CIS, Ukraine has a sizeable pro-European, reformist lobby in addition to two other political constituencies the left and the former Soviet republican nomenklatura, turned centrists oligarchs. Countries elsewhere in the CIS have only the left and centrist oligarchs. Western and central Ukraine, where much of the popular support for the pro European, reform lobby is concentrated, are not going to allow Kuchma and his oligarchic allies to get away with turning Ukraine into another Azerbaijan or Uzbekistan.
Second, it was possible for Kuchma and centrist oligarchs to forge an alliance with the derzhavnyk wing of the center right against the anti-statehood Communists only for as long as Ukraine's independence was not yet irreversible. This tactic was successfully used in the 1999 elections when voters backed Kuchma as the "best of two evils" over Communist leader Petro Symonenko. After 11 years of independence, that is no longer an option for Kuchma.
With independence consolidated, the main issue facing Ukraine on the cusp of the post- Kuchma era is: what sort of independent state is it that is being built? The national democratic, oppositionist wing is now in the ascendant and is willing to cooperate with the pro-statehood left in pursuit of democratisation and Ukraine's Europeanization. Calls for supporting Kuchma as the "symbol of statehood" in the face of a Russian (Kravchuk era) or Communist threat (Kuchma era) are no longer relevant.
For Yushchenko to continue to believe in Kuchma as the "Good Tsar" is
pointless, wrong and could seriously damage his credibility at home and
abroad. Ukraine has reached a crossroads in its development. It's time
for Yushchenko to stop waffling and act as a leader and for Our Ukraine
to drop its "multi vectorism" and decide where it stands.
Belief in a conspiracy theory became rife almost immediately after the crisis broke in November 2000. To Ukraine's leadership, a conspiracy theory is often a convenient way of deflecting from the allegations of criminal conduct which appears to be evidenced by the Melnychenko tapes.
However, a conspiracy theory is tied to the question of who would gain from Kuchma's departure? One theory expounded by Kuchma's allies is that Socialist Party leader Oleksandr Moroz is himself behind the conspiracy. This view was first outlined by key Kuchma ally Oleksander Zhyr to Melnychenko when offering to purchase the tapes.
According to this theory, Moroz allegedly went to Moscow in Summer 2000 seeking the support of industrialists. In return for helping him remove Kuchma from office, the group was to be granted lucrative privatisation contracts in Ukraine. Moroz was allegedly aware of Melnychenko's secret taping in Kuchma's office and used local criminals to undertake Gongadze's murder to incriminate Kuchma.
In reality, this conspiracy theory is more likely a ruse to incriminate Moroz and there is little, if any, evidence to back it up. If true, Kuchma would have used it to incriminate Moroz, one of his most implacable opponents.
So who else would benefit if Kuchma fell from power? Not Moroz, as his Socialist Party is too small and he had no official position. According to Ukrainian legislation, the prime minister replaces a deposed or an incapacitated president for three months until fresh presidential elections can be held.
From December 1999 to April 2001 Viktor Yushchenko was Ukraine's prime minister and the first since the collapse of the USSR who was reformist and pro-Western. If Kuchma had been deposed after November 2000, it would be Yushchenko who would have gained as he would have been de facto head of state for three months. During this time, he could have raised his popularity (Yushchenko was then Ukraine's most popular politician) and then won presidential elections.
This speculation has fuelled a scenario referred to as the 'Brzezinski Conspiracy' (named after former US National Security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski). This term was first coined by Vladimir Putin's image makers. Gleb Pavlovsky's Fund for Effective Politics has had a long and close working relationship with Kuchma's administrative chief Viktor Medvedchuk and his Social Democratic Party. It also has a Ukrainian branch, the Centre for Effective Politics (CEP), led by Mykhailo Pogrybynsky.
Soviet paranoia or real conspiracy?
The 'Brzezinski Conspiracy' was conceived as a typical Soviet-style plot that fed the paranoia still evident among the former Soviet elite in Ukraine. The US was allegedly behind Melnychenko and the anti-Kuchma opposition with the aim of removing Kuchma and replacing him with Yushchenko. This would have pulled Ukraine into the Western orbit and away from Russia's sphere of influence.
In April 2001, the chairman of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) Volodymyr Radchenko claimed foreign intelligence services were behind 'Kuchmagate'. In the same month Kuchma backed up the conspiracy theory on CBS' 60 Minutes programme. A documentary entitled 'PR' was also broadcast on Ukrainian television in March 2001 during the election campaign. This supported the 'Brzezinski conspiracy' and was aimed at damaging Yushchenko's Our Ukraine election bloc.
It is not clear how the 'Brzezinski conspiracy' would have been accomplished as NATO and EU do not grant automatic membership to any country. Like the Moroz theory, the 'Brzezinski Conspiracy' can hardly be taken seriously.
Yet another conspiracy theory holds that Russia was behind Melnychenko. This feeds into the Ukrainian nationalist fear of Russian conspiracies to reverse Ukrainian independence. It also fits in with the fact that Russia has gained the most from 'Kuchmagate'. Isolated in the West since the crisis began, Kuchma has increasingly re-orientated Ukraine eastwards and synchronised his policies towards the EU and NATO with Moscow. In 2001, Kuchma and Putin held eight summits and this year there have already been five. Last year was the first when no US-Ukrainian presidential summit took place and the Bush administration has ruled out holding such a summit until the Gongadze case has been resolved.
Jane's Intelligence Digest - September 18, 2002
As was to be expected, the U.S. government's announcement that it possesses definitive evidence that Kuchma approved the sale of sensitive weapons technology to Iraq in breach of UN sanctions has been followed by a string of clumsy denials. Who does Foreign Ministry spokesman Serhy Borodenkov, for example, expect to convince with his laughable claim on Sept. 24 that Ukraine's monitoring system makes the sale and delivery of sensitive technologies impossible? There are credible reports that up to $30 billion worth of weapons simply disappeared from Ukraine in the nineties alone. Who does he think he's fooling? To be fair, comments made the next day by Yury Serheyev, state secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, about the specifics of Ukraine's Kolchuga manufacturing sounded more level headed. But Ukrainian officials have a long history of disguising embarrassing lies as angry denials.
The immediate outcome of the U.S. announcement is the suspension of a large whack of aid, with the prospect of further cuts in the coming weeks after a policy review. If the cuts stick, it would be a huge comedown for the United States. It is effectively admitting what should have been obvious for years – that its Ukraine policy has been an abject failure. It has poured billions of dollars into the country over the last decade, ostensibly in an effort to build an effective democracy. In reality, of course, those funds had more to do with containing Russia. This newspaper has on numerous occasions criticized the United States for continuing to prop up Kuchma even as the extent of his corruption was becoming clear. While the United States should be lauded for taking quick action this time around, even now the cuts don't go far enough. Significantly, projects devoted to supporting private enterprise and NGO development will not be affected. For reasons that should be self evident, no government should be spending money on inherently private concepts like NGOs, free enterprise and independent media.
Still, that the United States is willing to significantly roll back its policy of blind support for Ukraine is a testament to the gravity of the charges leveled. One must wonder, now that the U.S. has admitted that this particular segment of the Melnychenko tapes is real, does it follow that all 700 hours of the Melnychenko tapes are real? In addition to Iraq, the tapes implicate Kuchma in a host of high crimes and misdemeanors. Previously unreleased transcripts of the tapes are being published every day, courtesy of former opposition deputy Oleksandr Zhyr, on a Washington based Web site called The Fifth Element (www.5element.net). They do not paint a pretty picture of Kuchma. Whatever the doubts raised by certain passages and the possibility of falsification, it is incredible to believe that such a volume of material now coming out could have been faked. Will Kuchma be made to answer for all the crimes on those tapes?
Internationally, it appears he might. NATO has been quick to respond to the U.S. announcement, with Secretary General George Robertson demanding an explanation of the affair from Kyiv and predicting that the alliance's relations with Ukraine are about to enter a difficult period. Meanwhile, Ukraine also figures in the dossier presented to the British Parliament by Prime Minister Tony Blair, which states that Iraq has been purchasing Ukrainian and Belarusian equipment for its program for creating weapons of mass destruction. Even Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, who stuck by Kuchma through last year's protests and their aftermath, has announced that he will be breaking off relations with Kuchma and reconsidering Poland's policy towards Ukraine. Kuchma has never before been so isolated. Just about the one place he can be sure of support is the Kremlin.
Alas, the prospect of Kuchma holding onto his job depends not on what world leaders think, but on how the Ukrainian public views Kuchma's latest antics. Though it would clearly be the best thing for the country, Kuchma is unlikely to step down. More likely, Kuchma will try to keep a lid on things by intensifying pressure on the media and opposition parties. This will only serve to drive the country deeper into isolation and expose his alleged commitment to Ukraine's European choice as the bankrupt gesture it is.
The Ukrainian people demonstrated convincingly in the recent elections
that they aspire to a future as part of the European family. Until now
the mass of the population have, for a variety of reasons, been reluctant
to take to the streets to demand Kuchma's resignation, even if they are
aware of the tapes existence and believe them to be genuine. If in the
coming weeks they see their hopes for the future blighted by Kuchma's iron
fisted response to this burgeoning crisis, one must hope they take to the
streets to make their voices heard. The alternative may be a Belarus style
crackdown. Very few Ukrainians would welcome that.
Copyright (c) Dansk-Ukrainsk Selskab og Ivan Nester