NEWS ANALYSIS: Lazarenko's "temporary" removal (06/29/97)

NEWS ANALYSIS

Lazarenko's "temporary" removal

by Roman Kupchinsky
RFE/RL Newsline

On June 19 President Leonid Kuchma of Ukraine issued a decree naming First Vice Prime Minister Vasyl Durdynets acting premier due to Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko's illness. The same day, Mr. Lazarenko was taken to Kyiv's Feofania clinic, where he was placed under strict observation. The first diagnosis was that Mr. Lazarenko was suffering from extreme exhaustion.

The previous day, the National Security and Defense Council, recommended to President Kuchma that Prime Minister Lazarenko be removed from his post. The council's secretary, Volodymyr Horbulin, commented publicly later that day that "the prime minister has to take responsibility for the promises he did not keep."

Appeals to remove Mr. Lazarenko had begun to intensify earlier this month. A congress of the National Democratic Party of Ukraine (NDPU) - whose leadership consists of many high-ranking members of the Kuchma administration, as well as a number of influential businessmen - issued an appeal to the president to dismiss the Cabinet of Ministers and, above all, the prime minister.

On June 17 NDPU member and National Deputy Oleksander Karpov said that members of the NDPU who had called for Mr. Lazarenko's removal were receiving threatening phone calls. The same day, Mr. Karpov repeated charges that the prime minister had illegally privatized his government-owned dacha in Puscha Vodytsia - one of many corruption charges leveled against Mr. Lazarenko this year.

President Kuchma had appointed Mr. Lazarenko as prime minister in May 1996 to replace Yevhen Marchuk, a former chief of the Ukrainian Intelligence Service. Before his appointment, Lazarenko had been the presidential representative in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and the head of both the oblast council and the oblast state administration. During the communist era, he was the head of a collective farm and held various positions at the raion and oblast levels. His association with the president Kuchma dates back to when Kuchma was director of the Yuzhmash missile factory in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.

Shortly after becoming prime minister, Mr. Lazarenko was faced with growing discontent from coal miners in the Donetsk region who had not been paid wages for several months. On July 16, 1996, while traveling by car to Donetsk to mediate the crisis, he was the target of an assassination attempt. A bomb placed by the side of the road exploded as the prime minister's car passed by, leaving a 10-foot crater. Mr. Lazarenko, however, escaped injury. President Kuchma subsequently removed Volodymyr Shcherban as presidential representative in Donetsk. At the time there were numerous rumors that powerful business clans in Donetsk, with whom Mr. Shcherban allegedly had links, were behind the attempt on Mr. Lazarenko's life.

This year, charges of widespread corruption in the Ukrainian government began to proliferate. The U.S. telecommunications company Motorola announced in March that it was pulling out of the Ukrainian market because of "officials constantly changing the rules of the game."

The press began to link Mr. Lazarenko to the Motorola pullout, pointing out he owns a significant portion of Kyiv Star, a newly formed telecommunications company that was awarded a tender by the government to install a mobile phone network in the country. Motorola had believed it had the rights to that project. Mr. Lazarenko responded to those and similar accusations in a letter to The New York Times, but the charges only increased.

With crucial parliamentary elections scheduled for 1998, President Kuchma decided in May to bring in a new, "clean" vice prime minister. Serhii Tyhipko, the 34-year-old director of Dnipropetrovsk's Privatbank, is seen by many in Kyiv as a future replacement for Mr. Lazarenko. By early June 1997, charges that the president and the prime minister were cooperating in illegal deals had begun to surface. The prime minister had clearly become a liability to President Kuchma. Mr. Lazarenko was removed on his return from an official visit to Canada where he discussed greater economic cooperation between Ottawa and Kyiv.

The "temporary" removal of Mr. Lazarenko is regarded by many in Kyiv as permanent. President Kuchma has to show the West that he is cleaning up the government, and the proof of the pudding was getting rid of Mr. Lazarenko. Without him, President Kuchma stands a far better chance of convincing Western financial institutions that he is sincere about both the anti-corruption drive and the reform program, which his prime minister had supported only half-heartedly.

Roman Kupchinsky is director of the Ukrainian Service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

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