ANALYSIS: Through the political periscope: a look at the pre-election scene (02/01/98)

ANALYSIS

Through the political periscope: a look at the pre-election scene

by Markian Bilynskyj

Asked last fall to characterize the forthcoming parliamentary election campaign, former president Leonid Kravchuk replied that it would be a "viina kompromisiv" ("war of compromises"). At the beginning of December, the usually restrained Mr. Kravchuk - who heads up the election ticket of the Social Democratic Party (Unified) - reiterated his view rather more graphically. Commenting on a newspaper piece on the potential of the Ukrainian security service and police for discrediting various candidates or parties, he stated that people should be afraid not of the security forces but of the "hivnometiv" (literally "dung throwers").

At the end of November, the chairman of the Bank of Ukraine, Viktor Yuschenko, had implied something similar - albeit without Mr. Kravchuk's vivid imagery - when he revealed in a TV interview that he would not run for the Verkhovna Rada. It was widely thought that he would appear on the People's Democratic Party (PDP) ticket behind Prime Minister Valerii Pustovoitenko. Mr. Yuschenko explained simply that contemporary Ukrainian politics were too dirty. According to many polls, Mr. Yuschenko is one of the most popular political figures in Ukraine, paradoxically because of his very reluctance to get involved in politics.

The continuing lack of consensus among the Ukrainian leadership elite over Ukraine's future continues to produce a highly politicized and ideologized policy process that invites confrontation. That this tendency would intensify during the pre-election period was not unexpected. Thus, on December 9, 1997, for example, the Verkhovna Rada, under the prompting of Chairman Oleksander Moroz, a Socialist, instructed the appropriate committees to prepare a motion of no confidence in the government on the pretext that it had misused the reserve fund of the Cabinet of Ministers.

The following day, Yevhen Kushnariov, chief of the Presidential Administration, dismissed this move as a blatant exercise in campaign posturing and stated that the president was completely supportive of the government. Appearing on December 12 at the All-Ukrainian Journalists' Economic Forum, President Leonid Kuchma reiterated this thesis, adding that he expected the Verhkovna Rada to begin impeaching him early in 1998 (something that groups within the Parliament had tried to do at different times throughout last year), again for populist campaign reasons.

The same day Mr. Kushnariov condemned the Verhkovna Rada's move against the government, the Rada passed a law limiting the length of time that government officials could discharge their duties on an acting basis without its approval. The timing of this move reinforced the impression that it was indeed little more than a politically motivated attempt to remove two government officials currently of prime importance to President Kuchma: acting Procurator General Oleh Lytvak, who had made it his mission (at the prompting of the administration, according to some commentators) to review or re-open cases against high-level officials, past and present, that had been pigeon-holed by his predecessor; and acting chairman of the State Property Fund, Volodymyr Lanovyi, a key player in the impending privatization of Ukraine's strategic enterprises. On December 16, 1997, the Verhkovna Rada again refused to confirm Mr. Lytvak - even though the committees responsible for reviewing his suitability for the post found nothing negative in either his record or character.

The Verkhovna Rada versus the Cabinet of Ministers and the Administration; Chairman Moroz versus President Kuchma: These are familiar, long-established vectors of confrontation characterized by accusations and counter-accusations, usually channeled through those elements of the media (particularly the press) supportive of or - increasingly, and alarmingly - under the control of the respective antagonists. More often than not, however, a kind of collective common sense eventually prevails and a semblance of equilibrium is restored. (Indeed, on December 30, 1997, for the first time since independence, the Verhkovna Rada worked closely with the government to approve a budget on time. Whether or not the budget is realistic is, of course, another matter. Moreover, the Verhkovna Rada's principal concern may have been the fact that no budget would likely have meant no elections.)

Thus, during a December 22, 1997, press conference, Chairman Moroz said he supported the move by 249 deputies to invite President Kuchma to Parliament for a closed clear-the-air session. "This is needed now," he explained, "so that with the elections approaching ... we will not continue to hurl abuse at each other through the media. We have to sit down and figure out what we should do in order to raise the level of stability within society because people have grown weary of the endless accusations, insinuations and so on."

As a further conciliatory gesture, the Verhkovna Rada chairman also explained that he personally was against the dismissal of the government at this time because such a move would further destabilize the general situation. (He did not mention the obvious. With the Verhkovna Rada certain to be completely preoccupied with the elections after the holiday season, dismissing the government would simply strengthen the president's hand significantly. In fact, on December 29, 1997, the no-confidence motion fizzled out principally because the Verhkovna Rada could not decide whether the current or previous government should bear responsibility for any misuse of funds.)

If, over time, a measure of self-regulation has evolved with respect to some of the more established confrontations within the Ukrainian political elite, newer ones, born of, and nurtured by, personal scores and electoral ambitions and imperatives, seem to be developing a life of their own. Most interesting in this respect is the one between Prime Minister Pustovoitenko, Chief of Staff Kushnariov and President Kuchma on the one hand, and Mr. Pustovoitenko's predecessor, Pavlo Lazarenko, on the other.

There is a compelling body of evidence supporting the thesis that internecine conflicts tend to be more vicious than conflicts between so-called out-groups. And this confrontation tends to corroborate such a belief. Three of the four protagonists hail from Dnipropetrovsk: President Kuchma, Prime Minister Pustovoitenko (a former mayor) and Mr. Lazarenko - who remains a Verkhovna Rada national deputy, where he heads the Yednist faction. He also has a powerful regional base as chairman of the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Council.

Long-standing personal differences between these erstwhile members of the Dnipropetrovsk clan (always more a useful analytical term than a description of reality) were exacerbated when Mr. Lazarenko was head of government and Mr. Pustovoitenko, a man politically and personally devoted to President Kuchma, was the minister of the Cabinet of Ministers, or chief government administrator. Mr. Lazarenko's predilection for a hypercentralized, micro-management approach to governing effectively froze out the government bureaucracy and did little for his relations with either Mr. Pustovoitenko or the extremely ambitious and openly anti-Lazarenko PDP. Messrs. Pustovoitenko and Kushnariov are leading members of the PDP, which draws many of its members from the bureaucracy - hence its nickname, sometimes used ironically, as the "Party of Power." The PDP, the most obviously pro-presidential party, was absolutely central in prompting a vacillating president to remove Mr. Lazarenko from office last July, thus making Mr. Pustovoitenko's appointment as head of government something of a formality.

President Kuchma has displayed increasing bitterness towards Mr. Lazarenko; for example, last month he said he regretted dismissing Mr. Lazarenko simply for health reasons rather than for abuses of office. The president gave Mr. Lazarenko an extremely broad latitude for discretion in the hope that he would turn the economy around. That confidence seemed well-founded at the time. When appointing him, President Kuchma had, after all, praised Mr. Lazarenko's administrative skills - skills tested and proven, moreover, on the president's home turf. Mr. Lazarenko in every sense was "President Kuchma's man" with an appropriately broad mandate to act more or less as he saw fit.

Mr. Lazarenko's failure to deliver, however, damaged President Kuchma's credibility at home, while his alleged intrigues and extracurricular business activities detracted from the president's and Ukraine's, image abroad. In short, from Mr. Kuchma's perspective, Mr. Lazarenko betrayed the trust he was shown - something that by all accounts President Kuchma does not easily forgive. Furthermore, Mr. Kuchma's post facto displeasure with Mr. Lazarenko might perhaps be in equal measure attributable to a sense of anger with himself for having shared the former prime minister's optimism and not having been sufficiently resolute to dismiss him sooner.

Soon after his dismissal Mr. Lazarenko became head of the Yednist faction and the force behind, and later the leader of, the Hromada Party. Judging by current performance, this party resurrected last summer by the former head of United Energy Systems (UES), Yulia Tymoshenko, a protege of the former prime minister's, stands a good chance of making a considerable impression in the parliamentary elections. Hromada's populist platform, based on unambiguous opposition towards the current government - and by extension the PDP - is clearly aimed at the potentially decisive left-of-center, non-Communist electorate. To emphasize its opposition, Hromada created a shadow Cabinet led by Ms. Tymoshenko. The composition of the shadow government, however, suggests that it should be regarded essentially as an innovative (for Ukrainian politics) and hence potentially effective publicity stunt devoid of any genuine substance. One of the shadow Cabinet's better known members, for example, is the Foreign Minister Oleh Bilorus, Ukraine's former ambassador to Washington.

Returning to Mr. Kravchuk's imagery, it is, not surprising, therefore that given the intricate interaction of personality and party politics and the stakes involved, some of the heaviest scatological projectiles have been hurled, and will continue to fly along this sector of the campaign front until March and possibly right up to the presidential elections in late 1999.

Shortly after assuming the premiership last July, Mr. Pustovoitenko declared that under his predecessor he came to realize that the Cabinet of Ministers had become a coordinating center for trading in gas and other commodities. (One of the new prime minister's first moves was to restructure the gas market, thus removing UES from its monopoly position. Its activities were extensively investigated by numerous government agencies. Hence Ms. Tymoshenko's antipathy.)

Almost simultaneously, Chief of Staff Kushnariov dismissed Hromada as a party no decent politician would join. This led to a threatened but so far unrealized lawsuit from Mr. Lazarenko. Then, on September 30, 1997, Prime Minister Pustovoitenko claimed, without producing any evidence, that while in office his predecessor had kept a notebook, containing two columns, one for official and the other for personal things to do - with only the latter fully taken care of. This accusation elicited another threat of a lawsuit.

On October 3, 1997, Ukraina Moloda, a heavily pro-presidential newspaper run by President Kuchma's former press secretary, published a detailed exposé of the business dealings of UES under Ms. Tymoshenko and alleged improprieties in the privatization process in Dnipropetrovsk while Mr. Lazarenko was prime minister. Mr. Lazarenko filed a lawsuit against the newspaper which has so far been noteworthy only for its continual postponement.

Matters escalated somewhat in late November and early December 1997. President Kuchma stated that just before the March elections he would reveal the names of people who had illegally deposited money abroad. The insinuation was clear enough. At about the same time the PDP called for charges to be filed against Mr. Lazarenko.

On December 6, 1997, acting Procurator General Lytvak appealed, unsuccessfully, to the Verhkovna Rada to strip Ms. Tymoshenko of her national deputy's immunity for a currency-related offense in 1995 - a rather incongruous charge given the thoroughness of the government's investigations of UES. And on December 23, 1997, the vice-chairman of the Parliament's Committee on Organized Crime and Corruption, Anatolii Yermak, announced that the Procurator General's Office was about to bring criminal charges against Mr. Lazarenko. The following day, Deputy Procurator General Olha Kolinko announced that the Verhkovna Rada had been asked to strip Mr. Lazarenko of his immunity on the grounds that he had misappropriated state funds to repair a government dacha at his disposal, and that several properties had been illegally purchased abroad by Cabinet officials during his time in office.

The final twist of the old year came at its very end when the secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, Volodymyr Horbulin, condemned a report in a Russian newspaper alleging that he had put together a strategy to discredit both Hromada and Mr. Lazarenko.

In turn, Mr. Lazarenko has gone out of his way, not always convincingly so, to criticize President Kuchma without actually naming him. But by going after the PDP, the government and the administration in a manner that makes Captain Ahab's monomaniacal pursuit of Moby Dick seem like a model search for compromise, the link to the president - and hence the real message - is clear. Thus, for example, speaking at a January 10 press conference, Mr. Lazarenko promised to publish substantiated details concerning the construction of a palatial home 3,200 square meters in area and worth $28 million (U.S.). Mr. Lazarenko ventured that only one person could afford such a project. (If Mr. Lazarenko proceeds with the publication, the step would at least be consistent with his claim made late last year that after January 14 the citizens of Ukraine will find out a lot of interesting things.)

At the press conference, he again refused to be drawn on whether he lists President Kuchma among his opponents. But one of his Hromada colleagues, National Deputy Viktor Omelych, was less restrained, revealing that Hromada is prepared to initiate very soon, likely through the Yednist faction, impeachment proceedings against President Kuchma. Moreover, not only has Hromada been calling for early presidential elections, but Mr. Lazarenko reiterated that if Hromada does well in March, he would run for the presidency in 1999.

To be sure, it is quite possible that instead of continuing along what has to date been a path of uncontrolled escalation, this antagonism, too, will find its own level of moderation. Indeed, it would be in the interests of both sides to try to extricate themselves from what could develop into something of a Prisoner's Dilemma conundrum with the credibility of all the parties involved increasingly at stake.

The alternative is that ever more serious charges against Mr. Lazarenko might lead to questions concerning how such egregious violations of public trust had gone unnoticed at the time by both the administration and numerous relevant authorities and agencies (and the corollary: whether the abuses would have come to light at all had Mr. Lazarenko proven more successful in office.) As for Mr. Lazarenko and Hromada, the threat to trump the president, government and the PDP by revealing whatever he might know can at best be of deterrent value only.

To indulge in further escalation is to risk priming and ultimately disenchanting the public's eagerness for such revelations - an outcome that neither Mr. Lazarenko himself nor his ambitious campaign of pious populism can afford. But the omens are not good. At the end of last week's press conference, for example, the maximalist Mr. Lazarenko declared that Hromada is now going on the offensive; everything prior to this was merely preparations.

Markian Bilynskyj is director of the Pylyp Orlyk Institute, an independent public policy, research and information center located in Kyiv that is supported by the Washington-based U.S.-Ukraine Foundation.

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