EDITORIAL: Rada's new chairman (07/19/98)

EDITORIAL

Rada's new chairman

After a two-month election marathon, Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada finally has a chairman. He is Oleksander Tkachenko, the 59-year-old head of the Peasant Party, which is aligned with Socialist Oleksander Moroz's Left-Center faction in the Verkhovna Rada. Mr. Tkachenko is the new leader of the Parliament, a person who will guide the daily plenary sessions and formulate the agenda, a person whose views and beliefs should make an impression on the 450-member Parliament and guide it in developing legislation that will finally bring economic and social reform to this long-suffering country.

So what kind of leader is the new chairman?

He can't be called a leader by the example he sets. An organization he heads, the Land and People Agro-Industrial Association, owes the government $75 million for a loan from Citicorp on which the association reneged and which the government of Ukraine as the guarantor of the loan had to repay. Land and People was ordered to pay back the money (which was used to buy U.S. corn seed that turned out to be useless, along with foreign automobiles and industrial equipment) to the government after an investigation by the Procurator General's Office found the association liable.

In the last Verkhovna Rada convocation, as the first vice-chairman he was the silent member of the Presidium, rarely heard from except when he chaired the proceedings in the absence of Chairman Moroz. So he does not lead by his words.

However, when he does speak, what comes out can startle. During his first nomination to the chairmanship, which failed, he responded to a question on the repayment of the money he owes the government by calling the national deputy who asked the question "a representative of the CIA." That national deputy happened to be Roman Zvarych, newly elected to the Verkhovna Rada from the Rukh faction, who gave up his U.S. citizenship in 1995 to become a Ukrainian citizen. And the statement was made from the podium of the Verkhovna Rada session hall before national deputies, the press and a national radio audience. Mr. Zvarych has denied the charges and filed a 150 million hrv ($75 million) slander suit against Mr. Tkachenko.

As the newspaper Den stated on July 8, one day after Mr. Tkachenko's election, "He is to a great extent a compromise choice. He is not altogether a leftist, but also not a centrist, and he is not a leader - that is certain."

The election of Mr. Tkachenko gives his colleague in the Verkhovna Rada, former Chairman Moroz, a puppet to carry out the agenda he had planned, after Mr. Moroz's attempt to re-take the chairmanship for himself was blocked by Rukh and the National Democrats. The two factions approached the elections of the chairman with the view that anybody was better than Mr. Moroz.

Rukh and the National Democrats worked closely with President Leonid Kuchma, who some say made every effort to block the election of Mr. Moroz because that would have given the former chairman a soapbox, almost literally, from which he could have begun his presidential campaign.

Mr. Tkachenko, like Mr. Moroz before him, strongly opposes the private sale of land, distrusts the International Monetary Fund and believes that the powers of the Office of the President must be curtailed and those of the Verkhovna Rada expanded - a general blueprint for maintaining the status quo, which would leave Ukraine as it is today, neither Soviet nor inclined towards the West.

So, Ukraine - which needs fresh, dynamic blood and new approaches to its myriad economic and social problems - now has a Parliament chairman, generally agreed to be the third most important political post after the president and the prime minister, who was chosen after 20 rounds and some 90 other candidates failed. The new chairman is a not very eloquent man who has a history of controversial financial schemes and who, to a large extent, may simply execute the political wishes and agenda of a man who wanted to use the same post as a springboard to higher office.

And for this Ukraine's citizens waited two months?