Rukh Party in crisis as parliamentary faction votes to remove Chornovil (02/28/99)

Rukh Party in crisis as parliamentary faction votes to remove Chornovil

by Katya Gorchinskaya
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

KYIV - The national-democratic party Rukh is going through a major crisis: its leader, Vyacheslav Chornovil, has been removed as the head of the party's faction in Parliament and he has been asked to resign as party leader.

Mr. Chornovil accused his opponents of attempting to split the party to weaken its position before the presidential election - an attempt he said, that was backed by people close to President Leonid Kuchma and other presidential candidates.

Last week members of the Rukh faction voted to remove Mr. Chornovil from his position as head of their faction in the Verkhovna Rada. The party's top executive structure, the central leadership (provid), voted no-confidence in Mr. Chornovil on February 20. The leadership also voted to gather an extraordinary party congress February 28 to discuss the situation and elect a leader.

"This is an attempt to start real reform in the party," said Yurii Kostenko, the new leader of Rukh's parliamentary faction at a press conference after the vote.

In response, Mr. Chornovil ordered a new registration of members of Rukh's parliamentary faction with the intention of casting out his opponents. His re-registered faction will be called The First National Rukh of Ukraine. He will also convene a party congress on March 7.

Rukh is the third-largest faction in Parliament after the Communist and the National Democratic Party factions. The Rukh Party is considered to have the second-strongest regional infrastructure after the Communist Party.

The members of the central leadership opposed to Mr. Chornovil accused him of authoritarian rule of the party and said he has been doing nothing to make Rukh a serious political force around which other parties could unite.

"All the decisions taken by the party leader are undemocratic and against the party," said Mr. Kostenko. He added that Mr. Chornovil even removed party secretary Bohdan Boiko from party management recently, despite his appointment by the central leadership.

Mr. Chornovil countered that the accusations against him are not factual but emotional, and that the decision of the central leadership has no legal validity. "They accuse me of authoritarian rule? But we have the most democratic party statutes and a loose party structure," Mr. Chornovil said at press conference on February 22.

He said the decisions taken by the central leadership have to be signed by the party leader to become legitimate. He did not receive them and stated that he was not likely to sign the kind of decisions that oust him from party management.

He also claimed that the central leadership can only make binding decisions if two-thirds of its 55 members are present, while only 30 were present at the February 20 meeting. Mr. Chornovil also said the extraordinary congress of the party planned for February 28 will be illegitimate and the delegates will be invalid because few people in the regions support the opposition. The real congress, he said, will take place on March 7.

"They [opponents of Mr. Chornovil] are simply trying to undermine the party's position before the election and split up the party," said Mr. Chornovil.

The opposition disagreed. "What is happening today is not a split, it's an attempt to get over a split," said Volodymyr Cherniak, a Rukh deputy and a member of the central leadership.

Both sides said they were going to invite the opponents to their congresses, but that the invitations might not be accepted. Mr. Chornovil said the opposition group consists of three types of people: those who have never shared the party ideology, but just happened to get into the party list and top management structure; those who pursue their business interests regardless of the party interests; and those who are upset with him for not getting a top position in the party.

Many party members believed Mr. Kostenko, who was elected the new leader of Rukh's parliamentary faction, had the best chances among Rukh members to be nominated as a presidential candidate. However, his candidacy was dropped in favor of Hennadii Udovenko, a non-Rukh member who was president of the General Assembly of the United Nations and is a former foreign affairs minister of Ukraine.

Mr. Kostenko said, however, that the opposition group is ready to continue campaigning for Mr. Udovenko, and even invited him to discuss strategy on February 20. Mr. Udovenko chose not to attend.

Mr. Chornovil accused his opposition of accepting money from the president's allies and possibly Yevhen Marchuk, also a potential presidential candidate, to get rid of him. Mr. Chornovil also claims that one of Rukh's members, Oleh Ischenko, said he is ready to take $1 million of his own money to remove Mr. Chornovil as head of the party. Mr. Ischenko ran for Parliament as head of the management of OLBank and once headed a Ukrainian-Russian oil corporation.

Mr. Chornovil also claims that a lot of money to support his ouster came from the Cabinet of Ministers. "One of the vice prime ministers said that once Mr. Chornovil is not in the faction, he [the vice prime minister] will run on the Rukh Party list in the next election," said Mr. Chornovil. He added that this person recently paid $40,000 every month to top Rukh opposition members.

Analysts say that these sorts of insults and emotional accusations are a sure sign that the party will split. "When people start using insulting arguments, there are few chances that the split can be avoided," said Mykola Tomenko, director of the Institute of Politics.

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