FOR THE RECORD: CPJ letter to President Kuchma (11/14/99)

FOR THE RECORD: CPJ letter to President Kuchma

Following is the text of a letter sent on October 28 by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists to President Leonid Kuchma of Ukraine.

Your Excellency:

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is greatly troubled by your government's recent attempts to censor four opposition newspapers prior to the October 31 presidential elections.

In four apparently separate incidents on October 13-15, local printing houses in the cities of Kryvyi Rih and Luhansk, under pressure from authorities, refused to print four newspapers that have endorsed your political rivals for the presidency.

In one case, a printing company in Luhansk refused to print the October 15 edition of the popular XXI Vek newspaper after its editor, Yurii Yurov, declined to pull a front-page photo of candidate Yevhen Marchuk and several articles critical of your administration.

Two other Luhansk newspapers, Rakurs and Nashe Zavtra, were also unable to publish that week. Both newspapers have endorsed Oleksander Moroz in the presidential race. The Donetsk company that normally prints Rakurs claimed it was experiencing technical problems. Mykola Severin, the paper's editor, tried to hire the printer that publishes Nashe Zavtra. But he found that tax inspectors had just shut down the printing house, blocking the publication of both papers.

On October 15, employees at the city-owned printing house in Kryvyi Rih told the editors of Kryvoi Rog Vechernyi that they were breaking their contract to print the paper. (Kryvoi Rog Vechernyi has also endorsed Moroz in the presidential race.) The employees claimed to have acted at the request of the Askon company, which owns the paper. Kryvoi Rog Vecherny's editors believe the publisher was pressured to submit this request after the paper experienced a series of politically motivated attacks.

The attacks on Kryvoi Rog Vechernyi began after authorities accused one of Moroz's aides of plotting a grenade attack on a rival presidential candidate, Natalia Vitrenko. Beginning on October 2, Ukraine officials subjected the paper to a series of hostile tax audits. On the night following the grenade attack, police ransacked the offices of Kryvoi Rog Vechernyi and detained one of its editors, Inna Chyrchenko. Chyrchenko was released after 17 hours of interrogation about the paper's ties with Moroz and his aide, Serhiy Ivanchenko. More reprisals followed after the paper ran an October 14 article that criticized the government's case against Ivanchenko as circumstantial and politically motivated.

As a non-partisan organization of journalists dedicated to defending press freedom around the world, CPJ condemns your government's crude attempts to censor these four newspapers for their editorial positions. We are troubled by the Kuchma regime's increasingly flagrant efforts to silence opposition news media, particularly during the run-up to the October 31 presidential election. Your campaign to stifle all critical expression over the last several years has fostered a climate of fear and self-censorship in which no genuinely independent news media can survive.

CPJ urges you to put an end to all press freedom abuses in Ukraine and to uphold your government's international obligations to respect the rights of journalists to practice their profession freely and safely.

Thank you for your attention. We await your comments.

Sincerely,
Ann K. Cooper
Executive Director

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