1999: THE YEAR IN REVIEW

U.S. and Ukraine: a focus on elections

The 1999 presidential election in Ukraine - its preparation, conduct and outcome - in one way or another influenced or colored almost every aspect of the U.S.-Ukraine relationship as it developed over the past year. It played a role in President Leonid Kuchma's and Prime Minister Valeri Pustovoitenko's visits to Washington, the assistance Ukraine seeks from the United States and international financial institutions for reforming its failing economy, and reports on its human rights record. It is also alleged to be behind the early recall of Ukraine's ambassador and consuls general to the United States.

As 1998 ended with a changing of the guard at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, so 1999 is ending on a similar, but discordant note: Ambassador Anton Buteiko, who replaced Yuri Shcherbak one year ago, is himself being replaced. Unlike the previous change, however, which followed Dr. Shcherbak's four-year tenure here, Mr. Buteiko's recall was abrupt, after only one year of service and, as some allege, tied to the lackluster showing by President Kuchma in the first round of the November presidential election vote tallies at Ukraine's diplomatic missions in Washington, New York and Chicago.

As President Kuchma's decisive victory over his communist challenger, Petro Symonenko, became clear on November 15, the U.S. government congratulated the president and the Ukrainian people, calling his victory an "expression of their commitment to democracy" and "an important endorsement by the Ukrainian people of a policy direction of continued political and economic reform and Western integration." Washington also promised to assist Ukraine's transition to democracy and a market economy.

The U.S. statement agreed with the OSCE observers' assessment that, while instances of election day violations were not "widespread or systematic," "imbalanced media coverage and the coordinated and inappropriate involvement of government officials in both rounds of the election on behalf of the incumbent" sullied the process.

The Kuchma administration's heavy-handed manipulation of the media was not a surprise. It was underscored in the State Department's annual human rights report released earlier in the year (see below), repeated by U.S. officials throughout the year, and focused on again just two weeks prior to the election during a briefing in Congress organized by the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (the Helsinki Commission). The briefing moderator, William Courtney, who is senior adviser to the commission and previously served as U.S. ambassador to Kazakstan and Georgia, said the harassment and various forms of intimidation of the opposition media was distressing.

On the positive side, panelist Nadia Diuk of the National Endowment for Democracy, pointed out that in Ukraine and in some other former Soviet republics "elections have now been definitively established as the only legitimate means of taking power."

A little more than a week after his inauguration, President Kuchma arrived in Washington - via Moscow and Paris - for talks on December 8 with President Bill Clinton, Vice-President Al Gore and other high-ranking administration officials, the heads of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and American business executives, among others. He also chaired, along with Vice-President Gore, a plenary session of the U.S.-Ukraine Binational Commission (the Kuchma-Gore Commission).

The major thrust of the visit, as it has been during numerous previous high-level visits here, was to get U.S., IMF and World Bank support for its monetary and structural reforms. Ukraine faces a serious financial crisis in the year 2000, when it must either pay more than $3 billion in credit interest payments or convince the IMF and other creditors to restructure Ukraine's loans.

During various meetings in Washington, President Kuchma stressed that his decisive victory in the presidential election was a mandate from the electorate to accelerate his economic reform program and continue pursuing the policy of integration into the Euro-Atlantic community. Indeed, just before coming to Washington, he signed a land reform decree aimed at doing away with collective farms in Ukraine. And, on his return, he instituted a major downsizing and restructuring of government ministries and agencies.

In a bylined article published by The Washington Post on the morning of his visit, President Kuchma gave his analysis of the election results, outlined his economic reform plans and tried to deflect U.S. and other Western criticism of the unfairness of the election campaign process.

Judging by the statements following his meetings here, Mr. Kuchma returned to Kyiv without a firm commitment about when the IMF would release its next tranche of long-term credits, which Ukraine needs in order to avoid defaulting on its loans.

Ukraine's Prime Minister Valerii Pustovoitenko came to Washington on a similar mission on February 2-3, and with similar results. He, as did President Kuchma in December, also called on the Ukrainian American community to use its influence in helping Ukraine obtain the financial support of United States and international financial institutions. He also underscored the importance of President Kuchma's re-election for Ukraine's future.

The Ukrainian president's other visit to Washington in 1999 was on April 23-25 to participate in the 50th anniversary celebration of NATO and the first Ukraine-NATO summit, which defined Ukraine's "distinctive relationship" with the Western alliance.

As he did in his later visit with The Washington Post, Mr. Kuchma used the Wall Street Journal on the day of his arrival in the U.S. for the NATO meeting to unveil a Ukrainian plan for the peaceful resolution of the Kosovo crisis.

While NATO was not in a mood for alternative peace proposals, especially those that would soften NATO's demands, Ukraine's participation in the anniversary celebration (which Russia boycotted), its summit discussions and the peace initiative served to strengthen its relationship with the West.

A few days after the NATO summit, the Ukrainian peace proposal got entangled in an embarrassing incident, when State Department spokesman James Rubin said in a television interview that the Kosovars would not return to Kosovo "if a bunch of Ukrainians are running around with guns on their sides ... the only country they really trust is the United States of America ..." Ukrainian Americans, including The Ukrainian Weekly, protested, and Mr. Rubin later back-tracked and, without apologizing, explained what he really meant to say.

For the most part, however, the Ukrainian American community has had a good working relationship with the administration. Senior U.S. officials have briefed community leaders and solicited their input on important U.S.-Ukraine issues. In April, State Department officials met with community leaders, who took exception to the annual State Department report on human rights, which cited Ukraine for having "deep-seated societal anti-Semitism." And prior to President Kuchma's December visit, the vice- president's foreign policy adviser, Leon Feurth, held a teleconference with a small group of Ukrainian American leaders.

In the Congress, much of the community's efforts were channeled through the Congressional Ukrainian Caucus, which, among other issues, has focused on improving U.S. assistance to Ukraine.

Two events defined U.S. assistance to Ukraine in 1999. In mid-February, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright reported to Congress that Ukraine had made "sufficient progress" in reforming its economy and in resolving some of the complaints by U.S. investors in Ukraine.

This "certification" of Ukraine, required by the foreign aid legislation passed by Congress in 1998, allowed Ukraine to receive the remaining $72 million of the $195 million in U.S. economic assistance slated for Ukraine in 1999.

Announcing Secretary Albright's decision on February 18, the State Department added, however, that both the administration and the Congress "remain very concerned about the uneven pace of reform and the difficult investment climate in Ukraine" and continue to urge Ukraine "to accelerate the market reform process and improve the climate for foreign investors by resolving remaining disputes."

On November 29, President Clinton signed the U.S. foreign aid legislation for fiscal year 2000, which the Congress passed 10 days earlier, after weeks of negotiations with the White House. The new legislation stipulates that Ukraine should receive "no less than $180 million." While the amount is $15 million less than in 1999 and $30 less than in 1998, the current legislation does not include any "certification" clause.

Over the past seven years, the United States has given $569 million to help Ukraine dismantle its nuclear weapons and reorganize its military under the so-called Nunn-Lugar program. On July 31, at a ceremony in the Crimean town of Foros, near Sevastopol, the program was extended for another six years under an agreement signed by U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen and Ukraine's Minister of Defense Gen. Oleksander Kuzmuk.

During the ceremony, Secretary Cohen spoke about the expanding U.S.-Ukrainian bilateral military relationship, noting that since Ukraine declared independence the two countries have undertaken more than 100 joint military programs.

The annual State Department human rights report for 1998 released last February gave Ukraine a "mixed" human rights record, with "limited progress" in some areas and persisting "serious problems" in others.

In addition to the "deep-seated societal anti-Semitism," which Ukrainian Americans protested, in general the report found more human rights violations in 1998 than in the previous year - "primarily due to infringements on freedom of the press and reports of government interference" in the elections to the Verkhovna Rada. But despite "numerous flaws and irregularities" in the elections, the report says they "generally reflected the will of the electorate."

The report also cited restrictive laws governing political parties, a judicial system "subject to political interference and corruption," politically motivated killings of politicians, politically connected businessmen, campaign managers, and journalists, and harsh conditions in prisons, where police and prison officials regularly beat detainees and prisoners and where there are "numerous instances of torture sometimes resulting in death."

This report has helped the former prime minister of Ukraine, Pavlo Lazarenko, who was detained at New York's Kennedy International Airport in February, from being deported back to Ukraine, where he is charged with misappropriation of government funds.

While under Immigration and Naturalization Service detention for trying to enter the country without appropriate documents, Mr. Lazarenko, who considered himself a political opponent of President Kuchma and his strongest challenger in the presidential election, requested political asylum, expressing fear for his life if he were to be returned to the conditions cited in the U.S. human rights report on Ukraine.

Also wanted in Switzerland, where he was arrested in 1998 on money laundering charges, Mr. Lazarenko remains in an INS detention facility in the San Francisco area

While Ukraine has not been able to exert any influence in the Lazarenko case, it has been successful in two other matters in which the United States played a leading role.

A senior State Department official said in January that the U.S. government is reconsidering the decision it made 50 years ago to give a collection of Albrecht Dürer drawings looted by the Nazis from the Stefanyk Library in Lviv to a descendant of its former Polish owner rather than return it to the library. The issue was raised earlier by the Ukrainian delegation to the Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets held at the State Department in November 1998.

And, in another U.S.-led effort to redress World War II injustices, in mid-December the German government and a number of German firms that used slave labor during the Nazi period agreed to pay $5.2 billion to the victims. Most of the more than 2 million people eligible for compensation are non-Jews from Eastern Europe, including Ukraine.

The past year also saw a unique event in Washington that, among other achievements, served to facilitate dialogue among U.S. and Ukrainian government officials and Ukrainian Americans. It was the Joint Conferences of Ukrainian American Organizations held June 23-27, when more than 900 members of major Ukrainian American professional, financial and veterans organizations discussed issues dealing with U.S.-Ukrainian relations, the Ukrainian American community and their own organizational matters at venues that, in addition to the conference headquarters hotel, included the Embassy of Ukraine, the State Department and Capitol Hill.

The keynote speaker at the Joint Conferences banquet was Vice-President Al Gore's national security advisor, Leon Feurth. Conference organizers had hoped that the vice president himself would attend and speak at the banquet and had planned to present him with the "Friend of Ukraine Award" in recognition of his co-chairmanship of the U.S.-Ukraine Binational Commission (the Kuchma-Gore Commission). The award was finally presented to him personally on September 15, during a private ceremony in his office attended by representatives of 15 major Ukrainian American organizations (see section on Ukrainians in the U.S.).

One of the most riveting sessions of all the conferences dealt with the trafficking of women from Ukraine, which was organized jointly by The Washington Group and the Washington/Baltimore Chapter of the Ukrainian National Women's League of America. The panelists - UNWLA President Iryna Kurowyckyj, Hanya Krill of LaStrada-Ukraine and Brama Gateway; Anita Botti, who heads the president's interagency task force dealing with that issue; Natalia Zarudna of the Embassy of Ukraine; and Walter Zalisko of the Jersey City Police Department - described the seriousness of what Ms. Kurowyckyj called this "modern form of slavery" and sexual exploitation, and what was being done and still needed to be done to combat the problem.

Two days later on Capitol Hill, Ms. Botti joined another group of panelists to examine the issue as a European problem. The hearing was held by the Helsinki Commission, whose chairman, Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.), declared that "It is time to declare war on those who commit these crimes."

Another troubling issue for Ukrainians which came up at the Joint Conference concerned the near impossibility of normal Ukrainians to get a visitor's visa from the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv. John E. Tedstrom, director of Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian affairs at the National Security Council, told the conference that changes are being made. "We've heard your message and have taken steps to fix the problem," he said. Subsequent man-in-the-street reports, however, indicate that little has changed.

Some say that Ukrainians stand a better chance of winning the lottery. Indeed, during the past nine years the lottery has been the easiest way for Ukrainians to get to the United States - and stay. The Immigration Act of 1990 makes available 55,000 permanent resident immigrant visas each year by random selection through what is called the Diversity Visa Lottery.

This year's lottery registration mail-in period was held between October 4 and November 3. The winning visas are apportioned among six geographic regions, with no visas issued to countries that have sent more than 50,000 immigrants to the United States during the previous five years, and no country permitted to receive more than 7 percent of the available visas in one year.

The Diversity Visa Lottery annually receives between 6 million and 8 million qualified entries for the 55,000 positions. That makes the odds of winning very respectable - between 109 and 145 to one.

U.S. Ukrainians' letter to Kuchma

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, December 26, 1999, No. 52, Vol. LXVII

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