Ukraine remembers Chornovil at memorial gatherings, services (04/02/00)

Ukraine remembers Chornovil at memorial gatherings, services

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - The National Rukh of Ukraine (NRU) received an unexpected morale booster as it prepared to commemorate the first anniversary of the untimely death of its longtime leader Vyacheslav Chornovil, when a renegade group from the splinter Rukh party turned over its headquarters in tribute to Mr. Chornovil's memory.

The party has struggled to maintain its national influence and its membership rosters since it took a double whammy a year ago - first with the party's split after an attempt to oust Mr. Chornovil as party leader, then his death several weeks later.

The surprise announcement came on March 20 during a telephone call between a former member of the splinter Ukrainian National Rukh Party (Ukrainskyi Narodnyi Rukh) Secretariat, Oleksander Sheremet, and National Rukh of Ukraine Party (Narodnyi Rukh Ukrainy) Press Secretary Dmytro Ponamarchuk.

Mr. Ponamarchuk said that Mr. Sheremet and some 40 other disgruntled members of the splinter party led by Yurii Kostenko had decided it was time to return to their roots, and that they were ready to take with them Mr. Kostenko's party headquarters.

The building, which was obtained before the split, was to have held the party's administrative offices, but ended up in the hands of the Kostenko political organization.

According to Mr. Ponamarchuk the action was led by Bohdan Boyko, a high-ranking official in the Kostenko party and one of the leaders of the revolt against the late Mr. Chornovil.

Both Mr. Sheremet and Mr. Boyko have applied for reinstatement into the National Rukh Party, and Mr. Boyko has re-joined their faction in the Verkhovna Rada, where he is a national deputy.

On March 21 Mr. Ponamarchuk and a small NRU delegation traveled to the building where they were greeted by Mr. Sheremet who provided them with the official NRU stamp, the lease contract for the facility, party papers and the 10-year-old archives of the Rukh party. The first official move they made was to change the plaque hanging on the building's facade to represent the new occupants.

A court now will decide the final fate of the building after Mr. Kostenko's Rukh filed a complaint on March 22. A few days later the Ukrainian government gave the Kostenko group another building in the city center of Kyiv.

Uncharacteristically, Mr. Kostenko's Rukh has not raised any serious protests to the extraordinary event. Officially, however, the building had remained in the name of the original Rukh and was obtained through the efforts of Mr. Chornovil's successor, Hennadii Udovenko.

The turn of events occurred as the National Rukh Party made final preparations for a string of commemorations in honor of Mr. Chornovil on the first anniversary of his tragic death in a car accident just outside Kyiv.

Mr. Chornovil was returning from political appearances in Kirovohrad just after midnight on March 26, 1999, with his personal press secretary, Mr. Ponamarchuk, when the car in which they were traveling collided head on with the side of a tractor-trailer truck that was making a u-turn on the dark two-lane road. Mr. Chornovil and his driver were killed instantly, while Mr. Ponamarchuk survived with serious injuries, chiefly because he was asleep in the back seat at the time of impact.

Ukraine's Ministry of Internal Affairs caused an uproar from among Mr. Chornovil's many supporters and followers when it announced, before all the facts surrounding the shocking incident were known, that the matter would be handled as an accident and not as a possible political assassination. The case was officially closed in December 1999 after the ministry determined that the driver was to blame but decided not to press charges against him, citing no prior record and a stable family history as their reasons.

Mr. Chornovil was buried at the Baikove Cemetery in Kyiv on March 29 in what many observers said was the largest funeral the city had ever seen. More than 50,000 people lined the funeral procession in an outpouring of grief and respect for the Rukh leader, a man who was adored by millions, but also disliked by many who saw him as a main culprit in the destruction of the Soviet system.

Far fewer people were on hand for the several commemorations that occurred this year on March 23-25, but at least several thousand paid tribute to Mr. Chornovil's memory at the Ivan Franko Theater, where the official ceremony took place. Among those attending were Prime Minister Viktor Yuschenko, First Vice Prime Minister Mykola Zhulynskyi, Minister of Culture Bohdan Stupka, Minister of Foreign Affairs Borys Tarasyuk and President Leonid Kuchma's cultural advisor, Yurii Bohutskyi.

Mr. Yuschenko told a packed house of at least 3,000 people that the name of Vyacheslav Chornovil and the notion of Ukrainian independence cannot be separated.

"The primary association that occurs when the name of Vyacheslav Chornovil is mentioned is independence and Chornovil. Let the third idea that stands in that row be the taste of victory. The taste of victory and independence - the creed and spiritual testament of Vyacheslav Chornovil," said Mr. Yuschenko.

The prior day, friends and acquaintances of Mr. Chornovil gathered at the Teacher's Building, the historic home of the Central Rada of the first Ukrainian republic, which existed only briefly in 1918-1920. It was also the building that thousands of distraught Ukrainians jammed last year to file past the coffin of Mr. Chornovil before burial at the Baikove Cemetery.

On March 23 National Deputy Les Taniuk, Mr. Chornovil's close friend and political ally, and a former stage director, led a group of poets, politicians and literati in a night of remembrances. The event, which was to have been an intimate and modest affair, became something quite different after the unexpectedly large turnout forced people to sit in the aisles and pack the halls and doorways of the building.

Commemorative events continued into the weekend and included a moleben at the gravesite of the political leader and public meetings at the site of the accident, as well as on Kyiv's central Independence Square, which were attended by hundreds more.

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