Funeral of Heorhii Gongadze is delayed (01/21/01)

Funeral of Heorhii Gongadze is delayed

by Yarema A. Bachynsky
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

KYIV - The mother of journalist Heorhii Gongadze, who went missing on September 16 and whose beheaded body was identified through DNA testing has decided to put off plans for immediate burial of her son's body until further tests are conducted and the missing head is found.

On January 16, addressing Parliament during hearings on the state of the Ukrainian information space, Lesia Gongadze brought tears to the eyes of many in the audience as she pleaded for answers that have not been forthcoming from Ukraine's procurator general and law enforcement officials handling the Gongadze case.

"I and my family have been pressured to bury [Mr. Gongadze's] body in Lviv. They have told me that a plane is ready and there's a spot at the Lykachiv Cemetery," said Mrs. Gongadze in television reports from the Parliament. "But I am the mother and I need to know whose body I am laying to rest," she continued.

Mrs. Gongadze's statement came after Procurator General Mykhailo Potebenko, who last week in Parliament announced that there was a 99.6 percent probability that the Tarascha corpse discovered on November 2, 2000, did indeed belong to the missing Mr. Gongadze, changed his mind and signaled he was willing to release the body to Mrs. Gongadze and Myroslava Gongadze, the late journalist's wife. Earlier Mr. Potebenko had refused to release the corpse on the grounds that the DNA test results had not confirmed its identity with sufficient certainty.

Apart from the question of whether the burial of a headless body accords with Christian religious practice, an issue raised by Lesia Gongadze in the past week, there is a legal question that may lie behind the decision of the Gongadze family to put off burial for the time being.

According to Ukrainian law, if there is no official confirmation by investigators that a body belongs to a particular individual, the procurator's office is not required to continue with a murder investigation, regardless of whether or not they release a body for burial. Mr. Potebenko has not made such an official determination and claims that a number of persons have seen Mr. Gongadze alive since September 16, 2000, the day of his disappearance.

Local law also gives a victim's relatives the right to demand additional forensic testing by investigators on the bodies of deceased kin, and Lesia Gongadze said she would demand that a full battery of tests be conducted on Mr. Gongadze's body.

Meanwhile, the Lavrynovych Committee, the ad hoc parliamentary group charged with investigating the Gongadze case, was slated to interview Health Ministry officials involved in the matter and experts who have said that they were subjected to pressure by law enforcement bodies to moderate their findings.

Svitlana Karmeliuk, a DNA expert working in the official investigation, has said that police personnel had broken into her home and tried confiscating her international travel passport. The Internal Affairs Ministry had refuted these charges, saying that Mrs. Karmeliuk's passport contained errors and that agents sent to her apartment were only trying to help correct these errors.

The case of Mr. Gongadze, former publisher of Ukrainska Pravda, an Internet periodical known for publishing investigative reports on high-level official corruption and shady dealings, and not for its love of President Leonid Kuchma, shows no signs of abating.

It was on November 28, 2000, that National Deputy Oleksander Moroz made public an audiotape that appeared to implicate Mr. Kuchma and top law enforcement officials in Mr. Gongadze's disappearance. That tape and subsequent revelations have sparked an uproar within Ukraine and have caught the attention of the West and international human rights and journalists' organizations such as Reporters Without Borders, which last week concluded a fact-finding mission to Ukraine and called on Procurator General Potebenko to resign.

Protesters who in December erected a tent town on Independence Square in Kyiv and demanded the resignation of President Kuchma and top law enforcement officials for their alleged role in what is now being called "Gongadzegate," have indicated that they will return to the center of the capital in early February in greater numbers.

In such cities as Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Mykolaiv, Lviv, Zhytomyr, Chernihiv and Donetsk, tent towns have been set up since the New Year, only to be knocked down by local police or banned by local courts. Organizers of the "Ukraine Without Kuchma" movement have officially registered as a civic movement, and promise to continue their protests until their demands are met.

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