ROUGH DRAFT: "Tapegate" engenders conspiracy theories (03/11/01)

ROUGH DRAFT

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

"Tapegate" engenders conspiracy theories

Why Ukraine's President Leonid Kuchma decided to dismantle and sweep away the tent city erected by opponents calling for his resignation two days after U.S. President George W. Bush conveyed a personal message of support defies logic.

Mr. Kuchma, who is fighting for his political life in the crisis dubbed "Tapegate" and the Gongadze affair that has paralyzed his administration, can use all the political support international leaders are willing to extend. He should have been pleased to receive the message from the leader of what few would contest is the strongest and most influential country on the globe. Then why, two days later, did he turn his political behind Mr. Bush's way as if to flaunt his disregard for the support?

Did Mr. Kuchma think that Mr. Bush's message, conveyed by U.S. Ambassador Carlos Pascual on February 27, which praised Ukraine for its progress in economic reforms in 2000 and expressed hope that the president will continue to uphold the rule of law, democracy and human rights, was an expression of carte blanche support for Mr. Kuchma, the person, and his actions of late? Did he not understand that the United States, in expressing support for Ukraine's policy of reform, was expressing confidence in the country's ability, and that of its president, to continue to submit to the rule of law and guarantee freedom of speech and assembly?

It also, without a doubt, was meant to unequivocally tell the anti-Kuchma forces that in a democracy the accused are considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law - in effect, more support for Mr. Kuchma's situation.

Less than two days after the unexpected communication from President Bush, on March 1, Ukrainian law enforcement officials descended on the tent city on Ukraine's main thoroughfare, the Khreschatyk, and systematically but forcefully disassembled the shabby tents, while manhandling and arresting the protesters.

There was no need for such an unprovoked and public show of force. The protest camp was a sea of tranquility. Even during large rallies the call was always for peaceful demonstration and the exercise of restraint. The banal everyday life in the tent city consisted of meetings with the press, dissemination of literature and discussions with passers-by.

Furthermore, the anti-Kuchma movement was not gaining momentum. On the contrary, while the militant members of the Ukraine Without Kuchma movement have sustained the vitriol, it was becoming increasingly redundant and uninteresting. Like music during a card game it had become background noise for many Kyivans as they undertook the daily challenges of their often bleak lives. But the actions by state militia on March 1 have given the movement new impetus.

The decision to take down the tents either was more bumbling by a Keystone Kops outfit in the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the presidential administration offices or a cynical expression of "law and order." But it also could have been a deliberately timed act by certain Ukrainian authorities with influence over the president and a secret agenda to keep criticism and international pressure on Ukraine.

Whatever the reason, the United States responded negatively, as could have been expected, expressing its regret for the action and calling upon Ukrainian officials to "to observe their international commitment to freedom of assembly." The statement also put the United States on record as directly linking human rights guarantees in Ukraine with future U.S. financial aid, which the country still will require to lift itself fully from the economic quagmire of the last decade.

Did the Kuchma administration not realize this would be the response from Washington? It becomes evermore puzzling why President Kuchma and those around him continue to make what seem to be glaring political missteps.

But even more interesting is how the events seem to be paralleling one of the several conspiracy theories about who killed Heorhii Gongadze, the journalist at the center of the political crisis, which was laid out around the time audiotapes implicating the president in the journalist's disappearance became public.

There are two constants in all the theories. First, that Mr. Gongadze, the journalist cum Internet publisher, who so severely criticized the president and the political oligarchs on his website and whose violent death began this dark odyssey for the Ukrainian people, is an innocent victim sacrificed to begin a chain of carefully planned events. The other one is that Maj. Mykhailo Melnychenko, the former presidential bodyguard who made hundreds of hours of recordings of conversations held in the president's offices, is a foreign agent.

Of the two most popular theories, one states that the United States and Europe conjured up the whole mess in order to force Mr. Kuchma from office and replace him with their beloved Viktor Yuschenko, the youthful prime minister who better fits the West's description of what a democratic reformer should be. The other holds that Russia developed the intricate plan to force Ukraine away from the West and into its open arms - the final piece in the return of empire to Moscow.

It is the second scenario that has been gaining proponents as Mr. Kuchma has begun to turn increasingly to Russian President Vladimir Putin, whether coincidentally or not, in the four months since the controversy reached crisis proportions. The U.S. threat to withhold aid, which came after the tent city was destroyed, is another development that seems to give credence to the theory.

It holds that Russian intelligence officials pasted together a plot to bring Ukraine back into Moscow's orbit by first setting up a scenario in which the Ukrainian president seems to be complicit in the death of a journalist. As the rumors fly and audiotapes suddenly appear that show what a crook the president is, the West begins to keep him at arms length, which forces the increasingly politically fragile leader to turn to Moscow for support. Moscow first demands, through its agents in the Ukrainian government, that a new prime minister be appointed, one more open to pro-Moscow policies. Eventually this leads to overtures of reunion in a loosely bound confederation of the Slavic states, to include, of course, Belarus.

With the signing of a series of bilateral agreements in Dnipropetrovsk on February 13, Russia and Ukraine have drawn as close as they have been since the Soviet Union collapsed. Although to some extent the cooperation agreements were a result of the U.S. threat to build a space-based national defense system, many political pundits here believe Mr. Putin obtained Mr. Kuchma's signature on the agreements because the Ukrainian president, whose political situation was deteriorating rapidly at that time, had no recourse but to accept Mr. Putin's demands for closer military cooperation and a single electricity grid in return for a hearty show of support.

While the West has attempted to express confidence in Mr. Kuchma, as evidenced by the presence of European Union leaders in Kyiv a day after Mr. Putin left and more recently the remarks by President Bush, it seems that somebody in Ukraine keeps trying to make the president look bad. The state militia's actions after the message by Mr. Bush did nothing to help Ukraine's relations with the new U.S. president.

Several theorists who propagate the theory of Russia as marionette master in Tapegate and the Gongadze affair have attempted to identify the person pulling the strings for Moscow. One of them has gone so far as to name a high-ranking National Security and Defense Council official who once belonged to the KGB. Others say it could be a ranking member of the Verkhovna Rada leadership. In Ukraine's insidious and turbulent political climate finger-pointing is easy and abundant. At the moment, however, the claims are based on no more than circumstantial evidence and are far from provable.

Those who support the conspiracy theory believe that the next stage in this stranger-than-fiction drama will soon ensue. They say that within a few weeks Prime Minister Viktor Yuschenko will be forced to resign. Mr. Yuschenko is currently in a political struggle with certain faction leaders within the Verkhovna Rada, led by First Vice-Chairman Viktor Medvedchuk, to dismiss his cabinet and appoint a new one to be based on representatives of a new parliamentary majority that is arising among the lawmakers.

The parliamentary majority that some political experts see developing in the Parliament will consist of the Communist faction in coalition with the three centrist factions controlled by the business oligarchs, namely the Labor Ukraine, the Regional Rebirth and the Social Democratic (United) factions.

Pundits are predicting that Prime Minister Yuschenko, who thus far has refused to consider the proposal and the usurpation of his authority by parliamentary leaders, could receive a vote of no confidence when he appears before the Verkhovna Rada in early April to give his annual report. If he goes, could it be that the next phase in this implausible scenario of intrigue will have been fulfilled?

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