FACES AND PLACES: Is Kuchma guilty? (03/18/01)

FACES AND PLACES

by Myron B. Kuropas

Is Kuchma guilty?

Is Ukraine's President Leonid Kuchma guilty of ordering the murder of Heorhii Gongadze, a journalist? Thousands of demonstrators demanding Mr. Kuchma's ouster believe he is.

"Why should a president who had just won an election seek to murder an unknown journalist?" Mr. Kuchma asked recently.

Mr. Gongadze was hardly an unknown journalist. He was one of Mr. Kuchma's severest critics and, like other journalists who had the temerity to question government corruption, he vanished. Coincidence?

If President Kuchma is innocent, why are he and his government sycophants behaving as if he were guilty? Mr. Gongadze disappeared in September. In October Vice Minister Mykola Dzhyga asserted that Mr. Gongadze was heavily in debt. More recently, Ukrainska Pravda, reported that a state prosecutor alleged that he had learned from a Kyiv crime boss that two gang members had taken Mr. Gongadze into a forest in order to collect on their loan. Mr. Gongadze's headless body was discovered in November. DNA tests indicated with 99 percent certainty that the body was that of the journalist. Where are the two gang members? They, too, disappeared.

Ukraine's president denied any involvement with the disappearance until a tape, allegedly implicating Mr. Kuchma, was produced by Mykola Melnychenko, a former presidential bodyguard. According to the tape, the president of Ukraine, using Nixonian expletives, demanded that Mr. Gongadze be deported to Georgia or kidnapped by the Chechens. At first Mr. Kuchma said the tapes, reportedly some 300 hours in length, were lies. Later, he argued that they had been doctored to put Gongadze's name in his mouth. Mr. Melnychenko had given the first set of tapes to Socialist Party leader Oleksander Moroz, a political opponent of Mr. Kuchma, who released the references to Gongadze. The protests began within days.

Suspecting that some government employees may be associated with the protesters, Mr. Kuchma demanded blind allegiance to his person. "I invite every state servant, starting with Cabinet ministers who are in communion, sympathize, not to speak of act, with opposition formations, to decide (within a week)," declared Ukraine's presidents, "either they resign from their jobs in state organs or publicly dissociate themselves from anti-state formation."

Anti-state formations? I thought the demonstrations focused on Mr. Kuchma, not the state. Are we to think that Mr. Kuchma is now the state? Has he discovered the Fuhrerprinzip, infamously tied to Adolf Hitler who adopted the principle (prinzip) that an all-knowing all-powerful leader (fuhrer) was to be blindly obeyed because he embodied the German state?

In December a parliamentary commission established to investigate the Gongadze case requested that the International Press Institute in Vienna examine the authenticity of the Melnychenko tapes. After almost two months of scrutiny, the institute's report was inconclusive. "It is nearly impossible to detect manipulation with a nearly absolute level of certainty," the report read. At the same time, however, the report concluded that "the above-mentioned notion of uncertainty in the technical examination does not imply that the tapes are inauthentic."

And now the United States is becoming involved. According to RFE/RL, Ukraine's ambassador to the United Nations, Volodymyr Yelchenko, asserted on March 7 that an "expert group" of FBI officials would be coming to Kyiv at the request of Ukraine's government to assist in the Gongadze murder investigation. We'll see.

Anti-Kuchma protests came to a crescendo on March 9 when a reported 18,000 people eventually materialized in Kyiv to protest Mr. Kuchma's participation in a wreath-laying ceremony honoring the 187th anniversary of the birth of Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine's poet laureate. Bloody clashes with police ensued, and some 200 people were arrested. According to the Associated Press, President George W. Bush sent a message to Ukraine's president "warning that pressure on protesters is testing Kuchma's commitment to democracy." Implicit was the waning that Mr. Kuchma was jeopardizing U.S. aid.

Does Mr. Kuchma care? Apparently not. Big Brother Vladimir Putin is more than willing to help the beleaguered president in his hour of need. The Russian embrace couldn't come at a better time for Mr. Kuchma. Under President Bush, the United States is taking a second look at the billions of dollars squandered in Ukraine, the third largest recipient of U.S. aid after Egypt and Israel. Many Kuchma Klan members became rich during the last few years, but the American gravy train is grinding to a halt. Are Mr. Kuchma's personal pockets hurting? In an interview with The New York Times, Mykola Melnychenko alleged that Ukraine's president embezzled over a billion dollars. Does this mean that Mr. Kuchma has surpassed the embezzlement record of one-time Kuchma Klan member Pavlo Lazarenko?

President Kuchma can't understand what the fuss is all about. "Show me a Ukrainian politician who is without sin," he said. "Let him cast the first stone." There you go.

How corrupt is Mr. Kuchma? According to Mr. Melnychenko, Ukraine's president is so powerful that he was able to control prosecutors, tax collectors and intelligence chiefs who opened "criminal investigations" of businessmen who supported his opponents. Why is all of this so believable?

Support for Mr. Kuchma is fading fast. Disillusionment with his tenure has now gone far beyond the Gongadze case, reflecting a widespread dissatisfaction with government chicanery, money laundering, gang violence, theft, corruption and all the other ills that plague Ukraine after 10 years of increasing gangsterism. According to Kyiv Post, Mr. Kuchma's opposition now "unite over 30 political parties and movements, the largest of which are the Socialist Party, the Batkivschyna Party, the Reform and Order Party, the Sobor Party, the Forward Ukraine Party (all centrist parties, the Ukrainian Narodnyi Rukh and the UNA-UNSO (right-wing parties)." Calling themselves the Forum for National Salvation, their "main goal is to change Ukraine's form of government to a more parliament-based structure" at the expense of presidential power. Interestingly, the pro-Moscow Communist Party in Ukraine opted to remain out of the loop. Any guesses why?

Is President Kuchma guilty of ordering the murder of Heorhii Gongadze? We may never know. But one thing seems certain: Mr. Kuchma has not been good for Ukraine.

Myron Kuropas' e-mail address is: [email protected].

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