Communist-led lawmakers fail to remove Rada leaders (06/24/01)

Communist-led lawmakers fail to remove Rada leaders

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - An effort to remove the leadership of Ukraine's Parliament sputtered on June 19 when it failed to gain a majority of votes to put the issue on the parliamentary agenda.

After the coordinating council of the Verkhovna Rada agreed to place the issue before the entire body, only 146 lawmakers supported the initiative during the floor vote to remove Verkhovna Rada Chairman Ivan Pliusch, 185 to oust First Vice-Chairman Viktor Medvedchuk and 144 to get rid of Vice-Chairman Stefan Havrysh.

The proposal to do away with the ruling troika came after the Communist faction earlier this year had gathered the signatures of more than 150 national deputies - the minimum required to consider the issue for debate within the assembly.

The initiative came from a petition-gathering effort that began late this past winter at the height of the political crisis that engulfed Kyiv as a result of the tape scandal surrounding the disappearance of the young journalist Heorhii Gongadze. But the main objective of the Communist Party was to remove those parliamentary leaders who last year had successfully ousted the prior chairman, Oleksander Tkachenko, an Agrarian Party member who has since joined the Communist faction.

Mr. Symonenko said that though his faction had decided to delay the initiative while the Gongadze affair raged, it was now well more than a year since the Tkachenko leadership was removed in an illegal "parliamentary putsch" and time for the current Verkhovna Rada leadership to defend its work.

"Let them now account for their work during this time, let them show that this leadership improved the work of the Verkhovna Rada," said Mr. Symonenko.

In February 2000, a majority coalition of centrist and democratic factions forced the removal of the leftist parliamentary leadership that had blocked legislation aimed at economic and democratic reform and replaced it with its own members.

A year later, during February and March of this year, Communists in Parliament began gathering signatures to oust the new leadership. The faction obtained the support of most of the Left Center (Socialist), Batkivschyna and Yabluko factions, as well as some lawmakers from the Ukrainian National Rukh and Progressive Socialist factions, which amounted to 154 names. However, as became obvious later, the support that the Batkivschyna, UNR and Yabluko factions extended to the effort was a result of the political turmoil of "Tapegate."

By the time Mr. Symonenko introduced the measure, the political environment in Kyiv had changed: the Gongadze affair and Tapegate had lost political steam, and the Communists successfully had led the ouster of Prime Minister Viktor Yuschenko, the darling of the right. There was little doubt that the UNR and Yabluko would not continue to support the matter.

Mykhailo Brodsky, leader of the Yabluko Party, said that the Communists had utilized the signatures illegally by presenting them at this late date and that the reason for the party's support for the petition initially was due to the "government crisis" of the time.

Meanwhile, Verkhovna Rada leaders expressed little concern that their posts were in jeopardy. Mr. Medvedchuk said on June 18 that the effort by the Communists was normal political maneuvering in a situation where a political force thought it might be able to grab power.

"This is a fight for authority, and it is an ordinary aspect of the behavior of those political forces that want to change either the entire administration of the Verkhovna Rada or at least replace some of it with their people," said a seemingly untroubled Mr. Medvedchuk, today considered the most powerful person in the Parliament and the prime target of the leftist forces.

National Deputy Oleksander Volkov, another power broker in the legislative body who heads the Democratic Union faction, put the effort by the Communists in more blunt terms, explaining that the political right, in failing to support the initiative, simply used good political reasoning.

"I see this as no more than an attempt to cause controversy on the part of the left. The right had the good sense of mind to see this was not for the good of Ukraine," said Mr. Volkov.

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