Committee to Protect Journalists seeks international investigation into Gongadze case (10/07/01)

Committee to Protect Journalists seeks international investigation into Gongadze case

NEW YORK - One year after the disappearance of Ukrainian journalist Heorhii Gongadze, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) joins Mr. Gongadze's widow in calling for an international investigation into the unsolved case.

"President Leonid Kuchma and other Cabinet officials have spent an entire year obstructing this inquiry," said CPJ Executive Director Ann Cooper. "Journalists in Ukraine will not feel safe until the government's role in Mr. Gongadze's disappearance is fully clarified, and those responsible for his abduction and death are behind bars," she added.

Mr. Gongadze was editor of the Internet news site Ukrainska Pravda, which often reported on alleged high-level government corruption in Ukraine. He disappeared on September 16, 2000, after several weeks of harassment by police officials. In early November 2000, a headless corpse believed to be his body was discovered in a forest outside Kyiv.

Several weeks later an opposition leader released tapes recorded by a former bodyguard of President Kuchma implicating his government in Mr. Gongadze's disappearance. The tapes caused a nationwide political crisis and led to numerous protest demonstrations against the Kuchma government.

Governments concerned about Ukraine's poor human rights record have also increased their pressure on the Kuchma administration in recent months. U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice visited Mr. Kuchma in late July to discuss U.S.-Ukrainian relations.

She told President Kuchma it was "very important to the world's confidence" in Ukraine to conduct a thorough investigation into Gongadze's disappearance, Agence France-Presse reported.

More recently, at a September 11 summit meeting between European Union and Ukrainian government officials in Yalta, senior EU representatives called on President Kuchma to improve press freedom conditions in the country during the run-up to parliamentary elections scheduled for March 2002.

At the opening of the summit, Guy Verhofstadt, the prime minister of Belgium, which currently holds the rotating EU presidency, stated, "These elections must be used to show that journalists can work freely in Ukraine," according to Agence France-Presse.

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