Gongadze documentary screened in Congress (06/30/02)

Gongadze documentary screened in Congress

by Roman Kupchinsky
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

WASHINGTON - The BBC documentary, "Killing the Story," was shown on June 18 in the Dirksen Senate Auditorium of the U.S. Congress. The documentary deals with the disappearance and murder in the fall of 2000 of the Ukrainian journalist Heorhii Gongadze in Kyiv.

Produced by the BBC in 2001 and 2002, and filmed in Kyiv, Washington and New York, the BBC correspondent who directed and guided the documentary was Tom Mangold, one of the best known BBC investigative reporters.

The showing was sponsored by the Congressional Ukrainian Caucus and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and was attended by over 100 guests, members of Congress, staffers and the media. This was the first showing of the film in the United States.

In his opening remarks, Carl Gershman, the president of the NED, reminded the audience that the term, "Killing the Story," is the slang term used in the media to describe the suppression of a story which might upset one or another powerful interest group or individual. If you kill the story, you hide it from the public. But such things do not happen in the Congress of the United States, Mr. Gershman pointed out. In Ukraine, unfortunately, it has been different. The president of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma, and his closest associates decided to kill not only the story, but the man who wrote it, Heorhii Gongadze. Thus, the premiere showing of the film in the United States was in Congress, Mr. Gershman noted.

Addressing the guests, Myroslava Gongadze, the widow of Heorhii, transformed the film into real life. It was a striking and emotional presentation of those events in Ukraine that caused the murder of a young man who wrote about corruption in his country and was surreptitiously sentenced to death by the highest elected officials of Ukraine.

"My story is not unique ... Hundreds, if not thousands, of people in Ukraine find themselves helpless and in the position of confronting a choice every day - whether to speak the truth, or to give in to manipulation and corruption," Ms. Gongadze said.

"But what about the people in Ukraine? It makes me very sad to see how many of the hopes we had for our new, independent country 10 years ago remain unfulfilled because of the corruption of the ruling elite," she continued. "I think I speak for all the patriots in Ukraine, including the thousands who have been forced to leave the country for economic reasons, that we love our country and desire nothing better than to see it become democratic and prosperous, and a true member of the international community of democratic and civilized nations."

The film includes testimony by Mykola Melnychenko, the former member of President Kuchma's security detachment, who provided the crucial evidence pointing to Mr. Kuchma's involvement in the crime; his verbal orders to the head of the SBU, Leonid Derkach, and Yuriy Kravchenko, the minister of internal affairs, to have Gongadze "removed." Mr. Melnychenko taped the conversations in Mr. Kuchma's office and allowed them to be made public in December 2000. The tapes also showed the role played by Yuriy Lytvyn, recently elected head of the Verkhovna Rada as he pushed President Kuchma to have Gongadze "punished." Mr. Lytvyn, who at that time was the head of the Kuchma administration, is heard convincing Mr. Kuchma to go after Gongadze.

"Killing the Story" is an immensely powerful indictment of the present Ukrainian power structure. It shows how the Ukrainian people, after 70 years of communism and over 350 years of Russian imperialism, have been forced to give up many of their gains of independence won in 1991 to a ruthless organization of corrupt former Soviet officials who never identified with any Ukrainian ideal of freedom and who now are able to exercise control over an entire country. It is, indeed, a chilling story.

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