ANALYSIS: Did death squads in Ukraine commit political murders? (09/08/02)

ANALYSIS

Did death squads in Ukraine commit political murders?

by Taras Kuzio
RFE/RL Newsline

The Kyiv newspaper Segodnia, owned by Tax Administration chief and Donbas clan head Mykola Azarov, published a sensational report on August 1 claiming that death squads have existed in Ukraine since 1996. The new Ukrainian procurator general, Sviatoslav Piskun, and Internal Affairs Ministry State Secretary Oleksandr Gapon subsequently confirmed that at least one such squad exists.

Mr. Gapon said the death squad is composed of nine members and includes the former head of Kyiv city's Internal Affairs Ministry directorate for the struggle against organized crime and another Internal Affairs Ministry colonel. The remaining members were former criminals. According to Mr. Gapon, all members of the squad are now in custody. The death squad is accused of undertaking 10 murders.

According to later official information, similar death squads also existed in Odesa and Lviv. Nine former Internal Affairs Ministry militiamen are soon to go on trial in Kharkiv; they are accused of belonging to a death squad that operated in that city and the Donbas region. The squad is accused of committing eight murders with its own service weapons. The Procurator General's Office is investigating another 330 Internal Affairs Ministry personnel for a range of offenses.

According to Mr. Gapon, an investigation into the activities of death squads began in 2000, but the material that was collected was handed to the Procurator General's Office only this year. In 2000, the head of the Kyiv Internal Affairs Ministry department, Yuriy Smyrnov, hinted that one such death squad existed. In May 2001, then Procurator General Mykhaylo Potebenko claimed that a Kyiv organized-crime boss had told his office that two of his gang had taken a Georgian, who they said may have been Heorhii Gongadze, to a forest near Kyiv on September 16, 2000, because he owed them money.

There are two likely reasons that the existence of death squads is being revealed now. First, Procurator General Piskun may have been instructed to clean up President Leonid Kuchma's image at home and abroad by finding a scapegoat for Mr. Gongadze's murder. Pinning the blame for Mr. Gongadze's death on organized crime would deflect attention away from the more plausible culprits in the higher echelons of Ukrainian politics.

Second, when the Internal Affairs Ministry and procurator general initially claimed that organized crime was behind the death of Mr. Gongadze they were ridiculed, especially after the two gangsters ("Cyclops" and "Matros") who are supposed to have abducted Mr. Gongadze produced an alibi saying they were participating in a wedding at the time of the crime, one of them as the groom. Neither of the two men are alive today. Gongadze was followed by unmarked cars for months prior to his abduction. When he reported their license plates to the police he was told they were police vehicles.

Other journalists and opposition leaders were subjected to similar harassment, and some died under suspicious circumstances. Since 1997 there have been at least eight suspicious car accidents involving large Kamaz trucks. The most suspicious of these was the purported accident in which Rukh leader Vyacheslav Chornovil was killed in March 1999. In October of that year, two opposition deputies, Hryhorii Omelchenko and Anatolii Yermak, a former officer of the Security Service of Ukraine, were shown a videocassette by Yevhen Marchuk, then an anti-Kuchma presidential candidate who was trying to woo national-democratic voters. The video included an interview with a colonel of the special-purpose MVS unit Orly (Eagles) who described the purpose of his unit as dealing with individuals on behalf of the authorities and admitted that the Orly were behind Mr. Chornovil's murder. The Orly colonel said he was ready to give evidence if his safety was assured.

Were the "Orly" the same as the death squads that the authorities now admit have existed since 1996? It is difficult to believe that death squads - which the authorities now admit included high-ranking Internal Affairs Ministry officers who used official cars and weapons - would go unnoticed by the National Security and Defense Council the Security Service and even President Kuchma for seven years.

The tape recordings made illicitly in Mr. Kuchma's office by his security guard, Mykola Melnychenko, led to the "Kuchmagate" crisis of November 2000 and reawakened interest in the evidence of malfeasance in Mr. Chornovil's death. A fragment on the Melnychenko tapes includes a conversation between President Kuchma and then Internal Affairs Minister Yurii Kravchenko in which Mr. Kravchenko gloated about the existence of his Orly unit. "I have such a unit who have their own methods and have no morality or anything. So, God help anybody," Mr. Kravchenko was recorded as saying.

Mr. Chornovil's son, Taras Chornovil, a member of Viktor Yushchenko's Our Ukraine bloc, is convinced, as are many other members of the opposition that the Orly were behind his father's "accident" and Mr. Gongadze's abduction.

It may be significant that the existence of officially sanctioned death squads in Ukraine was confirmed only after Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka admitted in October 2001 the existence in Belarus of a special unit named Zubr drawn from the Presidential Protective Service. The first unconfirmed reports of Zubr's existence surfaced one year earlier, in November 2000. Although Mr. Lukashenka insists that Zubr targeted only criminals, it is believed to have also murdered leading opposition figures and a Russian television cameraman.

Dr. Taras Kuzio is a resident fellow at the Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Toronto.

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