Turning the pages back... October 7, 2001 (10/06/02)

Turning the pages back...

October 7, 2001

Last year at this time, The Ukrainian Weekly reported on developments in the then-year-old Gongadze case. There was news on two fronts. In Kyiv, Ukraine's chief prosecutor had cleared President Leonid Kuchma of complicity in the disappearance of Internet journalist Heorhii Gongadze, while in New York, the Committee to Protest Journalists, called for an international investigation into the unsolved case.

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 Socialist Party leader Oleksander Moroz released tapes recorded by a former presidential security officer implicating the Kuchma administration in Mr. Gongadze's disappearance. The journalist's widow, Myroslava Gongadze, had called for an international investigation into the case.

CPJ Executive Director Ann Cooper said in a release published in The Weekly on October 7, 2001, "President Leonid Kuchma and other Cabinet officials have spent an entire year obstructing this inquiry," adding, "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."

At the same time, in Ukraine the Procurator General's Office cleared President Kuchma of involvement in Mr. Gongadze's disappearance and rejected a request by his mother that it launch a criminal investigation regarding the actions of the president and his top officials in the affair.

The Weekly reported on October 7, 2001, that Assistant Procurator General Oleksander Bahanets said in a letter to Lesia Gongadze, the journalist's mother, that his office had looked into the actions of the president and two of his top-ranking officials, Chief of Staff Volodymyr Lytvyn and Minister of Internal Affairs Yurii Kravchenko, based on conversations on a tape recording in which voices allegedly belonging to them are heard to be planning the journalist's abduction. In that letter, according to an Interfax-Ukraine report of September 28, Mr. Bahanets explained that his office had found all allegations against the three to be false.

Now, two years later, portions of the Melnychenko tapes dealing with the sale of a Kolchuha early warning system to Iraq have been found to be authentic. A determination has yet to be made on the rest of the recordings, and the Gongadze case has yet to be solved.

Source: "Ukraine's chief prosecutor clears Kuchma of complicity in Gongadze case," by Roman Woronowycz, Kyiv Press Bureau, and "Committee to Protect Journalists seeks international investigation into Gongadze case," both in The Ukrainian Weekly, October 7. 2001, Vol. LXIX, No. 40.

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