Kuchma insists on traveling to Prague though he is not wanted at NATO summit (11/24/02)

Kuchma insists on traveling to Prague though he is not wanted at NATO summit

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - Ukraine's President Leonid Kuchma prepared to fly to Prague on November 21 for the NATO summit, even as Brussels officials maintained that, while they could not ban his presence, his absence would make for smoother proceedings.

"Our position is that it wouldn't be smart for President Kuchma to come to Prague," explained NATO official Yves Broder on November 18, according to Holos Ukrainy.

Ukraine was put in a difficult situation on October 30 when the North Atlantic Council of NATO announced that it had downgraded a long-planned Ukraine-NATO Council meeting from the summit level to the foreign ministerial level over allegations that Ukraine's president had authorized the sale of anti-aircraft systems to Iraq. In the originally planned summit scenario, the 19 NATO state leaders would have sat with President Kuchma to discuss Ukraine's future with the alliance.

NATO officials have also indicated that if the Ukrainian president takes part in the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council roundtable, the meeting of the 44 countries that belong to the Partnership for Peace Program, there is a possibility that many world leaders would not attend in response. The meeting of the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council and the NATO-Ukraine Council were expected to be the center of attention of the second day of the two-day NATO summit on November 21-22 in Prague.

The meeting of the 19 state leaders of NATO was the scheduled main event of the summit's first day. Seven new NATO members, all former Communist countries, were scheduled to be welcomed into NATO that day.

Mr. Broder explained that while the president of a member-state of the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council had the right to head the state delegation - and NATO would do nothing to stop Mr. Kuchma's visit - nonetheless, "in our circles there exist certain matters of etiquette."

The United States initiated the fury that currently surrounds Ukraine and its president when it accused Mr. Kuchma on September 25 of giving authorization for an illegal transfer of an anti-aircraft radar system to Iraq in circumvention of United Nation sanctions. On November 18 the U.S. said that while it is up to Ukraine's leadership to decide whether Mr. Kuchma would attend the Prague summit, U.S. President George W. Bush has no intention of meeting with the Ukrainian president.

Mr. Kuchma and Ukraine's state leadership have vehemently and repeatedly denied any involvement in the sale of Kolchuha anti-aircraft systems to Iraq, which the West has deemed particularly dangerous to U.S. and British pilots protecting a no-fly zone over Iraq because the systems do not emit an identifiable radar signal. Washington said that it has a recording it deems authentic in which Mr. Kuchma gives the go-ahead to his director of military export to sell a Kolchuha to Baghdad via a Jordanian middleman.

After the accusations were leveled, Ukraine invited a special U.S.-British team of experts to enter the country and conduct a thorough investigation into Kolchuha manufacturing and sales procedures, and to review the country's arms export-control system. While the experts did not find any concrete evidence of the sale of Kolchuha systems to Iraq, they decided that Ukraine had not proven its innocence in the matter and that Ukrainian officials had not been as forthcoming and transparent as they could have been.

Ukraine initially delayed an announcement on its participation in the foreign ministerial meeting with NATO, explaining that it needed assurances that the gathering would not become a Ukraine-bashing contest and that the aims of the conference as originally planned would be met.

NATO and the United States responded by making overt calls for the need to maintain a close dialogue with Kyiv and to move forward on a new plan of Ukraine-NATO relations to supplant the original Ukraine-NATO Charter on a Special Partnership signed in Spain in 1997. The action plan associated with the original charter ends next month.

U.S. Assistant Deputy Secretary of State Steven Pifer traveled to Ukraine in the first week of November to convince Foreign Affairs Minister Anatolii Zlenko that it was in the best interests of Ukraine to move forward on a new general action plan and a specific plan for 2003, to which the sides had already agreed.

The action plan - in many ways similar to the exhaustive and demanding membership action plan that countries invited to join NATO are required to complete - would provide a specific path for Ukraine's eventual integration into the defense alliance.

A Foreign Affairs Ministry press release reported that U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell contacted Foreign Minister Zlenko by telephone on November 15 to express his personal interest in seeing Mr. Zlenko at the NATO summit. Later that same day, NATO Secretary General George Robertson reportedly spoke with Mr. Zlenko to express the same, according to the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Meanwhile, President Kuchma held a press briefing on November 15 to announce that a Ukrainian delegation would go to Prague only if he attends the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council meeting, again sharpening a situation that diplomatic efforts seemed to be diffusing.

"If the President does not go to the EAPC, nobody will," explained Mr. Kuchma.

Mr. Kuchma explained, however, that the final decision would remain with Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council. The matter was resolved when the council met on November 16 and officially sanctioned Ukraine's attendance at the NATO summit, and President Kuchma's participation as head of the delegation.

In another signal that the United States and NATO are mending fences with Ukraine, although perhaps not with its president, Oleh Zarubynskyi, the leader of Ukraine's permanent delegation to NATO's Parliamentary Assembly, said he had received assurances from NATO Secretary General Robertson that Ukraine stands a good chance of being in the third wave of countries to be offered NATO membership, which is currently scheduled to take place in 2006.

Speaking at a press conference in Kyiv, Mr. Zarubynskyi, who had just returned from the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in Istanbul, said Mr. Robertson had told him that the doors to NATO would be open to Ukraine after the Prague summit, although "the stairs to that door could become steeper."

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