2002: THE YEAR IN REVIEW

At home: maintaining steady policy is difficult

Maintaining a steady domestic policy proved to be very difficult for the Ukrainian government and state administration in 2002. As in years past, the effort to steer policy was too often a matter of reacting to unexpected developments and veering around unforeseen obstacles as Ukraine bounded from one crisis to another.

Elections dominated much of the first half of the year. In the three months to the March 31 parliamentary elections, the various political interests formed political blocs to consolidate their energies. Throughout the period, government and state leaders defended themselves from allegations that they were unfairly and even illegally swaying the political balance in favor of pro-presidential candidates and political blocs by utilizing state administrative and financial resources at their disposal.

Nonetheless, nearly a quarter of the voting population supported the Our Ukraine Bloc - headed by former Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko and outside the influence of the ruling elites - in the March 31 vote (see separate story). But its fortune turned into another domestic political crisis when it became apparent that through political arm twisting - at times done in an allegedly dubious legal manner - the For a United Ukraine Bloc of pro-presidential forces ended up with the most seats in the new Parliament.

That crisis still simmering, Ukraine headed into the usually peaceful summertime vacation lull only to be racked by several man-made disasters that took much human life, including several mining accidents and the crash of a military jet into a crowd of onlookers at an air show near Lviv (see separate story).

After the summer recess, political turmoil again took center stage with demonstrations by anti-presidential forces, partly in response to the post-election political maneuvering in the Verkhovna Rada, but also as a continuation of the Gongadze affair.

Matters finally settled down after the Verkhovna Rada formed a politically fragile parliamentary majority that eventually succeeded in forming a new government, as President Leonid Kuchma had promised it could during an unexpected Independence Day address in which he called for a dramatic change in the country's political system.

The year began with the Parliament's Accounting Chamber announcing that audits of the work of several government institutions during the last five years showed financial irregularities by the government in the amount of $357 million (U.S). Overall, it found more than $2.2 billion in misused funds in the nearly 2,000 state institutions it reviewed. Among the government institutions charged with the most widespread financial abuse: the Ministry of Industrial Policy and the Ministry of Fuel and Energy.

The matter of the disappearance and apparent murder of Ukrainian journalist Heorhii Gongadze in September 2000 remained just below the surface of Ukrainian politics throughout the year, re-emerging intermittently. By year's end the body that was found outside Kyiv near the town of Tarascha two months after Mr. Gongadze's disappearance remained unclaimed by his mother and unburied.

On January 27 Reporters Without Borders, an international human rights organization that had become interested in the case, said that, contrary to indications by Ukraine's Procurator General's Office, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe was still considering the formation of an independent European commission of inquiry to look into the matter of the Ukrainian journalist's disappearance and death. Earlier, Ukraine's prosecutors had announced that PACE had rejected the idea of a special investigative commission.

Ukrainian prosecutors also announced they would turn to a German firm to do a third examination of the Tarascha corpse for yet another determination of whether the remains belonged to the journalist. By the end of the year no such examination had taken place.

The FBI said after a visit to Kyiv on April 8-15 that it had been stymied in its efforts to assist the Gongadze investigation when Ukrainian investigators refused to share information other than what already was in the public domain. Ukrainian investigators also refused to share evidence or conduct a joint site inspection in the forest near Tarascha where the body was discovered.

Several weeks after the visit, Procurator General Mykhailo Potebenko resigned his post to enter parliamentary politics as a newly elected national deputy of the Communist faction. He was replaced by Sviatoslav Piskun, whom President Kuchma nominated on June 29 and the Verkhovna Rada approved on July 5. Mr. Piskun, previously the No. 2 person in the State Tax Administration, quickly became part of the quagmire called the Gongadze affair, after stating upon his confirmation by the Parliament that his first priority was to solve the crime.

On July 12 he announced the formation of a special task force dedicated to solving the mystery of the disappearance of Mr. Gongadze. The announcement came days after the new Parliament had agreed to continue the work of the ad hoc investigative committee formed by its predecessor, to be chaired by National Deputy Hryhorii Omelchenko, a former general in the Security Service of Ukraine and a prominent member of the anti-Kuchma political bloc.

Just days before the second anniversary of Mr. Gongadze's disappearance, Mr. Piskun announced that his office had determined the Tarascha corpse to be the remains of the Ukrainian journalist. Mr. Piskun said that a top-notch panel of Ukrainian medical examiners had reviewed the medical evidence related to the corpse. They had concluded that, "the body belongs to Heorhii Gongadze 100 percent," said Mr. Piskun. He also noted that, contrary to previous conclusions, these experts had said the cause of death was decapitation.

U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Carlos Pascual said the same day, when queried by The Weekly, that the U.S. supported the conclusion that the Tarascha body belonged to Mr. Gongadze based on an earlier FBI analysis of the DNA. However, the Ukrainian journalist's mother said she would make a statement only after she personally had reviewed the report. A few weeks later Rober Menard, director of Reporters Without Borders, appearing together with Mrs. Gongadze, told a press conference in Kyiv they would request the services of a French-based forensic expert for a third-party evaluation.

National Deputy Omelchenko announced the same day that his commission had filed a request with the Procurator General's Office that it open a formal investigation into the complicity of President Kuchma and three close political associates on four criminal matters, including the disappearance of Mr. Gongadze.

When the Procurator General's Office failed to act on the matter, a member of the Kyiv Appeals Court, Judge Yurii Vasylenko filed 11 criminal charges on October 15 against the Ukrainian president in regard to the Gongadze case, along with additional allegations of blackmail and corruption. Procurator General Piskun retaliated by filing a complaint with Ukraine's Supreme Court in which he declared the charges "mistaken," but Ukraine's highest criminal court only remanded the case back to Mr. Vasylenko's court to correct procedural errors.

In November Judge Vasylenko repeated his charges and ordered the Procurator General's Office to immediately begin an investigation, an authorization the Appeals Court judge claimed only his court or the Supreme Court could override.

National Deputy Yulia Tymoshenko, who spent part of 2001 behind bars and under constant threat of re-incarceration, obtained new political life after her eponymous political bloc did better than expected in the March parliamentary elections. With 7.4 percent of Ukraine's electorate backing her, Ms. Tymoshenko reinvigorated her anti-Kuchma campaign.

Six weeks after the elections she called a press conference to announce that a judge had cleared her of any wrongdoing related to charges of illegal money operations and bribery, which had brought her imprisonment the previous year.

She explained on May 8 that a Kyiv district court, after reviewing all the charges against her and her husband in regard to their work as owners and chief executives of United Energy Systems, had exonerated both of them fully. In the mid-1990s UES had been Ukraine's largest energy trading company and very close to Pavlo Lazarenko, a discredited former Ukrainian prime minister who today sits in a U.S. jail awaiting trial on charges of money laundering.

Not two months later, however, the Procurator General's Office announced it had opened a new criminal investigation into embezzlement charges in the purchase of Russian natural gas, conspiracy to defraud and abuse of public office. Ms. Tymoshenko quickly responded that the new charges, which she said were simply based on the earlier ones, carried political motivation and were a response to her leading role in organizing new demonstrations against President Kuchma, which were planned for the fall.

The first of those demonstrations, held on September 17, the day after the second anniversary of the disappearance of journalist Gongadze, turned into a larger affair than most disinterested observers had expected. The Kyiv protest was part of a series of international protests held across Ukraine, as well as in Prague, Budapest, Paris, London, Chicago, Washington and New York.

In Kyiv, an unexpectedly large crowd of 25,000 gathered on European Square to listen to the anti-Kuchma leadership - Ms. Tymoshenko, Socialist Party leader Oleksander Moroz, Communist Party leader Petro Symonenko - along with Mr. Yushchenko, who had tried unsuccessfully to reach a political agreement on sharing power in the Verkhovna Rada with the pro-presidential forces before becoming part of this protest action. The demonstration, which proceeded under the slogan "Arise, Ukraine," called for the resignation of President Kuchma for a variety of alleged crimes, including complicity in the disappearance of Mr. Gongadze. It ended before the Presidential Administration Building, where a tent city was erected.

That evening, state militia officers clad in riot gear and brandishing billy clubs swept away the tent city, while beating protesters. Law enforcement officials arrested 51 individuals, while protest leaders said some 125 others had gone missing.

Undeterred, some 10,000 anti-Kuchma forces gathered again on September 24 on European Square in Kyiv to continue to push for the president's resignation. The accent at this rally was the allegedly underhanded way in which the pro-presidential parliamentary forces had achieved a majority in the Verkhovna Rada, even while they took only 12 percent of the popular vote. Before the protest, during the morning session of the Verkhovna Rada, opposition leaders called for the president's impeachment and announced they would paralyze the work of the Parliament by not taking part in any legislative votes.

The evening before, the three leaders of the opposition, Messrs. Moroz and Symonenko and Ms. Tymoshenko, had forcefully entered the television studio of the government channel UT-1 and had demanded airtime on the evening news program to air their allegations against state authorities. Their refusal to leave the studio resulted in the cancellation of that day's news program.

During the protest the next day, Mr. Yushchenko told the gathering that the new political crisis in Ukraine had developed because, "The nation votes for one set of lawmakers, while another set takes power."

Afterwards, demonstrators marched to the Presidential Administration Building only to be confronted by some 400 helmeted, shield-wielding militia officers who blocked their path. A group of some 50 national deputies used their status to obtain access to the building, where they demanded a meeting with President Kuchma. After being held at gunpoint, they staged a sit-in that lasted all night. They finally were allowed to meet with Mr. Kuchma in the morning.

Two other protests followed. On October 12, 25,000 demonstrators assembled again to hear the leaders of the anti-Kuchma movement read a litany of specific charges against Ukraine's president. However, only days later, on October 21, only some 5,000 turned out to take part in a candlelight vigil to "commemorate" 10 years since President Kuchma took his first government position as prime minister.

Press censorship also came to the fore again in 2002, when several journalists quit their positions in protest over the appearance of anonymous directives, labeled "temnyky" from what were generally considered presidential sources. After a new director at the independent UNIAN news agency began heavily editing material critical of presidential policy, the staff went on strike.

In the ensuing days Kyiv journalists announced they had formed a strike committee as a first step towards the development of an independent trade union. They also published a manifesto demanding that the state stop manipulating and intimidating the mass media.

On December 4 the journalists succeeding in obtaining a hearing on press censorship and freedoms during a special session of the Verkhovna Rada, during which various journalists accused government and state leaders of not allowing them to work freely and openly, while authorities defended themselves by saying that a sufficient amount of legislation was on the books to prevent censorship and that any such cases were independent acts by bad bureaucrats.

While the Gongadze affair continued to be the central focus of the opposition movement, his death merely represented the fate of a dozen other journalists over the last decade. On May 23 a Donetsk Appeals Court overturned a guilty verdict against Yurii Verediuk, who had been convicted in the murder of another journalist, Ihor Aleksandrov. Mr. Aleksandrov was beaten to death with a baseball bat before the TOR television studio of which he was general manager on July 3 of last year. He had been broadcasting a series of stories on police corruption in his raion at the time of his demise. Mr. Verediuk was a homeless alcoholic who many doubt from the outset was capable of the killing. Mr. Verediuk died not long after his release from jail.

The Melnychenko "tapes" - the digital recordings that were at the center of the Gongadze controversy on which Mr. Kuchma is allegedly heard planning the young journalist's disappearance - continued to remain in the news. On February 7 Oleksander Zhyr, the head of the ad hoc parliamentary committee investigating the Gongadze affair, said that an independent U.S. expert, considered at the top of his field, had analyzed the recordings and concluded they were authentic. The announcement was made in Washington in an interview with Radio Liberty, at which Mr. Melnychenko was present.

Mr. Melnychenko was a member of Mr. Kuchma's security detail before requesting and receiving asylum in the U.S. after he announced the existence of his recordings in December 2000.

On May 21 Mr. Melnychenko announced from Washington that he had testified before a U.S. grand jury, although he did not disclose the subject matter involved. He did, however, emphasize that the testimony did not involve Mr. Lazarenko, the former prime minister being held in a U.S. prison in the San Francisco area for the third year now as the investigation into money-laundering charges continues.

While Mr. Melnychenko would not state the reason for his testimony, he repeated a charge that would explode into a major international controversy several months later: President Kuchma had ordered the sale of a Kolchuha anti-aircraft defense system to Iraq. Mr. Melnychenko said he had recorded the Ukrainian president giving authorization for the military transfer in a conversation with his chief military export official.

Mr. Lazarenko remained in the news as well, although his case continued to move at snail's pace in the U.S. On February 7 Ukraine's Procurator General's Office charged the former prime minister with the murder of National Deputy Yevhen Scherban of Donetsk, who was assassinated in 1996, and Vadym Hetman, former chairman of the National Bank of Ukraine, who was found dead in his apartment building in a gangland-style slaying in 1998.

Mr. Lazarenko was accused of ordering the murders through a group of professional assassins. That group had been disassembled and its members arrested, which led to the revelation of Mr. Lazarenko's involvement, according to the Procurator General's Office.

There was also relatively more mundane political activity and news in Ukraine in 2002. Perhaps the most unexpected development occurred on Ukrainian Independence Day, when President Kuchma addressed a national television audience to announce he was proposing to shift the country from a presidential political system to a parliamentary system. In essence, such a move meant that the legislature, not the executive, would carry ultimate authority in the country if the proposed changes became law.

Outlining his proposal the president said he would allow a parliamentary majority, if one were successfully formed in the Verkhovna Rada, to form the next government and appoint its prime minister. He also said he was ready to move to a strictly proportional electoral system, in which lawmakers would be elected based on electoral support for political parties. Mr. Kuchma also said he would agree to constitutional changes to make the system permanent.

While many politicians expressed surprise at the move, those in opposition to Mr. Kuchma called it an attempt by the president to cast himself in the role of democratic reformer and seize the initiative from the opposition, which had announced mass demonstrations in response to his alleged autocratic rule.

Lawmakers like Ms. Tymoshenko reminded the public that for several years now they had been pushing for a parliamentary democracy, in which the prime minister and his Cabinet are chosen from among legislators, as is the case in Germany and Great Britain.

President Kuchma also emphasized repeatedly during the year that Ukraine would continue to move Westward and that its "European choice," was irreversible. During his annual state of the state address, held this past year on June 11, the Ukrainian president said he would like to see associate membership in the European Union by 2004, with full membership sometime after 2011. He also emphasized the need to get membership in the World Trade Organization.

The president derided the Parliament, telling deputies to stop bickering and get to work, specifically to finally approve a new tax code. Mr. Kuchma also said once again that he would consider allowing the Parliament to help him form a new government, if it could form and maintain a majority

A day later, the president appointed the leader of the SDPU and one of the richest and most influential men in Ukraine, National Deputy Viktor Medvedchuk, as his new chief of staff, a sign that he would make the effort needed to find political agreement on a parliamentary majority.

As he strode to the podium to deliver his annual address, Mr. Kuchma was met with catcalls from the opposition and a pair of slippers tossed his way. The footwear was meant to symbolize that the president would soon be "walking" after anti-Kuchma forces succeeded in forcing his resignation (which ultimately did not happen). Ironically, the president voiced support for a new impeachment law in his statement to the Ukrainian legislature.

The Verkhovna Rada began its work after the March 31 parliamentary elections in chaos and confusion. Assertions by the Our Ukraine political bloc, led by former Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko, that pro-presidential forces had stolen the parliamentary elections by coercing newly elected independent lawmakers to join their For a United Ukraine faction in the new legislative assembly caused political turmoil and paralysis.

While the leaders of For a United Ukraine expressed confidence they would quickly elect a new Verkhovna Rada leadership and then move to formalize a parliamentary majority, it became evident from the outset that the process would take time and political compromise.

After two weeks and the rejection of more than half a dozen possibilities, a bare majority of lawmakers (226 votes) agreed to give the chairmanship of the Verkhovna Rada to Volodymyr Lytvyn, who only recently had been elected. Mr. Lytvyn, 46, who became the favorite after the first week of debates and closed-door meetings, formerly had served as President Kuchma's chief of staff.

Hennadii Vasyliev, a member of the Donetsk-based Regions of Ukraine Party, and Oleksander Zinchenko of the Social Democratic Party-United took the posts of first vice-chair and second vice-chair, respectively. Nor was the apportionment of committees achieved without a struggle, with Mr. Yushchenko insisting that his faction should get the majority of the committee chairmanships because the faction had 110 seats in the Verkhovna Rada - the largest number held by a single bloc. Finally, the lawmakers agreed to divvy up the chairs roughly in proportion to the number of seats the six winning political blocs had taken in the elections.

The election of the parliamentary leadership crystallized the political split within the ranks of the lawmakers - between nine pro-presidential parties and the three anti-presidential forces: the Socialists, the Communists and the Tymoshenko bloc. Mr. Yushchenko's Our Ukraine at first tried to maintain a position somewhere in the gulf between the two sides, but soon found itself in the opposition camp for all practical purposes.

Giving credence to claims by the opposition that For a United Ukraine was artificially constructed for the sole purpose of talking the parliamentary leadership posts, within days of completion of the process it had fragmented into nine separate factions.

While it had taken more than two months of political maneuvering and negotiating to settle on the leadership of the Verkhovna Rada, it would take an additional four months to develop a parliamentary majority. However, on September 30, Parliament Chairman Lytvyn told journalists that he had received unofficial agreement from a majority of national deputies that they were ready to form a majority and take responsibility for the legislative process. On October 8, 231 lawmakers, including one who had been with the Our Ukraine bloc, signed a pact formalizing the parliamentary majority.

Both opposition members and political pundits both expressed doubt that such a conflagration of various political and business interests could hold, and in fact in the first official vote after the majority was formed, the group failed to garner the required 226 votes to support a proposal to discuss the creation of an ad hoc commission on the Kolchuha scandal. However, on November 21 they succeeded in putting one of their own candidates in the prime minister's seat.

Anatolii Kinakh, who had been prime minister since May 2001 and had been considered one of four finalists to retain the position by the new parliamentary majority, was removed by President Kuchma on November 5. While a knowledgeable political leader, Mr. Kinakh proved ineffective in moving through the jungle of Ukrainian politics. He had put together a 2002 national budget that was roundly criticized and had trouble obtaining consensus on a 2003 budget. Also, he had not been able to move privatization forward and had failed to get a new tax code enacted.

Viktor Yanukovych, Donetsk Oblast chairman, emerged victorious after weeks of political pondering and negotiations among the nine factions of the Verkhovna Rada majority and President Kuchma. He was ratified as Ukraine's 10th prime minister by the Ukrainian Parliament on November 21. The 52-year-old crony of President Kuchma said he would concentrate on building Ukraine's economy and increasing foreign trade and investment. Many in Ukraine, including political experts, expressed skepticism that he would do more than continue to assure the president's hold over the government and influence among the various political/business clans.

Mr. Yanukovych, like his first vice prime minister Mykola Azarov, formerly the head of the State Tax Administration, is not a native Ukrainian speaker and rarely uses the state language, which did not bode well for those who continued to fight for supremacy of Ukrainian in schools and public institutions.

The Verkhovna Rada made some headway in acknowledging the historical reality of the existence of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) as Ukrainian freedom fighters, when National Deputy Yaroslav Kendzior told journalists that he and his National Rukh of Ukraine Party, had finally succeeded in getting the issue of the status of the UPA put on the Verkhovna Rada agenda. Rukh, which is part of the Our Ukraine faction, had fought for years to have the UPA recognized as World War II combatants, which would give its veterans the benefits and subsidies accorded to Soviet Army veterans.

The issue of the status of the UPA and it political arm, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, has stirred emotions for years in Ukraine. Even when the Ukrainian government submitted a bill to the Parliament for consideration in July, the announcement on July 12 that a provision of the bill would require each UPA veteran to be scrutinized to determine whether he could have possibly committed "crimes against humanity," brought a tirade of criticism from national democratic forces.

Earlier in the year another storm resulted from a decision by the city council of Ivano-Frankivsk to recognize members of the Galicia Division as World War II veterans. The resolution, passed on March 19, brought the ire of Moscow, which blasted the decision as "regretful" and "shameful." Jewish leaders both in Ukraine and the U.S. also lambasted the resolution.

While minorities continued to receive equal treatment in Ukraine, a rock- throwing incident by a marauding group of unruly soccer hooligans upset members of Kyiv's Central Synagogue, the Jewish community of Kyiv and residents in general. The incident, which occurred on April 13 after a Kyiv Dynamo soccer match, began when some 200 drunken teenagers and young adults began throwing bottles and rocks at storefronts along one of Kyiv's main thoroughfares. As the hooliganism intensified, state militia began to make arrests, but not before a group of about 50 thugs began to throw stones at children leaving Saturday services at the Central Synagogue.

While some Jewish leaders warned that the incident was the beginning of a rise in anti-Semitic activity, state militia asserted that the rock and bottle-throwing melee was an isolated and unfortunate series of events.

While closed forever, Chornobyl also stayed in the headlines in 2002. On the 16th anniversary of the largest nuclear accident ever, work continued on mothballing the now-idle plant and on reinforcing and rebuilding the "sarcophagus," the concrete casing that covers the ill-fated fourth reactor. The city of Slavutych, which housed the workers, also remained in transition, with half of the population relocated, but some 10,000 residents still working and living there.

President Kuchma, however, expressed his dissatisfaction with the progress being made and chastised his Cabinet for an insufficient allocation of funds for Chornobyl expenses in the 2002 budget. His remarks came on May 16, after he had met with European Commission Chairman Romano Prodi.

While Chornobyl will always remain a sad commemoration, Ukraine also commemorated happy moments in its national life in 2002, most notably the 11th anniversary of independence. The size and enthusiasm of the crowds on the Khreschatyk, Kyiv's main thoroughfare, for the 2002 Independence Day Parade mirrored those of years past, but it was a relatively subdued celebration. But then it would have been all but impossible to better the 10th anniversary bash Ukraine threw the year before.

Yet, Ukraine spared nothing in 2002 as well, with small celebrations, marching bands and fireworks displays in towns and cities all across the country. However, the place that had the most fun, or so it seemed, on August 24 and in the two weeks leading up to the holiday was a scouting camp set up near the town of Svirzh, in the Lviv Oblast. There, more than 1,500 members of Plast Ukrainian Scouting Organization held their first International Jamboree in Ukraine.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, January 12, 2003, No. 2, Vol. LXXI

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