Watchdog groups find press freedom to be lacking in Ukraine (08/17/03)

Watchdog groups find press freedom to be lacking in Ukraine

PARSIPPANY, N.J. - In its Freedom of the Press 2003 report on Ukraine, Freedom House downgraded Ukraine's status from partly free to not free, "because of state censorship of television broadcasts, continued harassment and disruption of independent media, and the failure of the authorities to adequately investigate attacks against journalists." The report covers developments in 2002.

During the March 31, 2002, parliamentary elections, Freedom House noted, censorship became an enormous problem. The party platforms were unequally covered, and it was found that President Leonid Kuchma's associates controlled most broadcasting and news agencies. The police went so far as to harass Dmytro Brovkin and Stanislas Efremov of the local TV station Khortytsia in the town of Zaporizhia while they were filming vote-counting in the town elections.

Countless newspapers, radio stations and TV stations have had to bear the brunt of censorship in Ukraine, according to the report. Media that broadcast opposition figures got shut down and had to struggle to be heard again. Between February 4 and 6, for example, the transmission mast of the radio station Nostalgia in the southern town of Mariupol was cut, due to unexplained repairs to the facility, which is home to other radio and TV stations. Nostalgia had broadcast an interview with former Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko, leader of the Our Ukraine coalition and President Kuchma's main rival in the March 31 parliamentary elections.

A special issue of the newspaper Azovskie Novosti featured an article about Nostalgia's suspension, resulting in the seizure of 40,000 copies of the paper on February 15. Unknown people from the warehouses of the firm Ostek in Mariupol took the papers, which also contained a report on a visit to the town by presidential candidate Mr. Yushchenko.

Another incident cited occurred on March 23, when police beat the driver and seized about 107,000 copies of Svoboda from a lorry belonging to the Respublika publishing firm in Cherkasy, and then dumped them in a river. Svoboda had criticized President Kuchma and Procurator General Mykhailo Potebenko. The next day, police seized 100,000 copies of the paper, which reported a demand by several members of parliament for an investigation of bribe-taking by Mr. Potebenko.

Freedom House reported that TV stations also suffer from such censorship. On February 6 the National Broadcasting Council cancelled the frequency used by the Pavlohrad Television Association, which included two privately owned stations, NPT and Fakt-Infos, and a municipal station, Pavlogradsky Telesentr. During the March parliamentary election campaign, the association's three stations had backed opposition candidates. Then on February 14, the National Broadcasting Council cancelled the frequency of the TV station Khortytsia in the eastern town of Zaporizhia. During the March elections, the station had opposed mayor Oleksander Poliak and backed his rival, Viktor Kaltsev, the station's owner, who lost the election.

A similar report on press freedom in 2002 was issued by the organization Reporters Without Borders. Its 2003 Annual Report on Ukraine writes of the various forms of media that are harassed and how they are subjected to strict censorship. Newspaper, radio, and television agencies' facilities and publications are attacked, and so are some of their reporters.

The organization noted that three journalists were killed, two were imprisoned, eight were physically attacked, and five were threatened during the one-year period covered by its report.

Reporters Without Borders cited the case of Oleh Liachko, editor of Svoboda, who was jailed on April 15-23 in Cherkasy on libel charges against a senior official at the local prosecutor's office. According to Freedom House, "Libel ceased to be a criminal offense in 2001; however, politically motivated civil suits are common, journalists frequently experience physical assaults, death threats, and murder as a result of their work."

Journalists in Ukraine must fear for their lives when reporting news that opposes powerful people in Ukraine, noted Reporters Without Borders. A few days after Tatiana Goriacheva, editor of the newspaper Berdiansk Delovoi, refused a request by the new port director in Berdiansk, Anatolii Reznikov, to publish an article criticizing a municipal election candidate, Dimitri Bero, she was splashed in the face with hydrochloric acid. The incident, which occurred on January 28, 2002, near Goriacheva's home, burned her face and almost blinded her.

On August 28, four people assaulted Oleksander Sumets, editor of the weekly Zmiivsky Kourier, in the stairwell of his office building, which is located in the town of Zmiiv. This came a few days after the paper accused local authorities of corruption and money laundering.

Harassment is not the only method that those in power employ to punish those who have spoken out against them; in a few cases journalists are apparently killed for attempting to make the public aware of the truth. On October 30 Mikhailo Kolomiyets' body was found hanging from a tree in a forest near Molodechno, Belarus. After Mr. Kolomiets disappeared on October 21, police said that he left Ukraine intending to kill himself, an assertion that Mr. Kolomiyets' family did not believe. Kolomiyets was the head of the Ukrainian news agency, Ukrainski Novyny, which criticized the government. When the Procurator General's Office decided to open an inquiry into the death of Mr. Kolomiyets, Reporters Without Borders offered the services of one of their pathologists, which was accepted.

Another murder case in Ukraine in which Reporters Without Borders has been involved is that of Heorhii Gongadze. Mr. Gongadze vanished on September 16, 2000, and on November 2, 2000, his body was found decapitated, near Kyiv. Tapes recorded in President Kuchma's office implicated the highest government authorities in the case.

During 2002 there was some "good progress" in the Gongadze case as Reporters Without Borders Secretary General Robert Menard was granted perimission by Ukraine's top prosecutor to serve as a legal represetative of the Gongadze family.

Ihor Aleksandrov, another journalist killed because of his work - which involved investigations into corruption and organized crime in the Donetsk region - was beaten with a bat on July 3, 2001, then died of serious head injuries on July 7. On July 11, 2002, the Ukrainian Supreme Court reopened the investigation into the Alexandrov murder.

The Reporters Without Borders annual report also pointed out that on October 15, 2002, the chairman of the Verkhovna Rada, Volodymyr Lytvyn, officially stated that censorship exists in Ukraine. Furthermore, a poll by the Ukrainian Center for Political and Economic Research found that 62 percent of journalists in Ukraine had experienced censorship.

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