ANALYSIS: Communists come to the rescue of President Leonid Kuchma, again (09/21/03)

ANALYSIS

Communists come to the rescue of President Leonid Kuchma, again

by Taras Kuzio
RFE/RL Poland, Belarus and Ukraine Report

Ukraine's ruling elites are fearful of the end of the Kuchma era. President Leonid Kuchma and his oligarchic allies have no candidate agreeable to the three main clans who could win an election and act as a neutral "umpire" between them.

Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, head of the Donbas clan's Party of Regions, is unacceptable to Viktor Medvedchuk, head of the presidential administration, and the rival Kyiv clan's Social Democratic Party-United (SDPU).

Mr. Medvedchuk is more fearful than the other two principal oligarchic clans of a victory by Viktor Yushchenko. Anders Aslund of the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment believes that, whereas the Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk clans are evolving from oligarchs into businessmen, Mr. Medvedchuk's SDPU has no future.

In his opening speech at this month's Verkhovna Rada session, Parliament Chairman Volodymyr Lytvyn indirectly attacked the SDPU for leaving its accumulated riches abroad, rather than reinvesting them in the Ukrainian economy. The crisis within the SDPU can be seen by its expulsion of the Verkhovna Rada's first vice-chairman, Oleksander Zinchenko, who unsuccessfully attempted to modernize the party and one of its television channels, Inter.

Renationalization and a reversal of the insider privatization that took place in the 1990s is unlikely. But a Yushchenko victory will be accompanied by intense pressure to launch investigations into high-level corruption. A recent poll found that 78 percent of Ukrainians believe that state action against corruption is purely "cosmetic." During the Yushchenko government Dr. Aslund calculated that between $2 billion and $3 billion was returned to the state budget from the oligarchs. National Bank of Ukraine Chairman Serhii Tyhypko, himself leader of the Dnipropetrovsk clan's Labor Ukraine, admitted that capital flight in 2002 had totaled a record $2.27 billion.

Ukraine could follow Russia, where President Vladimir Putin supposedly made a deal with the oligarchs whereby they would keep their wealth in return for staying out of politics. Such a deal in Ukraine would remove at a stroke the centrists from the political arena. But, as Mr. Kuchma points out in his new book, "Ukraine Is Not Russia," Mr. Putin has a KGB background and was trusted as outgoing President Boris Yeltsin's successor. Mr. Yushchenko would be elected as an opposition candidate without President Kuchma's blessing, making the issue of mutual trust more difficult.

A Yushchenko presidency would be forced to grapple with two additional issues. He would be unlikely to allow the oligarchs to continue to monopolize the media, particularly television. Here, Mr. Medvedchuk and Labor Ukraine oligarch Viktor Pinchuk would lose out most. Another area would be the need to clean out the Internal Affairs Ministry special forces who are accused of involvement in criminal and political violence.

Different oligarchs are pleading for Mr. Yushchenko to not launch criminal cases and other actions against them if he is elected. Ironically, these are the same kinds of activities that the authorities are themselves undertaking against the opposition, such as criminal cases against radical oppositionist Yulia Tymoshenko.

If President Kuchma's political reforms are adopted by Parliament, the 2004 elections are more likely to be free of violence and fair because Mr. Kuchma and the oligarchs will then have nothing to fear from a Yushchenko victory. Mykhailo Pohrebynskyi, an adviser to Mr. Medvedchuk, said in a recent interview in Ukrainska Pravda that, if the reforms are not adopted, there will be a violent and unfree election campaign, especially in the oligarchs' eastern Ukrainian heartland.

Three constitutional drafts have been drawn up by the executive to attempt to deal with the Yushchenko threat. The first two attempted to lengthen President Kuchma's term in office by postponing next year's elections until the parliamentary elections in 2006. This was blocked by the opposition and Mr. Kuchma withdrew his second draft in early August.

The third draft has successfully co-opted the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU) from the opposition. The double standards here are palpable; when the national democrats cooperated with the CPU in opposition, Mr. Kuchma attacked them for working with "anti-state forces." The CPU did not back the parliamentary resolution on the 1933 Great Famine.

This is not the first time the Communists have come to Mr. Kuchma's and the oligarchs' rescue. In April 2001 the Kuchma-oligarch-CPU alliance brought down the Yushchenko government. During the height of the Kuchmagate crisis from November 2000 to the March 2002 elections, the CPU remained neutral, thereby allowing Mr. Kuchma to ride out the crisis. After the elections the CPU failed to reach agreement with Mr. Yushchenko's Our Ukraine on the elections for Parliament chairman speaker. This allowed pro-Kuchma factions to elect former presidential administration head, Mr. Lytvyn, who won by one vote, that of CPU member Mykhailo Potebenko. As prosecutor-general during the Kuchmagate crisis, Mr. Potebenko shielded Mr. Kuchma from allegations of his involvement in opposition journalist Heorhii Gongadze's killing.

In July, a month before the third draft, the CPU openly came out against Mr. Yushchenko. Interviewed by the Kievskii Telegraf newspaper and the versii.com website, both owned by the Labor Ukraine clan, CPU Chairman Petro Symonenko said, "In my view, the coming to power of Yushchenko is a threat to both the state and the people of Ukraine." In Mr. Symonenko's view, Mr. Yushchenko is "not a patriot of Ukraine."

The third draft of constitutional changes outlines plans to transform Ukraine into a parliamentary-presidential republic by changing the election of the president from direct popular vote to a two-thirds majority of parliamentary deputies. Until the 2006 elections pro-Kuchma factions will possess a slim majority the Verkhovna Rada. Pro-Kuchma parliamentary majority leader Stepan Havrysh claims that he has 241 deputies. These, together with 62 Communists, give a slim majority of three to change the Constitution of Ukraine.

In reality, the majority have only 226 to 228 deputies and the CPU only 60, giving them less than the 300 plus votes required (i.e., only 286 to 288). Chairman Lytvyn, therefore, has predicted that the third draft will not be adopted before the October 2004 presidential elections.

If the lack of 12 to 15 votes is overcome and the constitutional changes are in fact adopted, President Kuchma could be elected by his parliament majority to become prime minister, to whom many of the current powers of the president would pass. Although Mr. Kuchma is constitutionally unable to be elected president for a third term, he could still survive politically by entering government, thereby postponing any problems surrounding his immunity - thanks, of course, to "anti-state" forces.

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

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