ANALYSIS: Donetsk: most dangerous place in Ukraine for journalists (10/12/03)

ANALYSIS

Donetsk: most dangerous place in Ukraine for journalists

by Taras Kuzio
RFE/RL Media Matters

Although they are the wealthiest oligarchic clan, the Donetsk clan is at a distinct disadvantage with its two regional rivals from Kyiv (Viktor Medvedchuk's Social Democratic Party-united, [SDPU] and Dnipropetrovsk Labor Ukraine Party) because they dominate the media, especially television and radio. Unlike its two rivals, the Donetsk clan has no control over any nationwide television or radio stations. In the approaching presidential elections molding Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych's image without one's own national media will be impossible.

After Mr. Yanukovych moved to Kyiv to become prime minister in November 2002, the lack of media assets became important to resolve for two reasons. First, the Donetsk clan understand that Mr. Yanukovych could only promote himself as an all-Ukrainian and national (in contrast to only a Donbas) politician through all-Ukrainian media. Secondly, national media are needed to defend Donetsk interests at the all-Ukrainian level.

Donetsk and Luhansk, the two oblasts that make up the Donbas region with its 10 million population, have long had a reputation within Ukraine as its own domestic version of Alyaksandr Lukashenka's Belarus. In the 1990s the region was, alongside the Crimean Autonomous Republic, a bastion of support for the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU). The CPU was actually revived in Donetsk in October 1993 after a two-year ban imposed after the August 1991 putsch.

By the October 1999 presidential election the dominance of the CPU in the Donbas had been broken by the local "party of power." President Leonid Kuchma obtained a greater number of votes in Donetsk than local Donbasite Petro Symonenko, leader of the CPU. The Liberal Party, an earlier but far weaker Donbas "party of power," had by then also been replaced by the new, all-powerful oligarchic Party of the Regions.

In the March 2002 parliamentary elections the Party of the Regions entered the pro-presidential For a United Ukraine (FUU) bloc. Meanwhile, the Liberals joined Viktor Yushchenko's Our Ukraine. The local power of the Party of the Regions was all too evident in the 2002 elections. The only region where FUU came first in the proportional half of the elections was in Donetsk Oblast, where it obtained a staggering 36.83 percent (the average throughout Ukraine was 8 to 9 percent). FUU's allies, the SDPU, obtained an additional 4.66 percent, giving presidential forces 41.49 percent in Donetsk Oblast.

International observers reported that the worst election fraud took place in Donetsk Oblast, especially in the media, which failed to give equal coverage to pro-presidential and opposition forces. Although the CPU also obtained 29.78 percent, the other three opposition blocs and parties (Our Ukraine, the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, the Socialists) were blocked by the local authorities and party of power (the two are one and the same) from crossing the 4 percent threshold. The two Donbas oblasts (and city of Sevastopol) were the only regions of Ukraine where Our Ukraine failed to cross the 4 percent threshold.

The 2002 elections were followed by the entrenchment of pro-presidential forces in the Verkhovna Rada, who created a majority which then formed a government headed by Viktor Yanukovych, the Donetsk Oblast chairman since 1997. In April, Yanukovych became head of the Party of the Regions.

Mr. Yanukovych was chairman of the Donetsk Oblast during the rise and entrenchment of oligarchic clans in Ukraine in the late 1990s. He is reportedly linked to Ukraine's wealthiest oligarch, Renat Akhmetov, who is the head of Systems Capital Management, the dominant company in the Donetsk region. After Mr. Yanukovych became prime minister, the Donetsk clan set about increasing censorship and stamping out any criticism in media outlets they owned or purchased. In September 2002 Viktor Shlynchak resigned as editor of the newspaper Segodnya, which is controlled by the Donetsk clan, in protest against growing censorship.

The website forum.ua was taken over by the Donetsk clan the same month that Mr. Yanukovych became prime minister. Five months later Andrii Myseliuk, political editor of forum.ua, was sacked for publishing materials on attempts by former presidential security officer Mykola Melnychenko (in exile in the U.S. since April 2001) to launch a court case in the U.S. against President Kuchma.

In August the heat was stepped up on critical journalists inside Donetsk itself. Over the course of three consecutive days, three separate journalists were subjected to attacks with similar patterns, suggesting political motives. In none of the three cases was there an attempted robbery. Nevertheless, the local Internal Affairs Ministry denied that there was any political motivation. All three journalists were severely beaten around the head as a warning to halt their research into, and writing of, critical materials regarding the control of Donetsk Oblast by oligarchs. An indirectly linked attack occurred a month earlier on Oleg Yeltsov, editor of the Ukraina Kriminalnaya website (http://cripo.com.ua).

The first attack took place on August 14 against Eduard Malynovskyi, editor of the Ostrov newspaper's online edition and a local correspondent for Hromadske Radio. Malynovskyy was attacked by five young men after leaving a café. After severely beating him about the head, the attackers did not take his briefcase or wallet. Malynovskyy was taken to the neurosurgical department of the Donetsk Oblast hospital. The Kyiv-based Institute of Mass Information, the Ukrainian representative of Reporters Without Frontiers, believes that Mr. Malynovskyi was attacked because of his articles exposing local oligarch Akhmetov.

The next day Serhii Kuzin, a journalist at the Aksent regional newspaper and forum.ua, also was badly beaten. Kuzin had gone to the café where Malynovskyy had been the night before to investigate the attack. As he left the cafe he was attacked by a group of unknown young men; he suffered a concussion and cracked bones. Mr. Kuzin's mobile telephone and briefcase were stolen (but, again, not his wallet). "Football hooligans," whom the police blamed for the attack on Mr. Malynovskyi, would have not returned to the café to attack Mr. Kuzin. This makes the police theory of "football hooliganism" as the motive for the attack rather hard to believe.

On the third day Vasilii Vasiutin, deputy editor of Zolotoi Skif magazine, was beaten. As in the two earlier cases, the attack took place in the center of the city. Mr. Vasiutin was beaten and kicked in the head by young men holding clubs and then lost consciousness. He suffered a concussion and was also taken to the neurosurgical department of the Donetsk Regional Hospital. As in the two earlier cases, his mobile telephone was stolen, but his wallet was left untouched. Mr. Vasiutin had written about earlier violence committed against journalists in Donetsk.

The Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine's most corrupt region and with the highest number of crimes and murders, has now also become the most dangerous place in Ukraine for journalists to operate. If former Donetsk Oblast Chairman Yanukovych is elected president in 2004, Ukraine could be threatened with the spread of the brutal methods against the media first implemented in the Donbas to the national level.

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

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