Committee of Voters of Ukraine warns that election is threatened (10/10/04)

Committee of Voters of Ukraine warns that election is threatened

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - The most prestigious and trusted Ukrainian civic organization on election monitoring said on October 6 that the Ukrainian presidential election is under threat and that conditions may arise that could make it impossible to hold a vote on October 31.

In the last month the pre-election season in Ukraine has turned brutal, first with the mysterious poisoning of National Deputy Viktor Yushchenko, the leading candidate, and then the egging of Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych during a campaign stop and his subsequent hospitalization, also under unclear circumstances.

The Committee of Voters of Ukraine (CVU) said during a press conference that in the last two weeks these and other incidents suggest that events in Ukraine may be spinning out of control.

"If this type of escalation continues, the election itself may be under threat," said CVU President Ihor Popov.

As the CVU was making its assessment, National Deputy Yurii Karmazin, a member of the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc within the Verkhovna Rada and a former prosecutor in Odesa, was telling colleagues on the parliamentary floor that already plans were afoot to take the stakes still higher.

Mr. Karmazin, a former prosecutor in Odesa, said he had received information that certain individuals within the presidential administration had ordered the assassination of Prime Minister Yanukovych to discredit the presidential aspirations of his opponent Mr. Yushchenko, who was to be blamed for the murder.

Mr. Karmazin, whose Tymoshenko parliamentary faction is part of the Power of the People political coalition that supports Mr. Yushchenko's candidacy, went so far as to specifically implicate and name two high-ranking individuals within the Ministry of Internal Affairs, who he said were tasked with carrying out the order.

The same day that Mr. Karmazin leveled his allegations, members of the Yanukovych campaign team, including National Deputy Stepan Havrysh, who is also majority leader in the Ukrainian Parliament, ridiculed assertions and even video documentation by pro-Yushchenko supporters that Yanukovych supporters had printed more than $10 million worth of smear literature lampooning the Power of the People candidate while utilizing American political symbols.

Several Ukrainian lawmakers of Mr. Yushchenko's Our Ukraine faction had discovered the literature in two warehouses located on the grounds of the Ukrainian Exhibition Center in Kyiv, after receiving tips from concerned citizens.

The national deputies videotaped the warehouse and the campaign literature, which depicts Mr. Yushchenko as a U.S. stooge and included caricatures of his face superimposed on a portrait of U.S. President George Bush.

Some television stations, most of which are owned by supporters of Mr. Yanukovych, uncharacteristically broadcast the story and the images ostensibly critical of their candidate, perhaps only because Mr. Havrysh, the majority leader, alleged that in fact the Yushchenko campaign team had printed the materials themselves. Mr. Havrysh explained that the $10 million project was yet another effort by Mr. Yushchenko to twist the facts and deliberately present himself as a victim while discrediting Mr. Yanukovych.

The U.S. government issued a statement on October 6 in which it stated that it condemned the use of American national symbols in an improper manner.

Those series of events followed on the heels of the discovery on October 2 of a cache of the same literature at the Novyi Druk printing shop, which is owned by the son of former Prime Minister Valerii Pustovoitenko. The former prime minister is the chairman of the National Democratic Party, which is aligned with the Yanukovych campaign team. Mr. Pustovoitenko's son, Viacheslav, was hospitalized after he refused to allow members of the Yushchenko campaign team, including National Deputies Yurii Orobets and Andrii Shkil, to enter the print shop grounds. In response, they pushed the younger man aside and entered the shop where they discovered the smear literature.

The younger Pustovoitenko claims that the two lawmakers beat him badly after he resisted their attempts to enter his business. Mr. Orobets and Mr. Shkil stated on Channel 5, a television station controlled by National Deputy Petro Poroshenko, a close confidante of Mr. Yushchenko, that they merely pushed aside Mr. Pustovoitenko, who stands well over 6 feet in height.

"I would have needed a stool to take a swing at him," explained Mr. Shkil.

Mr. Shkil's candidate, Mr. Yushchenko, remained in Vienna at the Rudolfinerhaus Medical Clinic, receiving treatment for his condition, which had failed to improve after he was originally discharged on September 18. He checked back in on September 30 during which time doctors decided to undertake an analysis of his skin, bones and hair to attempt to determine the source of his poisoning. Test results were expected about the middle of the week of October 11.

Rudolfinerhaus officials, who had attempted to remain removed from the political aspects of treating a presidential candidate of a foreign country, became embroiled in the odiferous pre-election presidential campaign in Ukraine when it was determined that a press release supposedly issued on behalf of the hospital from a German fax machine and sent to all the major mass media outlets in Ukraine was a forgery. The press release, widely used by Ukraine's news media after its release, improperly underscored that the hospital believed that Mr. Yushchenko had not been poisoned.

Rudolfinerhaus officially distanced itself from the false document and continues to maintain that it cannot support nor exclude the possibility that the Power of the People candidate was chemically poisoned. (See related story on Mr. Yushchenko's hospitalization.)

The six parliamentary factions that make up the parliamentary majority - all of which officially support the presidential candidacy of Prime Minister Yanukovych - on October 5 called for the withdrawal from the race of his opponent, Mr. Yushchenko. National Deputy Hennadii Samokhfalov, a member of the Regions of Ukraine faction, said that the six groups believe that by falsely claiming that state officials had tried to poison him, Mr. Yushchenko had shown himself to be unworthy of the country's top post. The six factions also called for a formal apology.

The CVU, an organization that has monitored elections in Ukraine for 10 years, said during its press conference that the pre-election problems were not limited to the intense friction between the two top candidates and their camps of supporters. CVU Vice-President Yevhen Poberezhnyi noted that there are extensive problems in the organization of the territorial, district and precinct election commissions, which were tasked with developing voters' lists, polling stations, candidate ballots and the election day voting process in general.

Mr. Poberezhnyi noted that, just as in previous elections, his monitors had this time again discovered that in some districts applications for seats on the electoral commissions were "received" from people who were dead, as the monitors determined afterwards. Mr. Poberezhnyi explained that in another case an individual who had formerly led a district election commission was seated on it once again, even though he was now in criminal incarceration.

"We find it difficult to believe that any of these people could have applied on their own," Mr. Poberezhnyi observed.

The CVU vice-president said that his group had also found that almost none of the election commissions were ready to begin their work, although their mandates stated that they should be up and running by mid-September.

"When we asked at a territorial commission near Sevastopol whether at least one district commission was ready to work, they told us quite honestly that, yes, one - but only one - was ready to work," explained Mr. Poberezhnyi.

The CVU maintained that an increased threat of hostility and even bloodshed associated with the election season exists within Ukraine. Mr. Popov noted that in the next days and weeks election observers from the two leading candidates would be crossing the country and entering what could be described as enemy territory to monitor the election, which could result in violent encounters between supporters of the opposing campaign camps of the two leading presidential contenders.

"For instance, recently the CVU received information about the mobilization of groups of observers for transport en masse from the east to the west of Ukraine and vice versa," noted the CVU in a report it released on the situation in Ukraine a month before election day, which added that, "the arrival of such groups could work as a destabilizing factor and lead to unforeseen results."

| Home Page |