Yushchenko administration's first 100 days incorporate promises made on maidan (05/08/05)

Yushchenko administration's first 100 days incorporate promises made on maidan

by Zenon Zawada
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - During their first 100 days, President Viktor Yushchenko and his Cabinet of Ministers wasted no time in demonstrating to the Ukrainian people that they are intent on delivering on the Orange Revolution's promises of building a more prosperous and Western-based society.

Arrests of men involved in Heorhii Gongadze's murder, as well as the detention of Donetsk businessman Boris Kolesnykov, proved effective symbols in demonstrating that Mr. Yushchenko was serious about tackling corruption and crime, experts said.

Though widely criticized as a populist tactic to win votes for next year's parliamentary elections, the 2005 budget assembled by Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and her fellow ministers fulfilled Mr. Yushchenko's campaign promise that it would be the most socially-oriented in independent Ukraine's history.

"We haven't betrayed any of the maidan's slogans," Mr. Yushchenko said in assessing his first 100 days. "Today I can approach any member of society - the veteran, the child, anybody - and say that we worked for you," Mr. Yushchenko said in a statement.

Crime and corruption

It was no coincidence that among the first achievements of the Yushchenko administration was Procurator General Sviatoslav Piskun's announcement that his office had arrested two police colonels who are suspected of murdering Heorhii Gongadze.

The September 2000 disappearance of the Ukrayinska Pravda journalist served as the catalyst for wide scale protests against former President Leonid Kuchma's government, culminating several years later in the Orange Revolution.

Just as he announced the arrests, Mr. Piskun said his office would question former Internal Affairs Minister Yurii Kravchenko. The morning of his scheduled questioning, police found Mr. Kravchenko dead in his dacha outside of Kyiv, with two gunshot wounds to his head.

An arrest far more controversial occurred on April 6 when the Procurator General's Office cited extortion and racketeering as reasons to arrest Boris Kolesnykov, the head of the Donetsk Oblast Council who had very close ties to Donetsk oligarch Rynat Akhmetov.

Mr. Kolesnykov allegedly was behind a series of violent threats against a Donetsk department store owner, including two bombings and a spray of machine gun fire, in order to force him to sell his shares at a discount.

In the days following Mr. Kolesnykov's arrest, more than 7,000 people protested in Donetsk and hundreds of protesters picketed the Verkhovna Rada, even setting up a mini-tent city in the nearby park.

His allies from the Party of the Regions and Social Democratic Party - United delivered emotional and sometimes inflammatory speeches and held press conferences in the Rada, accusing the Yushchenko government of carrying out political reprisals against their opposition.

Internal Affairs Minister Yurii Lutsenko stood before the Verkhovna Rada on April 7 and said Mr. Kolesnykov's arrest had no political motives.

"The president of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, signed a demand depoliticizing the police," said Mr. Lutsenko, a member of the Socialist Party. "It makes no difference to me which party a citizen belongs to, whether you're a Communist, a Socialist, Regions, SDPU or independent or Our Ukraine."

It's possible to find a political subtext to Mr. Kolesnykov's arrest, said Oleksander Lytvynenko, a leading expert at the Razumkov Center for Economic and Political Studies.

"As much as politics is so closely tied with business here, and business with criminal activity, one matter can drag with it another," Mr. Lytvynenko said. "But it's entirely obvious that Kolesnykov's supporters haven't found arguments to assert that the matter brought against him is baseless."

After Mr. Kolesnykov's arrest, Mr. Akhmetov took about $153 million from his holding company, System Capital Management, out of Ukraine, Ukrainian news services reported.

Social spending

On March 25, the Verkhovna Rada approved Ukraine's 2005 budget with not a single national deputy voting against it, despite the abundant criticism from members of the Communist Party and the Party of the Regions.

National Deputy Valerii Asadchev said his peers in the Rada overwhelmingly supported the budget - promoted and championed for its social spending - because "everyone wants to be loved by the electorate."

The budget boosted pensions payments, despite Ms. Tymoshenko's repeated criticisms that Mr. Yanukovych's decision to increase pensions ahead of the prior year's elections caused significant inflation in the Ukrainian economy.

The budget contained a 17 percent increase in minimum monthly pensions to $63 a month, and a 27 percent increase in the minimum monthly wage for government workers to $63 a month, said Viktor Pynzenyk, Ukraine's finance minister.

The official minimum wage increased 40 percent, while the government minimum wage for professionals such as teachers and doctors increased 57 percent, Mr. Pynzenyk said.

The budget also increased financial aid for childbirths by 12 times to $1,619 per child, aid for single mothers fourfold, aid to disabled children by 4.5 times and aid to orphans by 5.2 times to $89 per child a month, he said.

Cultural issues also emerged as a priority. Spending to support the Ukrainian language increased by 50 percent, Mr. Pynzenyk said, while spending for the Ukrainian diaspora will increase by 11 times.

When arguing for the budget in the Rada, Ms. Tymoshenko promised inflation no higher than 9 percent.

The 2005 budget projects a deficit of $1.3 billion or 1.5 percent of GDP, compared with a projected $1.7 billion deficit in 2004 that eventually swelled to a massive $6.5 billion deficit, or a 8.0 percent of GDP.

Freedom of the press

Under Mr. Yushchenko's presidency, the Ukrainian media is beginning to enjoy the most freedom among all the post-Soviet states, said Dr. Taras Kuzio, a visiting assistant professor at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University in Washington.

If anything, Dr. Kuzio said, the media should exert more of its newfound freedom in not only reporting and observing events and decisions, but critically analyzing them as well.

The biggest media controversy has been the Yushchenko government's efforts to pull the license of NTN, a television station owned by Donetsk entrepreneur and Yanukovych ally Eduard Prutnik.

NTN mounted a massive public relations campaign on its station and on the streets of Kyiv, accusing the Yushchenko government of trying to silence its political enemies.

Ukraine's National Television and Radio Council alleged NTN obtained its license illegally and prosecutors filed a lawsuit against the broadcast company for failing to pay necessary fees.

On April 28, a Kyiv court ruled in favor of NTN, ruling that it obtained its license to broadcast legally.

Scandal and conflict

Our Ukraine was an extremely delicate coalition of distinct political fractions assembled by Mr. Yushchenko as his campaign accelerated toward last year's presidential elections.

The cracks in the Our Ukraine bloc became ever more apparent once the new administration took office.

Prime Minister Tymoshenko and National Security and Defense Council Secretary Petro Poroshenko have revealed their antipathy for each other, and political scientists have said Mr. Yushchenko has not done enough to resolve such conflicts among his ministers.

With Mr. Yushchenko, "there's an inability to bang heads together among allies and get them to stop arguing among themselves," Dr. Kuzio said.

It was a former American of Ukrainian descent, Roman Zvarych, who caused the Cabinet's two biggest scandals, in which he stood at the brink of resignation.

Just two weeks into the new administration, Mr. Zvarych threatened to resign because the Cabinet of Ministers had voted to ban re-exportation of oil.

He withdrew his threat after it became apparent that the government wouldn't impose a ban on re-exporting oil, a business in which his wife, Svitlana, is directly involved.

Then Ukrayinska Pravda reported on April 14 that Mr. Zvarych never achieved a degree from Columbia University. Mr. Zvarych had been claiming for at least eight years that he completed a master's degree in philosophy.

Mr. Zvarych acknowledged in an April 28 interview with The Ukrainian Weekly that he never completed a master's degree in philosophy. This week The Weekly was able to confirm that Mr. Zvarych earned a bachelor's degree from Manhattan College in the Bronx in September 1976.

According to a press release issued by the Ministry of Justice on Thursday, May 5, Mr. Zvarych was to travel to the United States, where he would visit Columbia and New York universities in order to retrieve documentation about his academic record. The release also noted that Mr. Zvarych will hold a press conference on Tuesday, May 10, in Kyiv. In the release Mr. Zvarych accused the mass media of widespread manipulation that takes out of context information regarding his education.

While Mr. Yushchenko declined to comment on the scandal on April 27, Mr. Zvarych is less popular with Ms. Tymoshenko, who mentioned at one point that Mr. Zvarych had been absent from too many Cabinet meetings.

"Yushchenko's weak in personnel policies, as seen in the Zvarych case," Dr. Kuzio commented.

Political scientists believe that the Ukrainian public is satisfied overall with the first steps taken by Mr. Yushchenko and Ms. Tymoshenko. After patiently suffering under 14 years of post-Soviet authoritarian governments, Ukrainians realize change won't come overnight.

Mr. Yushchenko has remained Ukraine's most popular politician with a 60 percent approval rating, according to a recent poll by the Democratic Initiatives Foundation.

About 47 percent of Ukrainians believe the nation is headed in the right direction. Only 21 percent of Ukrainians believe the country is not headed in the right direction, according to the poll - a decline from 26 percent in September.

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