NEWS ANALYSIS: Resolution of Gongadze murder blocked (07/17/05)

NEWS ANALYSIS: Resolution of Gongadze murder blocked

by Taras Kuzio
Eurasia Daily Monitor

Despite hopes to the contrary, the election of a new president of Ukraine has not speeded the investigation into the murder of opposition journalist Heorhii Gongadze. At the Davos World Economic Summit in January, President Viktor Yushchenko promised that the Gongadze case would be submitted to court by May.

In fact, there is little progress beyond the arrest of two Internal Affairs Ministry officers and the release of a third on bail. All three were involved in the Gongadze kidnapping in fall 2000.

Procurator General Sviatoslav Piskun in the second week of July, visited the United States where he had planned to meet Mykola Melnychenko, the former presidential guard who had bugged President Leonid Kuchma's office. A fragment of one tape recording with Mr. Kuchma's voice ordering violence against Gongadze was played in Parliament on November 28, 2000, sparking the Kuchmagate crisis.

For still-unclear reasons, Mr. Piskun did not meet Mr. Melnychenko. Instead, he discussed other issues with the United States, such as signing an extradition treaty, the deportation of former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko (detained and on trial in California since 2004), and the extradition of former Kuchma administration officials wanted in Ukraine but now living in the United States.

Mr. Melnychenko blamed Mr. Piskun for changing the time and place of the planned meeting. Mr. Piskun was to have taken Mr. Melnychenko's affidavit and hoped to take the original recordings back to Ukraine (Ukrayinska Pravda, July 13). But observers are now wondering if the "scheduling error" is really a smokescreen covering both the procurator general and Mr. Melnychenko.

First, both Mr. Melnychenko and Mr. Gongadze's widow, Myroslava, have long argued that President Yushchenko was mistaken in retaining Mr. Piskun as the country's top prosecutor. Mr. Yushchenko may belatedly be coming round to that same conclusion. At a meeting of central and regional prosecutors, Mr. Yushchenko accused the Procurator's Office of taking bribes to block investigations ordered by the Internal Affairs Ministry (MVS) and Security Service of Ukraine (SBU).

Mr. Yushchenko noted that top Kuchma-era officials all seem to get advance warnings to flee Ukraine ahead of their imminent arrest. For example, Gen. Oleksii Pukach, who was in the car alongside three other MVS officers accused of kidnapping Mr. Gongadze, fled to Israel in 2004. When the SBU and Israeli security service jointly located Mr. Pukach in Israel and passed this information through Interpol to the Ukrainian Procurator General's Office, somebody leaked this information to Segodnya (June 23), allowing Mr. Pukach to go into hiding. As Zerkalo Nedeli/Dzerkalo Tyzhnia (June 25) put it, "In a word, it all looks professional and smells bad."

Second, Mr. Melnychenko's reputation has been tarnished. Semen Shevchuk leaked information to Ukrayinska Pravda (July 5) that detailed meetings in Berlin (February), and Moscow (August and September 2004) between Mr. Melnychenko and Kuchma officials, with Russia's SVR acting as intermediaries. The Russian side was interested in protecting Mr. Kuchma as well as ensuring that fragments of Mr. Melnychenko's tapes relating to corruption by Russia's leaders in cahoots with Mr. Kuchma did not go public.

Mr. Melnychenko and Oleksander Yeliashkevych, another political refugee from Ukraine, both demanded and received $1 million each from Kuchma administration authorities. The funds were organized by Viktor Medvedchuk, then head of the presidential administration, and negotiated in Moscow by Ihor Bakai, then head of the Directorate for State Affairs. Mr. Bakai is now living in Moscow and is wanted by the current Ukrainian authorities on charges of stealing $300 million. This explains why so little of the Melnychenko tapes were released during the 2004 election and his reluctance to assist the Gongadze investigation since President Yushchenko came to power. His silence was agreed to in Moscow as part of the monetary arrangement.

Third, the latest tapes to be released make top Yushchenko officials look guilty. Newly released tapes from 2000 incriminate National Security and Defense Council Secretary Petro Poroshenko, portraying him as a Kuchma lackey hostile to then First Vice Prime Minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, who is now prime minister. Zerkalo Nedeli/Dzerkalo Tyzhnia (July 9) described this development as the recordings' "transformation from a heroic deed into something absolutely different. And a national tragedy has been transformed into a farce."

However, the Kuchma camp is not the only faction that has sought to buy off people involved in the Gongadze case. The Ministry of Justice attempted to bribe Ms. Gongadze with 100,000 Euros in exchange for her withdrawing all future claims against the government. She described this offer as "an absolutely vulgar proposal by the Ukrainian government to shut me up" (Ukrayinska Pravda, June 23). Unlike Mr. Melnychenko, Ms. Gongadze refused the offer and demanded that the Ukrainian authorities punish the "organizers," and not just the MVS officers who carried out the murder of her husband.

Two further suspicions have also arisen. The first rests with the death of former Internal Affairs Minister Yurii Kravchenko, whose voice is heard on the Melnychenko tape dealing with Mr. Gongadze. MVS Minister Yurii Lutsenko and former SBU chairman Ihor Smeshko do not believe Mr. Kravchenko committed suicide - especially as he was found with two bullets to his head - after Procurator Piskun publicly called him to give testimony. Mr. Smeshko said, "I am inclined not to believe that he committed suicide. The information I have at the moment poses huge questions as to why the murder version was not pursued" (Channel 5 TV, July 11).

The second suspicion rests with efforts to bring Mr. Kuchma to justice. First Vice Prime Minister Mykola Tomenko believes that any investigation of the Gongadze affair should begin with Mr. Kuchma and Verkhovna Rada Chairman Volodymyr Lytvyn (Den, July 15). Mr. Lytvyn, who was head of the presidential administration in 1996-2002, has never been called in for questioning and will be a coalition partner with Mr. Yushchenko in the 2006 parliamentary election.

Deputy Procurator Viktor Shokin is now stating that Mr. Kuchma did not issue the order to "deal with" Gongadze (Stolichniye Novosti, June 22). Mr. Shokin was deputy prosecutor in October 2003, when the presidential administration responded to pressure and released Mr. Pukach from a brief imprisonment.

Failure to proceed on the Gongadze affair will seriously damage the legitimacy of those who came to power through the Orange Revolution. As SBU Chairman Oleksander Turchynov admitted, "the death of this person [Gongadze] really shook up and changed the country" (2000, June 3). Without Kuchmagate, there likely would never have been an Orange Revolution exactly four years later.

Dr. Taras Kuzio is visiting professor at the Elliot School of International Affairs, George Washington University. The article above, which originally appeared in The Jamestown Foundation's Eurasia Daily Monitor, is reprinted here with permission from the foundation (www.jamestown.org).

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