ANALYSIS: Verkhovna Rada chairman to be progressively marginalized (08/14/05)

ANALYSIS

Verkhovna Rada chairman to be progressively marginalized

by Taras Kuzio
Eurasia Daily Monitor

While President Viktor Yushchenko remains outwardly confident that his Our Ukraine party, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko's bloc, and Verkhovna Rada Chairman Volodymyr Lytvyn's People's Party of Ukraine (PPU) will enter the 2006 parliamentary elections as a coalition, this scenario is now unlikely (Ukrayinska Pravda, July 25).

As a condition of joining Mr. Yushchenko in the 2006 election, Ms. Tymoshenko has demanded that Mr. Lytvyn be excluded. Mr. Lytvyn's unwillingness to support the adoption of legislation required by the World Trade Organization was the straw that broke the camel's back for her. Ms. Tymoshenko accused Mr. Lytvyn of playing the opposition against the authorities and of advising factions not to vote for the WTO legislation as a single package.

During a recent joint meeting President Yushchenko, Prime Minister Tymoshenko and Chairman Lytvyn discussed the need for the "harmonization of parliamentary processes" (Ukrayinska Pravda, July 25). This is a reference to not repeating the problems found in Parliament in June and July, when it discussed the WTO-required legislation. After Parliament failed to adopt a large proportion of the bills, the government issued a resolution condemning Parliament as a whole, and Mr. Lytvyn in particular (Ukrayinska Pravda, July 13; Zerkalo Nedeli/Dzerkalo Tyzhnia, July 16).

The government statement accused Mr. Lytvyn of being in league with "destructive political forces in Parliament" (kmu.gov.ua, July 13). First Vice Prime Minister Mykola Tomenko accused Mr. Lytvyn of working with former president Leonid Kuchma to destabilize Parliament and discredit the new authorities (ERA TV, July 14).

Ms. Tymoshenko's dislike for Mr. Lytvyn is magnified by her equal dislike for Petro Poroshenko, secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, who acts as Mr. Lytvyn's lobbyist within the Yushchenko camp. Their enmity has only grown since the release of an audiotape secretly made in Mr. Kuchma's office by former presidential guard Mykola Melnychenko.

Mr. Poroshenko denied the authenticity of the tape and, in his usual fashion (see Eurasia Daily Monitor, July 27), claimed it was part of a "konspiratsiya" by former Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who funded the transcription of the Melnychenko tapes. Mr. Poroshenko claimed that Berezovsky is working with Mr. Kuchma to divide the Yushchenko coalition (Ukrayinska Pravda, July 7 and 21).

The tape recorded a conversation between Messrs. Poroshenko and Kuchma on July 7, 2000, and contains two unpleasant moments. First, Mr. Poroshenko swears his loyalty to Kuchma: "I am a member of your team! I will obey any of your orders," Mr. Poroshenko declares. "I have made a choice once in my life and there will be no change" (Ukrayinska Pravda, July 6).

Second, and far worse for Mr. Poroshenko, the recording also provides details of Mr. Poroshenko and Mr. Kuchma's discussion on how to undermine then First Vice Prime Minister Tymoshenko (in Mr. Yushchenko's government) and her parliamentary faction. After criminal charges were filed against her, Ms. Tymoshenko was arrested and imprisoned briefly in February 2001.

It is not coincidental that very soon after the tape became public, Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) Chief Oleksander Tyrchynov, Ms. Tymoshenko's right-hand man in her Fatherland Party, disclosed that the SBU was authenticating the Melnychenko tapes. This is the first occasion that the tapes have been officially examined in Ukraine. Melnychenko told Eurasia Daily Monitor that he believes Mr. Poroshenko is blocking the authentication of his tapes because he fears further details will emerge regarding his, and Mr. Lytvyn's, dealings with Kuchma in the 1990s. This, in turn, is holding up progress in the investigation into the murder of journalist Heorhii Gongadze in fall 2000.

Copies of the Melnychenko tapes were obtained from Hryhorii Omelchenko, head of the parliamentary commission to investigate the Gongadze case. Omelchenko is himself a member of Ms. Tymoshenko's Fatherland Party.

Mr. Lytvyn has already predicted, and Melnychenko has privately confirmed to Eurasia Daily Monitor, that further disclosures of Mr. Lytvyn's abuse of office under President Kuchma will be made public this fall. These will include excerpts dealing with the alleged involvement of Mr. Lytvyn, who was then head of the presidential administration, in the Gongadze murder.

The final nail in the coffin of the alliance with Mr. Lytvyn will be the annulment of constitutional reforms agreed to in December 2004 as part of a "compromise package" during the disputed presidential elections. These constitutional reforms would transfer some executive power to Parliament, a move Mr. Lytvyn supports. Mr. Tomenko advised Mr. Lytvyn to remember that Ukraine had only one president, Mr. Yushchenko, and not himself (UNIAN, July 14).

In the fall the Yushchenko-Tymoshenko coalition is likely to file an appeal with the Supreme and Constitutional courts to annul the constitutional reforms. They will argue that the adoption of the reforms was undertaken unconstitutionally in only one parliamentary session. Changes in the Constitution are required to be adopted over two parliamentary sessions, the first time with a minimum of 225 votes and the second with 300 votes.

The annulment of the constitutional reforms would lead to a rift between the Socialist Party and Mr. Lytvyn's People's Party of Ukraine, which support the reforms and Our Ukraine, Ms. Tymoshenko, and First Vice Prime Minister Anatolii Kinakh's Party of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (PPU), who oppose them. Mr. Poroshenko, therefore, is becoming increasingly isolated within Our Ukraine by continuing to support the constitutional reforms and an alliance with Mr. Lytvyn.

Hostility to working with Mr. Lytvyn in the 2006 election runs deep among local branches of Our Ukraine, which accuse Mr. Lytvyn's party of becoming a haven for former Kuchma officials afraid of being charged with criminal offenses. This opposition to working with Mr. Lytvyn and members of the former Kuchma camp has also pushed national democratic parties who were members of the Our Ukraine bloc in the 2002 election closer to Ms. Tymoshenko.

A break with Mr. Lytvyn over constitutional reforms, coupled with Ms. Tymoshenko's refusal to countenance entering a 2006 election coalition with him, will prove to be a crisis for both Mr. Lytvyn and Mr. Poroshenko, his main lobbyist in Our Ukraine.

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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