Turning the pages back... October 10, 2004 (10/09/05)

Turning the pages back...

October 10, 2004

A front-page news story on October 10, 2004, provided a telling snapshot of the incredible situation in Ukraine three weeks before last year's presidential election. The Committee of Voters of Ukraine (CVU), the most prestigious and trusted Ukrainian civic organization on election monitoring, said on October 6 that the Ukrainian presidential election was under threat and that conditions could arise that would make it impossible to hold a vote on October 31.

In the previous month the pre-election season in Ukraine had 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 CVU said during a press conference that these and other incidents indicated that events in Ukraine could be spinning out of control.

As the CVU was making its assessment, National Deputy Yurii Karmazin, a member of the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc and a former prosecutor in Odesa, was telling the Verkhovna Rada that already plans were afoot to take the stakes still higher. Mr. Karmazin said he had received information that certain individuals within the presidential administration had ordered the assassination of Mr. Yanukovych to discredit the presidential aspirations of his opponent Mr. Yushchenko, who was to be blamed for the murder.

The same day, members of the Yanukovych campaign team 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. A cache of the same literature was discovered at the Novyi Druk printing shop, which was owned by the son of former Prime Minister Valerii Pustovoitenko, who was aligned with the Yanukovych campaign. The campaign literature depicted Mr. Yushchenko as a U.S. stooge and included caricatures of his face superimposed on a portrait of U.S. President George W. Bush.

Meanwhile, Mr. Yushchenko remained in Vienna, where he was being treated for poisoning. At the same time, six parliamentary factions that made up the parliamentary majority - all of which supported Mr. Yanukovych for president - called for Mr. Yushchenko to withdraw from the presidential race, saying that he had falsely claimed state officials had tried to poison him and thus was unworthy of leading Ukraine.

Source: "Committee of Voters of Ukraine warns that election is threatened," by Roman Woronowycz, Kyiv Press Bureau, The Ukrainian Weekly, October 10, 2004, Vol. LXXII, No. 41.

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