IN THE PRESS: Yushchenko's deal with Yanukovych, questions about the Orange Revolution (10/30/05)

IN THE PRESS

Yushchenko's deal with Yanukovych, questions about the Orange Revolution

Interview with President Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine with the Financial Times, London, published on October 14:

QUESTION: Not long ago you signed a joint agreement with your opponent in last year's elections, Viktor Yanukovych. Some of your supporters see this move as talks with the enemy. How should the agreement be understood?

ANSWER: I spoke not with Yanukovych, but with 13 million people [who voted for him in last year's elections], who represent principally eastern Ukraine.

My basis was the main slogan that everyone carried on Independence Square during the Orange Revolution: "East and West together."

I think I and every citizen of Ukraine is denigrated when Ukraine is divided, when in violation of the Constitution someone can speak of separatism, of an eastern Ukrainian republic. We all need to understand the precipice Ukraine was standing on.

So my idea was that the leaders of the factions in Parliament should sign a joint declaration for the sake of the future, and reach a mutual understanding on five to seven key issues.

That is, holding honest elections in March of next year, adopting a budget, not allowing political repression or persecution, European integration and joining the World Trade Organization, and adopting laws [defining the status of] the president, opposition and government.

And regarding the people who were drawn into falsifying last year's presidential elections, I proposed to formulate a more or less balanced policy, to reach a mutual understanding on the issues that can be closed.

We want to move, so shall we slap the cart or the horse?

Shall we imprison people for organizing the server [which allegedly gave unauthorized people real-time access to nationwide voting results data during the presidential elections], for organizing multiple voting at many polling stations, for the beating of demonstrators outside the Central Election Commission, which was organized by particular high-ranking officials?

Or shall we persecute thousands of doctors and teachers [i.e., ordinary people] who took part in vote fraud?

It wasn't a joint memorandum about the March elections. It was about how to resolve the key challenges that the political elite faces today, independent of whether they are from the authorities or the opposition.

Editorial, Financial Times, London, October 17:

... Mr. [Viktor] Yushchenko is hampered by the deal struck with Mr. [Leonid] Kuchma to secure peaceful regime change. Following next March's parliamentary elections, much of the president's power will be transferred to the prime minister.

So instead of thinking long term, Mr. Yushchenko must focus on the short- term issues of his party's poll prospects and its possible post-election coalition partners. It is in this context that he talked to Mr. [Viktor] Yanukovych.

It is to be hoped that Ms. [Yulia] Tymoshenko will now see sense. A Yushchenko-Tymoshenko coalition remains Ukraine's best chance for a reformist, West-oriented government.

Even if Mr. Yushchenko bends with the political wind, he must not break with the Orange Revolution's ideals. Already he has gone too far in extending legal immunity from MPs [members of Parliament] to local assembly members.

It is not just principles that are at stake, but also Ukraine's future place in Europe.

Dominique Arel, associate professor and chair of Ukrainian studies at the University of Ottawa in Canada, writing in the October issue of Current History in the article titled "Is the Orange Revolution Fading?":

... Buoyed by the Orange Revolution, most analysts expected the Yushchenko presidency's first 100 days to be marked by a powerful program of political change, taking advantage of the disarray of the political opposition to reset the agenda and, more important, to change the way politics is conducted in a post-Soviet state. Puzzlingly, there was no such momentum. By one count, the number of draft laws initiated by the new president and prime minister was the lowest ever submitted to Parliament by the executive branch for any one legislative session since independence.

Compounding this image of passivity is a continuing and troubling ambivalence toward the law. Orange elites seem unable, or unwilling, to understand that an inclination to bend the law, even for high-minded short-term political purposes, can be extremely subversive for the long-term consolidation of Ukraine as a "normal" and "European" state. If 15 years of post-communist transition have taught one thing, it is that the rule of law constitutes the stepping-stone from which everything follows. Back in the early 1990s, many experts thought that a law-based state would evolve as a by-product of the implementation of liberal economic and electoral reforms. What we better understand now is that whenever political expediency trumps respect for the law, even for the purest of intentions, the foundations of a law-based state are eroded. The Orangists do not appear to share this understanding yet.

* * *

... Arguably the most critical challenge in the Orange era is the de-politicization of these "punishing" state agencies and the establishment of legal restraint in the application of executive power. In the first half-year of the Yushchenko administration, there is no evidence that a seismic change has occurred, or is about to.

The Procuracy, for one, does not appear to have changed the way it conducts business. Hardly a week has gone by, since January, without the announcement that a high-profile person associated with the former regime - including Yanukovych himself, his main business ally, and his former regional chief of staff - has been summoned for questioning or arrested. The number of such criminal cases that have been opened is reportedly in the thousands, although no case has yet gone to trial. The drumbeat of criminal investigations has been greeted favorably, or with indifference, by Western observers who bear little sympathy for the old regime. Yet one is struck by how selective the justice system has remained. ...

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