ANALYSIS: Melnychenko returns to Ukraine (12/18/05)

ANALYSIS

Melnychenko returns to Ukraine

by Taras Kuzio
Eurasia Daily Monitor

Mykola Melnychenko, the presidential guard who was involved in bugging President Leonid Kuchma's office between 1998 and 2000, returned to Ukraine on November 29. Exactly five years earlier Mr. Melnychenko fled Ukraine to Poland and then Prague, where he lived until obtaining political asylum in the United States in April 2001.

During Mr. Melnychenko's absence his "recordings have remained a significant factor in Ukrainian domestic politics" (Dzerkalo Tyzhnia, November 26-December 2). Why is he returning only now, when many Ukrainian commentators expected Mr. Melnychenko to return immediately after the election of President Viktor Yushchenko one year ago? There are two answers.

First, Procurator General Sviatoslav Piskun was sacked in October. Mr. Piskun had been reinstated on December 10, 2004, two days after the Ukrainian Parliament adopted the "compromise package" permitting a re-run of the second round of the disputed presidential election.

Mr. Piskun has been accused of blocking investigations of high-ranking officials from the Kuchma regime for a number of crimes, including the murder of Ukrayinska Pravda editor Heorhii Gongadze in 2000. The accusations seem confirmed by Mr. Piskun's appearance on the Party of the Regions of Ukraine list for the March 2006 parliamentary elections, a party linked to the former regime.

The other factor is the upcoming parliamentary election. Mr. Melnychenko has accused Verkhovna Rada Chairman Volodymyr Lytvyn of complicity in the Gongadze murder, charges that could dent his popularity with voters (Ukrayinska Pravda, December 6; Dzerkalo Tyzhnia, December 3-9).

Socialist Party of Ukraine leader Oleksander Moroz first disclosed a fragment of the Melnychenko tapes in the Ukrainian Parliament on November 28, 2000. The SPU would like Mr. Melnychenko in its parliamentary faction, but Ukrainian courts had refused to permit the guard to run on the SPU ticket in the 2002 elections. While Ukrainian courts and the European Court of Human Rights have subsequently demanded that Mr. Melnychenko be made a national deputy, the Central Election Commission (CEC) continues to ignore these rulings.

However, the CEC's obstinacy will not necessarily apply to the SPU's 2006 election list if Mr. Melnychenko opts to remain in Ukraine. If it wins 30 seats as projected, the SPU could bring Mr. Melnychenko into Parliament next year.

Mr. Melnychenko gave sworn testimony in the United States before he departed for Ukraine (Ukrayinska Pravda, November 29). In Ukraine he was summoned to the Procurator General's Office (PGO), where he testified for another three hours. The PGO also received copies of Mr. Melnychenko's tapes from the Boris Berezovsky Foundation and former Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) Chairman Oleksander Turchynov.

Mr. Melnychenko's latest statements also implicate Mykola Azarov, the former head of the State Tax Administration; the late Internal Affairs Minister Yurii Kravchenko; former SBU Chairman Leonid Derkach; and former Kuchma adviser and energy oligarch Oleksander Volkov.

Accusations against the latter two could cause problems for President Yushchenko and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Mr. Derkach's son, Andrei, heads the media outlets Kievski Telegraf, Versi.com, and Era TV and Radio, which all supported Mr. Yushchenko in the 2004 elections.

Mr. Volkov could be a complication for Ms. Tymoshenko. His high-profile presence in the Tymoshenko bloc tarnishes her image as a populist, anti-oligarch politician. It also raises questions about whether Ms. Tymoshenko could support an investigation of Mr. Melnychenko's accusations when they could affect one of her key advisers.

Mr. Melnychenko's return may not lead to charges against senior Kuchma officials. In the past year, no high-ranking Kuchma official has been charged with election fraud or abuse of office or corruption, let alone the Gongadze affair. Now, all of the likely suspects appear prominently on the Party of the Regions 2006 election list. If no charges are filed before the 2006 vote, they will be shielded by parliamentary immunity.

As for Mr. Kuchma himself, two factors make the Yushchenko administration reluctant to accuse him of involvement in the Gongadze murder.

First, Mr. Yushchenko may have been pressured into giving some form of immunity to President Kuchma during the December 2004 roundtable negotiations to stop the Orange Revolution protests. Mr. Yushchenko is also reluctant to set a precedent of filing criminal charges against former presidents, fearing he could be next.

Second, Mr. Yushchenko and his entourage believe that Russia was in some way behind the Melnychenko affair, particularly how Mr. Kuchma's alleged order to "rough" up Gongadze ended with murder. Some other force likely wanted President Kuchma implicated.

Four Internal Affairs Ministry policemen abducted Gongadze on September 16, 2000. The leader of the group, Gen. Oleksii Pukach, is accused of actually murdering Gongadze. After Gongadze was murdered, his body was decapitated and dumped in Mr. Moroz's Kyiv Oblast constituency, where it was quickly discovered. Why would Mr. Kuchma want the body to be found, if he had indeed ordered the killing?

The alleged Russian link comes via local Ukrainian politicians seeking to weaken President Kuchma, force him to resign early and transfer power to a successor. Russia's likely partners would have been the Kyiv clan's Social-Democratic Party - United.

While living abroad, Mr. Melnychenko occasionally released selected fragments of conversations, but never the full tapes. "Each time the release of the recording was timed to a certain extent, it became clearer that Mr. Melnychenko was not acting independently, " commented Dzerkalo Tyzhnia (November 26-December 2).

Few observers believe Mr. Melnychenko's claim that he taped Kuchma's office single-handedly. The cloud of suspicion and other still-unanswered questions have led to the Mr. Melnychenko's partial discrediting. Twelve presidential guards who attended Mr. Melnychenko's press conference insist that Mr. Melnychenko was given access to Kuchma's office only in the company of other officers, never alone. They scoffed at his claim that he had placed a digital dictaphone under Mr. Kuchma's sofa (Inter TV, December 5).

Mr. Melnychenko's tapes unleashed the Kuchmagate scandal, emboldened the opposition and compromised the Kuchma government. If the tapes were intended to make President Kuchma leave office early they failed; instead they led to Mr. Yushchenko's election and the Orange Revolution.

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

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