Turning the pages back... April 8, 2001 (04/02/06)

Turning the pages back...

April 8, 2001

Five years ago, our issue dated April 8, 2001, carried an article that revealed the Kuchma regime's fear of Vice Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. She was seen as an agitator disrupting the status quo and was made a target by the regime's tactics of political repression. Charges of bribery, smuggling and forgery were brought against Ms. Tymoshenko. She denied all charges, claiming they were politically motivated.

The Kyiv District Court on March 27 annulled a warrant issued in December 2000 by the Procurator General's Office for Ms. Tymoshenko's arrest. The court ruling made by Judge Mykola Zamkovenko said, "there was not sufficient reason to believe Ms. Tymoshenko would hide from investigators since she attended all required interrogations."

Upon this decision, the Procurator General's Office appealed the ruling, and the Kyiv City Court complied on March 31 to place Ms. Tymoshenko under arrest once more. At that time, she was reportedly recovering from a stomach ulcer at a Kyiv clinic after being jailed since February 13. There, guards appeared outside her hospital room to arrest her. Ms. Tymoshenko's lawyers filed an appeal to the Supreme Court, which on April 2 ordered a suspension of the arrest until it considered the appeal.

Oleksander Turchynov, head of the parliamentary caucus of Ms. Tymoshenko's Fatherland Party, cited "informed sources" and told Interfax that the order to rearrest Ms. Tymoshenko came personally from President Leonid Kuchma. Looking at the speed at which these rulings were made and overturned, many saw the invisible hand of corruption and power at work.

After Mr. Turchynov spoke with the president about Ms. Tymoshenko's husband, who was in jail on charges of bribery, Mr. Kuchma said that Ms. Tymoshenko's fate depended on her "behavior." President Kuchma's term "behavior" referred to the release by Ms. Tymoshenko to Western experts of Maj. Mykola Melnychenko's recordings of conversations in the president's office which implicated Mr. Kuchma in the murder of journalist Heorhii Gongadze.

Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko commented on the rearrest, saying it was "a demonstration of force unfavorable for overcoming the crisis and arranging a normal political dialogue."

Source: "Is Kuchma afraid of Tymoshenko or of dialogue?" by Jan Maksymiuk, RFE/RL Poland, Belarus and Ukraine Report, The Ukrainian Weekly. April 8, 2001, Vol. LXIX, No. 14.

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