1_January 6, 2002 - The Ukrainian Weekly

12 THE UKRAINIAN WEEKLY SUNDAY, JANUARY 6, 2002
No. 1
2001: THE YEAR IN REVIEW
militia officers and 60 demonstrators hospitalized. That
evening law enforcement officials conducted sweeps of the
offices of opposition political organizations and of trains
leaving the city and arrested 200, mostly young people,
including the leader of the Ukrainian National Assembly-
Ukrainian National Self-Defense Organization (UNA-
UNSO) political organization.
The March 9 incidents were the culmination of three
months of almost weekly demonstrations, which included
the pitching of two tent cities, one on Independence Square
and the other astride it. Law enforcement officials
destroyed both days after they were constructed. At one
point young members of a heretofore-unknown political
group swept down on one camp, pulling up tent stakes and
knocking down Ukrainian flags. Many witnesses said the
attackers were students from the Internal Affairs Ministry
academy in Kyiv tasked with the job.
As the anti-Kuchma movement grew, several support
organizations developed. Generally they were composed of
the same members and the same political organizations.
Both the Ukraine Without Kuchma organization and the
Forum for National Salvation were led by representatives of
the Socialist Party of Oleksander Moroz, and included the
Sobor Party, the Batkivschyna Party, UNA-UNSO and the
Schyt Batkivschyny political organization.
The anti-Kuchma forces were adept at gathering up to
10,000 or so demonstrators in Kyiv for mass protests, but
they failed to ignite a nationwide movement and never
found the support to seriously threaten the presidency of
Mr. Kuchma after March 9.
With the Gongadze affair still in the political undercurrent,
although off the front pages of the news, the Labor
Ukraine Party, which is politically close to the president and
includes the president’s son-in-law in its leadership, hired
Kroll Associates, a private U.S. detective firm, to investigate
the crime as well as the Melnychenko tapes. The
detective agency announced on September 25 that it could
find no evidence to suggest a link between President
Kuchma and the Internet journalist.
“There is no conclusive evidence to show that President
Kuchma ordered or was otherwise involved in the murder
of Heorhii Gongadze,” stated the 50-page report. It also
found that Mr. Melnychenko could not have acted alone in
producing the tapes.
The Procurator General’s Office released the results of
its own investigation into the complicity of Mr. Kuchma,
his Chief of Staff Volodymyr Lytvyn and ex-Minister of
Internal Affairs Kravchenko, and found all three beyond
reproach in the matter. Assistant Procurator General Oleksii
Bahanets said in a letter to the dead journalist’s mother,
Tymoshenko, who as vice prime minister had done much to
reform the energy sector and to increase tax revenues, was a
controversial choice for the post and was never looked
upon kindly by the president in her 13 months in office.
Ms. Tymoshenko became closely involved in the effort
to remove Mr. Kuchma from office and was a leading
founder of the Forum for National Salvation, actions that
only increased the president’s distrust of her as the second
in command of the government.
She was arrested and jailed on February 13 on charges
that she offered Mr. Lazarenko more than $80 million in
bribes while he was prime minister, allegations that
Oleksander Turchynov, her political colleague in the
Batkivschyna Party she leads, categorically denied. Her
husband, who headed United Energy Systems after Ms.
Tymoshenko entered politics, had been arrested in
September on charges of financial improprieties.
Ms. Tymoshenko vowed to take her case to the Supreme
Court to protest what she considered an illegal arrest, based
on her assertion that she was taken from her sick bed to
prison.
She was released on March 27 after six weeks of incarceration
when a local judge ruled that prosecutors had given
insufficient substantiation for the need to keep her in jail.
While prosecutors appealed the decision, they reassigned
Ms. Tymoshenko to house arrest.
Ms. Tymoshenko immediately entered a hospital to be
treated for an ulcer, of which she had complained in jail.
She received more good news on April 2 when Ukraine’s
Supreme Court ordered her released from all detention
and/or guard. The highest criminal court in Ukraine ruled
that the decision to incarcerate Ms. Tymoshenko was
unconstitutional because it had been made in a secretive
and illegal manner. The final ruling came after the prosecutor’s
office had successfully appealed the initial ruling,
which had resulted in a guard being place outside Ms.
Tymoshenko’s hospital room.
Eventually all charges against Ms. Tymoshenko were
dropped for insufficient evidence. By the end of the year
she had redirected her political efforts into a Tymoshenko
political bloc and was preparing for March 2002 parliamentary
elections.
Mr. Yuschenko, who had never fully accepted Ms.
Tymoshenko’s dismissal, followed his first vice prime minister
out of office just over three months later, on April 26.
The storm cloud over Mr. Yuschenko initially gathered
earlier in the year when Labor Ukraine leader Serhii
Tyhypko began to press the prime minister to reorganize his
Cabinet of Ministers into a coalition government, which
Mr. Yuschenko resisted.
“Your time is over. The political and moral failure of your rule can
be seen not so much in the ‘tape scandal’ as in the alienation of
power from the people, from their needs and spirit. ... [The tape itself]
is a trifle. The important thing is that virtually nobody doubts [its
authenticity] and no voice of real indignation has been heard – even
from your side.”
– Ukraine’s PEN Club in a letter to President Leonid Kuchma, as quoted by Interfax
on February 7 and cited by RFE/RL Poland, Belarus and Ukraine Report.
Lesia, that his agency had reviewed the Melnychenko tape
recordings and determined that the allegations were false.
A good example of how everything on the political scene
in the first half of the year was viewed through the prism of
the Gongadze affair was the series of events surrounding
Yulia Tymoshenko, the controversial business tycoonturned-politician
who had been closely associated with
Pavlo Lazarenko before he fled to the United States, where
he was arrested and now awaits trial on money laundering
charges.
Ms. Tymoshenko held the post of first vice prime minister
in the government of Prime Minister Viktor Yuschenko
before being dismissed by President Kuchma on January 19
in connection with criminal charges of smuggling, forgery
and tax evasion, which the Procurator General’s Office had
leveled against her. While President Kuchma said that his
prime minister had concurred in the decision, Mr.
Yuschenko never publicly accepted the arrest and took five
days to sign the order.
The firing came after an investigation was begun on
January 5 into Ms. Tymoshenko’s activities while she was
chairman of United Energy Systems, a gas and oil consortium
that was closely associated with Mr. Lazarenko. Ms.
The prime minister, who had great success in implementing
long-delayed economic reforms, making the government
more transparent and in stimulating economic
growth, had made enemies by stepping on the toes of many
a business oligarch as he reorganized the energy sector and
brought it out of the shadows. He was also criticized for
moving ahead with political decisions without sufficient
consensus and with failing to cooperate with the
Parliament.
On April 19 the Parliament left his government hanging
by a thread after it voted to support a resolution initiated by
the Communist faction criticizing its performance in 2000.
The lawmakers scheduled a motion of no confidence for
April 26, an action that became a fait accompli after
President Kuchma failed to back his prime minister 100
percent, and instead said that Mr. Yuschenko’s problem was
that he had not learned to work with the Verkhovna Rada
and would have to do so quickly or lose his job. The prime
minister did not discover the compromise that would have
saved his government and was removed on April 26 as an
unlikely coalition of Communists and pro-business parties
led by Labor Ukraine joined to oust him in a 263-69 vote –
the first time a head of government in Ukraine had been
ousted in a parliamentary vote of no-confidence.
As he left the Verkhovna Rada building, a regular citizen
again after leading the government for 16 months, Mr.
Yuschenko was greeted by some 15,000 supporters chanting,
“Yuschenko, Yuschenko!” He told the crowd that he
was not embarrassed with what he had accomplished during
his time in office.
“A year ago I had said we would move strongly on a
program of national well-being. I said that I would not be
embarrassed when the end came and to face the nation.
Today that time has come,” explained Mr. Yuschenko,
whose government oversaw a 6 percent growth in the economy
during 2000, the first ever in independent Ukraine.
Mr. Yuschenko agreed to stay on as head of a caretaker
government while a replacement who could be approved by
the Verkhovna Rada was sought. It took a month of extensive
consultations with political and parliamentary leaders
and the vetting of several candidates before President
Kuchma announced on May 21 that he had nominated
Anatolii Kinakh, the leader of the League of Industrialists
and Entrepreneurs, who had briefly been first vice prime
minister in the last days of the government of Prime
Minister Valerii Pustovoitenko.
The Verkhovna Rada easily approved Mr. Kinakh on
May 29, but his confirmation was overshadowed by an
executive order issued by President Kuchma the same day,
which instituted a system of state secretaries in the Cabinet
of Ministers.
In what the presidential administration called administrative
reform, Mr. Kuchma ordered that a position be established
a notch below the top in all the ministries, including
the office of prime minister. These presidential appointees
named to five-year terms would be responsible for the dayto-day
administration of the office. President Kuchma
called it a much-needed structural change within the executive
branch to give some administrative stability to the government.
“Governments will come and go, but stability will
remain,” explained Mr. Kuchma. Critics of the move said
that now the president’s men would control all the departments
of the government, which would leave the ministers
and the prime minister ineffective political puppets.
Prime Minister Kinakh maintained most of the policies
instituted by his predecessor, even though he slowed the
process of reforms, and the hot Ukrainian economy continued
to sizzle even as the world economy cooled. By midyear
the economy was growing at about 10 percent and
would end the year showing a 9 percent growth in GDP.
Just as important, inflation remained negligible, reaching
only about 5 percent for the year.
Foreign investment also showed some strength in 2001,
in the first six months recording a 1.6-fold increase over the
same period of the previous year, bringing it to a total of
$4.3 million, which still remained paltry when compared to
Poland, which had nearly $80 million in foreign investment
by the same time.
Leading the list of foreign investors in Ukraine were the
United States, the Netherlands, Germany, Great Britain and
Russia.
Ukraine’s agricultural sector, which responded positively
to a presidential decree on structural reform within the sector
at the end of 2000, led the movement of Ukraine’s economy
upward. The sector had its best year in more than a
decade as well as its biggest grain harvest, which reached
38 million tons.
Farmers were given another boost when the long-awaited
Land Code was approved on October 25 after a tumultuous
political battle on the Verkhovna Rada floor that even
turned physical when Communists battled those supporting
the new land code before the final vote.
After successfully blocking a first attempt at a vote on
October 18, the Communists did all in their power to repeat
the success on October 25, but this time the parliamentary
leadership was determined to bring the issue to a close.
First Vice-Chairman Viktor Medvedchuk told the session
that “We will vote on this bill today, one way or another,”
which would later be grounds for the leftist forces to appeal
to the Constitutional Court to review the legality of the procedures
used.
The Communists, however, were inclined to use whatever
means necessary to block the vote, and they did, including
stealing voting ballots and urns prior to a written vote,
which was declared after a floor vote was blocked when
someone disconnected the voting system. A vote was finally
tallied using an unorthodox “signature vote” during
which national deputies signed their names under a “yea”
or “nay” category.
The historic Land Code, which was approved with 232
votes supporting it, legalized the private ownership of land
with all generally associated rights of investiture and established
January 1, 2005, as the moment when the sale of