02/10/2001 | Broker

Incriminating tape is a fake, says Ukraine's president: Charles Clover meets Leonid Kuchma, accused of ordering the killing of a journalist exposing high-level corruption

Financial Times; Feb 10, 2001
By CHARLES CLOVER



The air inside the president's administration in Kiev is thick with
conspiracy, as a scandal deepens over a murdered journalist and mysterious
recordings that implicate President Leonid Kuchma in the killing.

This week, Mr Kuchma cast a further air of mystery over the tragedy and the
events that subsequently unfolded, saying in an interview with the FT that
he believed "a very well-organised force", with "a great deal of money and
capabilities", may have bugged his office last year, fabricating the
recordings which incriminated him.

"So far, I have no theory about the goal of the organisers of this affair,"
he said, and flatly denied any role in the tragedy.

The tapes, first publicised last November, allegedly record Mr Kuchma
ordering his interior minister to "deal with" Georgy Gongadze, the editor of
an opposition internet website (www.pravda. com.ua). Mr Gongadze had
disappeared on September 16, and a headless body with an apparent DNA match
was discovered outside of Kiev on November 3.

On the eve of a meeting tomorrow with Russia's President Vladimir Putin, Mr
Kuchma warned that the scandal surrounding the murder and the tapes was
having unpredictable consequences for Ukraine, which only gained
independence from Moscow in 1991 and whose stability has persistently been a
point of concern for western politicians and strategists. "Ukraine is not
homogenous, it has many internal contradictions. We are already starting to
see these differences become more radical."

He was referring to demonstrations on Tuesday, when thousands of Ukrainians
gathered in Kiev's central square to demand his resignation. Officials close
to Mr Kuchma said the scandal was complicating Ukraine's ties with the west
and driving Mr Kuchma to seek closer links to Moscow.

Mr Kuchma said he believed the tapes were a montage of several different
conversations, probably recorded in his office. "They must have had some
kind of super-apparatus," he said. Experts so far disagree on how difficult
it would be to fabricate such a tape, which is being examined by foreign
specialists.

In the course of the interview, Mr Kuchma was keen to show that there
remained far more questions than answers about the recordings. He said it
was "completely impossible" that the recordings were made solely by Mykola
Melnychenko, who until November was one of Mr Kuchma's security guards.

Mr Melnychenko has said he made more than 300 hours of taped conversations
by placing a digital recorder under Mr Kuchma's couch, and had decided to
publicise the recordings to expose Mr Kuchma's alleged wrongdoing. Since
late November, he has been in hiding with his family abroad.

"Yes, Major Melnychenko exists," said Mr Kuchma. "But who is behind him? If
they bugged the president's office, then we are not talking about some small
play by the opposition. We must look much more broadly.

"I completely reject the idea that this was done on the level of states,
that it was the Americans or the Russians. Though it is not excluded that
some sort of civil institutions from these countries are at work," he said.

Opponents of Mr Kuchma said it was not important how the tapes were made but
only that they were genuine. Serhiy Holovaty, a parliamentarian, said: "For
us it is not important how he was taped but whether he had these
conversations with his subordinates."

Other tapes allegedly show Mr Kuchma receiving bribes and working on
falsification of election results.

Mr Kuchma insisted he had been framed. He believed there was a "100 per cent
analogy" to a similar case of a disappearing journalist in neighbouring
Belarus, last autumn. Many other analysts have noted intriguing similarities
as well.

In that case, Dmitri Zavadsky, a cameraman for ORT, the Russian television
network that has frequently criticised Belarus's President Aleksander
Lukashenko, disappeared on July 7. While the authorities' investigation made
no progress, on November 20 an anonymous e-mail was sent to news
organisations by someone who identified himself as "an officer in the State
Security Committee of the Republic of Belarus". The anonymous writer then
quoted facts suggesting that the Belarusan president's personal security
service was responsible for the disappearance and murder of Mr Zavadsky. A
week later, the head of the KGB was replaced by former deputy director of
Russia's federal security service, formerly headed by Mr Putin.

Diplomats in Minsk privately say they do not exclude the possibility that
the Russian security services played a part in the Zavadsky affair. Mr
Lukashenko himself, however, blamed "certain forces in the west" seeking to
"apply the Yugoslav scenario to Belarus".

Mr Kuchma maintains there are disturbing aspects of the Gongadze affair that
point to a conspiracy to frame him.

Mr Gongadze's body was buried at a crossroad, with one arm sticking out of
the ground, though some versions say this was due to animals having dug it
up. Though decapitated and placed in acid so as to prevent identification,
the body was buried with Mr Gongadze's jewellery.

"They made it possible for the corpse to be found and identified
immediately," said Mr Kuchma. "Look at how primitively it was done, they
made it into a real horror show. Isn't it possible that, having recorded
something about Gongadze, the recorders could then have done this deed
themselves?"

This version has been examined at some length in Ukraine. Opposition
politicians reject it out of hand: "Idiocy," said Oleksander Moroz, head of
Ukraine's Socialist party, who made the tapes public.

Mr Kuchma flatly denied any role in Mr Gongadze's death. "About Gongadze. I
can swear on the bible or on the constitution that I never made such an
order to destroy a human being. This is simply absurd. Maybe the name
Gongadze came up in conversations, I don't remember. But I give you my
honest word, I did not even know this journalist."