01/30/2001 | Broker

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/30/world/30UKRA.html?pagewanted=all

January 30, 2001
A Grisly Mystery in Ukraine Leads to a Government Crisis
By PATRICK E. TYLER

KIEV, Ukraine, Jan. 26 — The political crisis that has seized Ukraine started with the disappearance last September of Georgy Gongadze, a lanky Georgian-born journalist with a penchant for asking blunt questions about President Leonid D. Kuchma.
It worsened with the discovery in November of a headless body — believed to be that of Mr. Gongadze — and, later that month, the release of secret recordings made under the president's couch by a security man in which Mr. Kuchma appears to order the journalist's abduction or worse. The security agent, who is now hiding in Europe, has beamed his accusations into Ukraine over short-wave radio.
The scandal has set off anti- Kuchma demonstrations in dozens of cities, as well as counterdemonstrations by state workers ordered into the streets or bused to pro-Kuchma rallies. Television and radio journalists say they have been ordered to keep the anti-Kuchma movement off the air.
The whole affair has also touched off a fractious brawl in Parliament, where Mr. Kuchma's political majority has been upended by defections and the formation of a new centrist opposition.
"Never in 10 years has there been this kind of scandal, and no one can see where it is going," said Oleksandr Tkachenko, managing director of Novyi Kanal, an independent television network.
The growing crisis is threatening to undo reforms in a country — a major recipient of American aid — where pensioners are being paid on time for the first time in years and where the economy last year registered a respectable level of growth after a decade of collapse and stagnation. "There is a real potential for a lot of progress that has been made to unravel, and if it does, it could happen really quickly," warned a senior Western diplomat here.
Many political analysts are also trying to figure out whether an unstable Ukraine would lurch back into Moscow's orbit, or pave the way for Mr. Kuchma's exit and the ascendancy of Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko, if not through early elections, then in 2003.
At highest risk is the fragile relationship between the president and prime minister. Mr. Yushchenko is a former central banker whose reputation for honesty and commitment to reform have made him a more attractive leader to the West and an object of suspicion for the president.
Mr. Kuchma, a former Soviet rocket factory manager, has led Ukraine since November 1992, first as prime minister and then as president, by balancing Western affections against Moscow's dominance in the country's economy.
But to his critics, corruption has been the dominant feature of Mr. Kuchma's tenure.

On Jan. 19, Mr. Kuchma fired Mr. Yushchenko's energy minister, Yulia Timoshenko, who had been leading the government's efforts to clean up the country's energy industries, the source of the largest corruption.
The scandal could not have come at a worse time, as Ukraine just won reinstatement of a $2.6 billion lending program by the International Monetary Fund after a long suspension imposed for failing to carry out economic reforms.
Mr. Kuchma is also trying to complete negotiations with the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development to finance projects critical to boosting Ukraine's flaccid post-Soviet economy. One is the completion of two nuclear power stations of Soviet design needed to replace the electrical output of Chernobyl, the troubled nuclear plant that Mr. Kuchma shut down in December.
Ukraine has been one of the leading recipients of United States foreign aid in recent years, totaling more than $2 billion since it became independent at the end of 1991, much of which has gone to nuclear safety needs.
In a recent interview, Mr. Yushchenko distanced himself from the scandal surrounding Mr. Gongadze's disappearance by criticizing the performance of the police and prosecutors, who answer directly to Mr. Kuchma. In answer to the question of where his loyalties lie, he replied, "To the truth."
"For the interest of Ukraine, it is not only very important to find the truth, but we should also think about stability," he said, noting that the loss of a political majority was already undermining reform.
Outside the prime minister's window, blowing snow raked Kiev as old Soviet trolleys trundled through the bustling business district and past the gilded domes of churches rising from the tree line along the Dnieper River, where ice fishermen worked their lines on the silvery crust.
About 100 demonstrators braved the subzero cold to chant "Ukraine without Kuchma" in front of the Interior Ministry building, at the base of the hill crowned by Mr. Kuchma's presidential edifice, the old headquarters of the Communist Party.
The demonstrators demanded the arrest of Interior Minister Yuri Kravchenko, whose voice can be heard on the tapes telling an irate Mr. Kuchma that something would be done about Mr. Gongadze:
Kuchma: "I'm telling you, drive him out. Throw him out. Give him to the Chechens. (Undecipherable) and then a ransom."
Kravchenko: "We're thinking about it. We'll do it in such a way that ——"

Kuchma: "Meaning you drive him out, strip him, (expletive) leave him without his pants, let him sit there."
Kravchenko: "We're studying the situation: where he walks, where he goes. We've got someone sitting there, surveillance. We have to study just a little bit. We'll do it. The team I have is a fighting one — such eagles! — they'll do everything that you want."
The authenticity of the tapes has yet to be established by any independent authority. But among the demonstrators last week, Vladimir Melnik, 60, a retired sea captain, had no doubt about the recordings.
"We have criminal power here," he said, "and there is evidence against Kuchma for the murder of Gongadze."

A prominent political writer, Yulia V. Mostova, added in an interview, "In my opinion these tapes call into question whether the president has the moral right to stay in office."
The first 25 minutes of excerpts were made public on Nov. 28 by Oleksandr Moroz, the former speaker of Parliament and Socialist Party leader, who says of Mr. Kuchma: "I don't consider him a criminal in the literal sense. Only a court case can decide this question. But I have no doubt that by his position, he was the cause of this crime."
The initial snippets were taken from an estimated 300 hours of tape spirited out of the country by Mikola Melnichenko, a major in the presidential security service who had been recording Mr. Kuchma's conversations for several years by placing a digital recorder under the sofa in his office. More disclosures are coming, Mr. Melnichenko has said.
"My choice was prompted by my conscience," he told Radio Liberty in a Ukrainian-language broadcast on Jan. 9. "There are no political forces or oligarchs behind me."
Mr. Kuchma's defenders have challenged the authenticity of the tapes, saying they are fabrications, or an edited montage, meant to smear the president. But opposition leaders in Parliament say they consulted experts who verified the recordings as authentic.
Mr. Moroz said a number of officials whose conversations with Mr. Kuchma had been recorded were ready to testify that the recordings accurately reflected their talks.
"There is widespread belief in the Ukrainian establishment that the tapes are authentic, and that in itself is a political factor," said a Western ambassador. Privately, even some of Mr. Kuchma's aides have conceded that the tapes are real and that they accurately convey the often profane and dictatorial manner of Mr. Kuchma in private.
Though Mr. Gongadze is gone, his work is being carried on by his colleagues. Last April he founded an Internet news site, Ukrainska Pravda (www.pravda.com.ua), and his disappearance has made it one of the most popular news sites in the country. With assistance from the United States Embassy, the Web site has received a grant to continue operating for another year.
Mr. Gongadze was born in Georgia in 1968. His mother is Ukrainian, and his father was a member of Georgia's first post-Soviet legislature. Known for his combative style, Mr. Gongadze publicly confronted Mr. Kuchma with tough questions about how the president could have allowed former Prime Minister Pavlo I. Lazarenko to flee Ukraine after Mr. Lazarenko, according to charges filed by prosecutors, plundered the treasury of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Just months after founding the Web site, Mr. Gongadze complained in a public letter to Ukraine's prosecutor general, Mikhailo Potebenko, that he was being subjected to surveillance and harassment.
On Sept. 7 the outgoing American ambassador, Steven Pifer, met with Mr. Gongadze in a show of support for freedom of the press, but to little avail.
"We thought that with moral support from such a powerful friend as the United States ambassador, the authorities would be afraid to try to suppress our activities, but perhaps we were naive," said Mr. Gongadze's closest confidant and colleague, Alyona Y. Pritula, 33.
On Sept. 16, at about 10 p.m., Mr. Gongadze disappeared on his way home.

On Nov. 2 the police found a decapitated body in a wood 75 miles from Kiev. "I found out from the television," said his mother, Lesya, 57. "After that a friend called me and said they found a body without a head and that it was recognized as my son."
Ms. Pritula and another of Mr. Gongadze's friends, Koba Alaniya, drove to Tarashcha and told the local coroner where to look for shrapnel in Mr. Gongadze's wrist, left over from his days as a war correspondent in Abkhazia in 1993.
The coroner immediately found the shrapnel. He showed Ms. Pitula a bracelet and a locket found with the body. Ms. Pritula showed the coroner the other half of the locket. The coroner asked what Mr. Gongadze had eaten that day in September, and the visitors told him watermelon. The coroner found watermelon seeds in the stomach.
But the initial coroner's report was later suppressed.

Now, four months on, Lesya Gongadze refuses to take the body home for burial in western Ukraine until the country's prosecutor states with 100 percent certainty — not 99.6 percent as he stated this month — that the body is Mr. Gongadze's.
By her demands, Ms. Gongadze and many of her son's friends and supporters are hoping to force a murder investigation in which all evidence can be pursued, even into the presidential offices.
Last week the Council of Europe, responding to pleas from the Gongadze family and the parliamentary commission investigating the matter, said it was willing to help establish the truth of the tapes and the identity of the body through forensic tests.
But obstacles abound. Ukrainian police authorities say they have already conducted DNA tests on the body, with assistance from Russia, and they refuse to rule out the possibility that Mr. Gongadze might still be alive.