03/23/2001 | Broker

Улюбленне джерело Л.Д.К.
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Financial Times

A tape and coffee table gossip
Journalist's murder sends Ukraine into a conspiracy theory free-for-all,
writes Charles Clover

Published: March 22 2001 20:27GMT | Last


Since the appearance of mysterious tape recordings apparently implicating
Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma in the grisly death of an opposition
journalist last November, solving the "cassette scandal" has become
Ukraine's national pastime.
At social gatherings and on the nightly news, everyone is discussing whether
it was possible for Kuchma's security guard to put a tape recorder under the
president's couch every day for three years, or if the murder was a frame-up
job by the Russians, with help from the CIA.
But no sooner are the pieces put together than the latest insight is
subjected to the withering observation: that's probably what they want you
to think.
The facts are as follows: last September, Georgy Gongadze, a popular
journalist who ran a Ukrainian opposition website www.pravda.com.ua,
disappeared. In November, a body which appeared to match his DNA was
discovered in a forest outside Kiev.
Later that month, opposition politicians released tape recordings allegedly
made by one of Mr Kuchma's security guards, with the president's voice
apparently ordering his interior minister to "get rid of" Mr Gongadze.
Mr Kuchma's handling of the crisis has fuelled the controversy. For example,
he has repeatedly changed his story about how the tapes could have been
made.
But for many Ukrainians, the appearance of the tapes, rather than confirming
Mr Kuchma's complicity in the slaying, showed that someone very powerful was
out to get their president.
"I think whoever made the cassettes killed Gongadze," said Dmytro
Ponamarchuk, press secretary for the nationalist political party, Rukh U.
Mr Kuchma admitted in a Financial Times interview last month that his office
had been bugged, but says that the recordings have been doctored to put
words in his mouth and that he had nothing to do with the assassination.
Independent analysis of the tapes by western laboratories has proved
inconclusive.
Whether or not they believe he ordered the murder, many in Kiev are prepared
to believe Mr Kuchma when he says it was impossible the recordings were the
work of one former security guard, Mykola Melnychenko.
Mr Melnychenko escaped with his family to an unnamed eastern European
country, where he has managed to evade detection by Ukrainian authorities
despite granting regular press interviews and appearing on Ukrainian
television.
Meanwhile, the mystery became still murkier this week when a German
laboratory said the body thought to be Mr Gongadze's might not be.
Ideas as to who could be behind Mr Melnychenko actions, and possibly Mr
Gongadze's murder, range from Russian hard-liners seeking to disrupt
Ukraine, to the Ukrainian opposition, to a CIA plot to oust Kuchma, or to a
mixture of all three.
Many Russians and Ukrainians, for example, continue to suspect the Kremlin
in a series of apartment bombings in Moscow in 1999, which were blamed on
Chechen terrorists and triggered Russia's invasion of Chechnya that year.
They suspect the same hand is at work.
"It is clear that whoever organised this did it in order to halt Ukraine's
westward integration, paralyse parliament and destroy civil society," said
Oleksander Lavronovych, a deputy who headed the parliamentary committee
investigating the Gongadze case.
Adherents to this theory point out that the corpse purportedly of Mr
Gongadze was buried with one arm sticking out of the ground, ensuring it
would be found and identified.
Furthermore Mr Gongadze's strong links to the US embassy meant his killers
would have known his murder would provoke a reaction in the west. The theory
runs that Ukrainian destabilisation could drive a besieged Mr Kuchma further
into the arms of Russia.
Ukrainian authorities have tried to pin the murder on the opposition.
Ukraine's prosecutor has alleged that Yulia Timoshenko, an implacable
opponent of Mr Kuchma, is behind the scandal. The former energy minister was
jailed last month on corruption charges, which she contests are politically
motivated.
By far the wildest scenario is that the scandal is the product of western
intelligence agencies, disturbed by Mr Kuchma's pro-Russian line and anxious
to replace him with a more western-friendly figure.
Volodymyr Malinkovitch, a former dissident, insists that some of those
involved in publicising the tapes have questionable motives. "This has all
the markings of a western covert operation," he says.
He says the main outlet for the Kuchma tapes has been the US
government-financed Radio Liberty, his former employer. The US embassy and
Radio Liberty heatedly deny that they are behind it all, calling the theory
"crazy".