12/24/2002 | Абу

Dec. 23, 2002 / Vol 160 No.26
http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/0,13006,901021223,00.html
Ukraine's President Kuchma is under fire for muzzling the press, quashing dissent and more. Is this a return to the old days?
BY MARYANN BIRD

Every week Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma's staff sends out a missive to all the country's television, radio and newspaper outlets. Known as temniki, "theme lists," the directives outline the issues to be covered in news reports and provide instructions on how these issues are to be treated. For example, when mass protests take place — the most recent, in September, drew 100,000 people in the capital, Kiev — photographers are told to start taking pictures only after most of the demonstrators have departed, resulting in shots of a few stragglers milling around in a public square instead of tens of thousands shouting for Kuchma's resignation. Bland, uncritical television news programs — the main information source for most Ukrainians — fail to give coverage to the protesters or to spell out their demands. And for appearances on talk-show programs, correspondents are told what to say hours in advance.

Kuchma, a former missile-plant director who won the presidency in 1994, may well have total control of the media, but events both in- and outside Ukraine are beginning to elude his grasp. Kuchma's administration is suspected by the U.S. of indirectly selling sophisticated Kolchuga radar systems to Iraq in violation of U.N. sanctions; opposition leaders and activists are increasingly emboldened by the success of recent street rallies; and the discovery last month of the body of Mikhailo Kolomiets, head of the financial journalism agency Ukrainian News — he was found hanging from a tree in a forest in neighboring Belarus — added to the mounting feeling of insecurity within the media. Many Ukrainians fear their country may be slipping back into totalitarianism. "We have failed to create a system that guarantees democracy," warns Viktor Yuschenko, leader of the Our Ukraine bloc, the largest opposition faction in parliament, and a former Prime Minister removed by Kuchma in April 2000 for his modest attempts at reform. "We are not just close to a dictatorship; we are already in a serious phase of dictatorship."

Don't expect to hear about this through the temniki. The New York-based organization Human Rights Watch recently described the government directives as "subtle but very effective censorship" and urged the Ukrainian parliament — which called hearings on the matter on Dec. 4 in response to complaints from journalists and media monitoring groups — to enforce guarantees of free expression. "Maybe we don't have censorship de jure, but it certainly exists de facto," says Andriy Shchevchenko, leader of the newly formed Independent Media Union. Serhiy Vasilyev, head of President Kuchma's Information Department, insisted the memos were nothing more than simple press releases. But some 500 journalists signed a manifesto in which they threatened to strike in protest against the temniki and in support of free-expression guarantees. "Ukraine is the most informationally open country," counters Ivan Chizh, chairman of the State Committee on Information Policies, TV and Radio. "It is so open that quite often those who are using this openness are working against the state."

Despite the openness Chizh describes, dozens of Ukrainian and foreign journalists have been physically assaulted over the past three years. The impression of a media under threat has been reinforced by the fact that three have turned up dead — including Heorhiy Gongadze, whose headless corpse was found by the side of a road in the Tarashchanskiy forest near Kiev in November 2000, two months after he disappeared. Gongadze had been writing articles critical of Kuchma and his top officials. That same November, Major Mykola Melnychenko, a former Kuchma bodyguard now in the U.S., released a secretly taped recording of a conversation in which Kuchma purportedly tells top aides that Gongadze should be "given" to Chechen guerrillas or otherwise disposed of. The government has repeatedly denied any role in his death.

Unlike Gongadze, Mikhailo Kolomiets was not known as a muckraker before he was found hanged in Belarus. Police said he had committed suicide — and no other credible scenario has been established — but Kolomiets' family and friends demanded an investigation. Inquiries also are under way into the July 2001 beating to death of Ihor Alexandrov, an investigative television journalist, and the disappearance late last month of Oleksandr Panich, a newsman who specialized in economics issues.

The Kolchuga radar accusation first surfaced in the Melnychenko tapes too; Kuchma is allegedly heard approving the sale of four Kolchuga systems to Iraq through an unidentified Jordanian middleman. The purported sale — a deal that Ukrainian officials deny ever took place — has led to a serious diplomatic dispute between Ukraine and the U.S. The fbi says the July 2000 tape of Kuchma in conversation with Valeriy Malev, then head of Ukraine's state arms-sales firm, Ukrspetsexport, is authentic — a finding that led to the suspension last September of $55 million in U.S. aid to Ukraine. Denying the alleged sale, Viktor Medvedchuk, Kuchma's Chief of Staff, told a press briefing last month: "This is absolutely ruled out. The President of Ukraine could not approve such supplies to Iraq."

An investigative team of U.S. and British defense and intelligence experts visited Ukraine in October, at the Kuchma government's invitation. Their report, released last month by the U.S. State Department, does not resolve the question of whether Ukraine trans- ferred radar equipment to Iraq. While the investigators do not believe a direct transfer to Baghdad took place, they say that "covert or illegal arms transfers, particularly with the complicity of third parties, remain a credible possibility." The team, which said it found some Ukrainian officials evasive, concluded that a standard "end-user" contract clause — in which "Ukraine obliges other countries not to transfer [radar] stations and their components to third countries" — may have been altered to allow China to resell to a third country. "China has abided by U.N. sanctions against Iraq and has not transferred any military technology to Iraq," says Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao. If the U.S. proved that the equipment transfer took place — and got angry enough about it — Ukrainian opposition leaders hope Kuchma would be forced to resign. The new elections that would follow could steer the country back onto a more democratic path. "Should the U.S. or the E.U. start legal proceedings," says Oleksandr Moroz, leader of the opposition Socialist Party, "it will send a signal to the political and business élites now dependent upon the President that this dependence is temporary. Then the situation might change rapidly."

Another person working for change in Ukraine is Mikhailo Svistovich, who has been active in mass protest actions since the Soviet days. An economics graduate of Kiev State University, he gave up political activity in 1992 and went to work for a private bank. Now, Svistovich — with his wife, Miroslava — concentrates on street politics in Irpen, outside Kiev. Svistovich says that the corruption that is widespread on the national level is replicated on the local level. "Any business, even the smallest kiosk, is under their heel," he says. "Any town official feels free to demand a bribe."

Svistovich claims that government officials collude to shut any business that is independent or unfriendly to the regime — particularly media outlets. To back up his point, he cites local authorities' threats to close an Irpen printing business if it produced a newsletter for Svistovich's group. "We're fair game to anybody," says Polina, a real-estate agent in Kiev who did not want her surname published. "The only way to defend yourself is to slip a bribe to someone at your district executive committee. Then the bribed official will protect you. But if you fail to bribe that official, you're finished." It wasn't always so. "Ten years ago, a lot of private bakeries, tailor shops and barber shops started," Polina says. "Where are they all now? Most have been wiped out. This state does not want small businesses to prosper because people might get too independent."

The result: even more economic misery for a country existing largely at subsistence levels. Some 30% of Ukraine's 48 million people live below the poverty line of $63 a month; most survive on an average wage of $70 a month. Ukraine's population has dropped in the past 10 months, with some 346,000 deaths linked to poverty, malnutrition and a lack of medical care. The nation now has the highest hiv-infection rate in Europe, according to U.N. statistics.

In September's big street protests in Kiev, demonstrators waved down with kuchma! banners and demanded the President's resignation, an early election, an overhaul of the political system with more powers given to the parliament, and fair investigations of corruption and murder cases. Moroz believes that these actions shored up the opposition forces in the parliament and last week, opposition leaders announced another round of street protests for next March. But Svistovich is realistic about what protests can achieve. "It doesn't make any sense to keep promising to topple Kuchma," he says. "When we were protesting back in 1990, we didn't promise that we would topple the communist regime. We just kept working to get the people organized, and the regime eventually fell itself. That's what we must do now: keep working to organize people, like Poland's Solidarity movement in the 1980s."

Kuchma isn't likely to go quietly. "The President has usurped all the power," asserts Moroz, and his staff "decides all the personnel, political and economic issues. This is what passes for the checks-and-balances system in this country. All other institutions of the state are just theater props."

But Moroz does believe that Kuchma is feeling pressure from the West. Without greater internal pressure, though, Kuchma won't step down. He may even run for a third term as President. And even if he does go, the absence of political reform means that whoever replaces him may not be an improvement. "Unless we overhaul the system," Yuschenko admits, "it will only clone other Kuchmas." It doesn't take a Kolchuga radar system to pick up that signal.