Games with the prosecutor general

Last Friday’s dismissal of Sviatoslav Piskun from his post as prosecutor general of Ukraine was not unexpected. Last week Minister of Internal Affairs Yuriy Lutsenko, appearing on the 1 + 1 TV program “Idu na Vy,” declared that instead of “sitting in jail, “bandits” have been freely leaving this country and smuggling out their assets with the connivance of top prosecutors. It is logical to assume that the minister was not airing just his own personal viewpoint. Public trust in Ukrainian law-enforcement agencies has been seriously undermined by spin control exercises and “live TV investigations.” Add to this PACE dissatisfaction with the investigation into the Gongadze murder case the solving of which President Yushchenko at one time called a point of honor for him. In other words, Piskun’s dismissal was inevitable, and the only question is what political repercussions it will have.

The president’s chief of staff, Oleh Rybachuk, told journalists last Friday that Yushchenko had signed an edict to this effect. He noted that “there were more than enough reasons why the prosecutor general had to be fired” but the president himself would be providing details. According to Rybachuk, the signing of the dismissal edict was preceded by his “lengthy consultations” with well-known Ukrainian jurists.

Thanks to this preparatory work, the edict is “a legally flawless decision,” which, according to the presidential chief of staff, no court will interpret as unlawful. “Mr. Piskun has been so excited in the last while, he was opening so many cases. We prevented him from instituting proceedings against himself,” the president’s chief of staff said ironically. Experts attribute Piskun’s “agitation” to the fact that he was expecting to be dismissed, possibly because he had accused Petro Poroshenko, ex-Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, of “obstructing legitimate economic activities.” Now the ex-prosecutor general has ample grounds to claim that his dismissal was in revenge for his principled stand. Yuliya Tymoshenko’s loyal supporter, Oleksandr Turchynov, said earlier that Piskun was being pressured to drop corruption charges against some of President Yushchenko’s top aides. It was Piskun who, shortly after being re-appointed prosecutor general, dismissed all the charges that the Office of the Prosecutor General had brought against Tymoshenko.

Last Friday Piskun announced that the news of his dismissal had taken a load off his shoulders because the situation in which he had been working for the past nine months “was nothing but sheer schizophrenia.” The ex-prosecutor general said he will be entering politics.

According to Oleksandr Bandurka, member of the Parliamentary Committee on Promoting Law Enforcement, his committee may discuss the new candidate for the post of prosecutor general as early as Tuesday.

All this raises one more question, if we recall the story of the phone taps on Piskun’s telephone calls (the Security Service’s investigative department even opened a criminal case into the illegal eavesdropping of telephone conversations between Piskun and US Ambassador John Herbst. Nothing more has been heard about this). Based on one of these conversations, probably between Piskun and Viktor Pinchuk, experts have concluded, first of all, that the new government left Piskun in his post as prosecutor general in exchange for his readiness to scrupulously fulfill his assigned tasks and, second, as a guarantee of immunity for the old government. Does Piskun’s dismissal mean that he was fed up with following “instructions” or that the “hirers” failed “to keep the boat afloat,” and the leadership has rescinded the guarantees?

This case is not just about personalities. Long before Piskun’s dismissal Andriy Fedur, the prominent lawyer, told The Day that “today it is the president and parliament that are responsible for the prosecutor general’s actions.” In other words, the practice of ignoring the law has considerably spread in this country for a variety of reasons. But replacing the prosecutor general will hardly change the way legality is observed in this country.

COMMENTARIES

Vasyl STOYAKIN, director, Center for Political Marketing Studies:

“Piskun came into conflict with the president. It does not matter which of them was the first ‘to pick a fight,’ although there are reasons to believe that the first to do so was the justice minister, Serhiy Holovaty. Piskun declared war on the president and, naturally, he lost: he was dismissed. But I don’t think that Piskun’s strategy ruled out this kind of outcome.

The point is that President Yushchenko has a supreme talent for making enemies for no apparent reason. If Piskun had been fired earlier, a month or two ago, there would have been no serious consequences. But during his presidency Yushchenko has made every effort to turn Piskun into a public politician who plays an independent political game. Now he has been dismissed, on the very crest of his enormous popularity and success. Incidentally, right before he was fired, Piskun hinted very clearly to the president that he would end up in a stupid situation if he chose to dismiss him. Now Piskun can claim that he was fired for having hurt Poroshenko, the godfather of the president’s child. He can also say that he was dismissed because he has almost completed the investigation into Yushchenko’s poisoning, who in fact does not want to know the truth because... (let the president himself say why). Another version is that no sooner than he caught Shcherban in the US, he was fired. (The former Sumy governor’s biography offers a number of connections between Shcherban, Piskun and Yushchenko — the possibilities for spinning black-PR fantasies are limitless). In other words, Piskun is now in a very strong position, because he can say: I am an honest prosecutor general still being harassed by the president’s entourage. As for Yushchenko, he’s in a jam. Now he will have to fight not just Tymoshenko, Yanukovych, and Medvedchuk but also Piskun, who may sue the president. Then, on the eve of the elections, he may join the BYuT or form his own bloc of ‘honest prosecutors and policemen.’

On the other hand, from the standpoint of national interests, Yushchenko’s decision to fire Piskun was absolutely correct, and he did it in a timely fashion. Since the president had retained him as prosecutor general until now (which was absolutely the wrong thing to do, in my view) he had no choice but to dismiss him after the signals being given over a week- long period by Piskun, who appearing live on TV tried to ‘prevent’ the president from firing him. The dismissal couldn’t have come at a worse time, now that Yushchenko has managed to consolidate his team, at least to some extent. This kind of prosecutor general had to be fired, although the president will have to face repercussions.

Viktor NEBOZHENKO, political scientist:

“Piskun is a very unique personality in modern Ukrainian history, a sort of a political ‘centaur’ who, on the one hand, possesses certain professional qualities and, on the other, is an accomplished champion of the people and populist. In this respect, he stands alongside such well-known personalities as Mykhailo Brodsky and Yuliya Tymoshenko. However, what is permitted to Brodsky and Tymoshenko is not permitted to the prosecutor general, who has no right to take an independent political stand. He must abide by the political position of the one who appoints him, i.e., the president. Meanwhile, Piskun has long been an independent political force. Jurists usually try to solve political problems in terms of the law, but Piskun easily tackled matters of the law in terms of politics: he would open and throw out criminal cases, find the guilty parties, and at the same time damage legal proceedings. Moreover, he maneuvered between various political forces, helping all of them one by one. Of course, this situation could not have lasted forever and it irritated the political elite. Obviously, this irritation has reached the limit.

“Who will be the next prosecutor general is a very important question. Will it be a jurist or another politician? We are getting closer to the elections, which is always like an outbreak of ‘political flu’ for Ukraine.”