If obeying them requires coming to agreement

With April 10, when the government is to report to Verkhovna Rada on its performance last year, just a few weeks away, politicians from all the political camps without exception are making more and more diverse statements. Tellingly, the “positive” results of work of the “reform team” headed by Viktor Yushchenko has not been discussed at all in the past few days. This looked quite logical: why should a serious conversation about power jostle with a growth percentage which can no longer impress anybody? In other words, the question of whether the prime minister deserves dismissal is not on the agenda. What is on the agenda is on what conditions the ladies’ and the West’s heartthrob can remain in office.

It is not so easy to squeeze the depth and subtlety of official powers into the framework of the existing laws. Not so easy because these laws are continually flouted. This creates absurdities, such as the one that came up last week. On the one hand, Verkhovna Rada passes, in the first reading, the law On the Cabinet of Ministers, which sets out clearly that the cabinet is answerable to the President and accountable to Verkhovna Rada within the constitutional framework. The same law says that ministers shall be appointed by the president after consultation with the Verkhovna Rada speaker and fraction leaders and be sworn in within five days after appointment.

On the same day when this law was being passed, people’s deputies were heatedly arguing about a political agreement between the government and parliament. Is it not easier to observe the Constitution and current legislation or to change them if they are no longer suitable? What kind of agreement should the government and parliament come to if their powers have been stipulated by the law? How should it look?

What is not forbidden is allowed. Ukrainian citizens are free to conclude all kinds of agreements among themselves. If all suddenly begin to follow the suit of parliament and the government, then bus drivers, for example, will have to conclude a deal with passengers — or even several deals with passengers traveling a certain number of stops. It would also be a good idea to make a deal with the pedestrians passing by, the drivers of other vehicles riding down the same street, the janitors who sweep this street, the residents whose apartment windows look out on the driveway, etc. Clearly, the drivers, so much absorbed in concluding such agreements, might run short of passengers. This is the approximate picture of the attempts the authorities are making to legitimate almost every step of theirs, only to brazenly violate everything they had adopted before. An agreement similar to the one now being talked about in the government and parliament could only come up as a result of the overall mistrust of all toward all. Will this agreement, if signed, oblige the contracting parties to observe it? Highly doubtful. Even the unbreakable military oath, the source of the state’s stability, contains the term “criminal order,” that it, one that should not be obeyed. But no one knows who should assess whether or not the order is criminal. The same applies to deals between the branches of power: they will be breached at the first opportunity, when finding an excuse is no problem.

Meanwhile, the sides, unable to meet the April 10 deadline, have postponed the government report. Seeing that he will not be fired, Mr. Yushchenko launched a counteroffensive, saying last Friday the government should not be “a branch of SDPU(o) or any other parliamentary faction.” The premier also said he “was not pleased” with ultimatum- like statements of fraction leaders, without specifying when he began to feel these symptoms. Even two days earlier, the government head was ready to listen to “rational cadre proposals.” Now something has changed. In an interview with Holos Ukrayiny on March 23, the premier said the talk of a coalition government was a “provocation.” Mr. Yushchenko now needs “a well-adjusted mechanism to strike a balance between the power- branch interests.” Is that clear? If not, all we have to do is expect either a deal between the government and parliament or adoption of the law on the Cabinet of Ministers in its final version.

In reality, all these documents are just a pretext for a tough bidding for ministerial portfolios, administrative resources for the 2002 elections, and control over the tastiest morsels of the national market. There is nothing extraordinary in this, as far as politics are concerned, except for one problem: will the voter at last get a clear answer to the question who is responsible for what? Otherwise, this dispute will be very difficult to understand. A fresh example was given by the executive power, tightlipped for almost a week about whether or not Minister of Internal Affairs Kravchenko was relieved of office.

Meanwhile, tired of uncertainty, the people’s deputies have passed, in the first reading the law On Carrying Out Peaceful Protests. The adopted version even sets out the distance at which peaceful demonstrators can approach certain buildings. The deputies clearly look overworked. Then why not legitimate the procedure of pedestrian movement on the streets? Maybe we will at last make the streetcar.

PS. On March 23 Viktor Yushchenko continued maneuvering by way of paradoxes. Speaking to journalists after consultations with parliamentary majority leaders, the premier emphasized the government was prepared to show an “elastic” cadre policy to keep the majority intact. However, he said, this preparedness should not be construed as a “government pledge to form a coalition cabinet of ministers.” He noted that participants in the consultations raised no “cadre claims.”

The premier said the “main” thing for him in the next twelve months is “the availability of a mechanism to define the political responsibility of the government and the majority.” He also stressed that liquidation of the parliamentary majority will shift all responsibility for the situation to the government. “I don’t want to work even one day in a government like this. It’s unfair,” he said. Mr. Yushchenko, tactfully touching on the actions of the pro-governmental factions, categorically opposed dividing the parliamentary majority into the pro-presidential and pro-governmental parts. “I am not and don’t want to be in conflict with the President,” Interfax-Ukraine quotes the premier as saying.