LOCAL GOVERNMENT

At midnight on Saturday, the City Council convened for an extraordinary session. After discussing the issue called On the Political Situation in Kirovohrad and the Actions by Law Enforcement Bodies, the session, which finished its work after 2 a.m., resolved as follows: "To declare the actions of the Kirovohrad oblast ECD officers on June 19, related to the seizure of documents of the City Council and executive bodies, not corresponding to current legislation, and to propose to the law enforcement officers that they leave the City Council premises."

"The illegal actions were organized by the Presidential Administration and the Kirovohrad Oblast State Administration," reads the CC Press Center statement. "Such actions were caused by the fact that Mayor Oleksandr Nikulin had organized in Kirovohrad the nomination of Volodymyr Oliynyk (the president of the Association of Ukrainian Cities and Cherkasy mayor) for President.

The conflict between the Kirovohrad Mayor's Office and the oblast state administration had long been brewing. However, it acquired such a scale only after Oleksandr Nikulin openly supported another presidential candidate, rather than the incumbent President. This demonstrates once again that Leonid Kuchma's team is ready to use extraordinary measures to assure total support. In such cases, it really makes no difference whether the President gave the order to seize the Kirovohrad Mayor's Office. Indeed, it is very unlikely that the current occupant of the house on Bankova Street could have set Berkut such a task. But the very atmosphere of suspicion, created during Leonid Kuchma's presidency, made it possible for events to develop according to such a scenario.

We should recall that the Presidential Administration considers the institution of local self-government part of its executive vertical. The events in Yalta and Odesa, when Kyiv supplanted the legally elected mayors with people more congenial to Kuchma, bear witness. And such actions have already provoked a conflict with the Council of Europe.

On June 21 at 10 a.m. the City Council went back to work. A few minutes earlier, Mayor Nikulin told The Day, "In my view, the main purpose of the unauthorized actions taken by the state authorities against the City Council as a body of self-government was that they were eager to find compromising materials against the City Council on the eve of its June 24 scheduled session. And the issue number one on the agenda for the session was a political one."

"What issue specifically?"

"One relating to election of the President of Ukraine and the political situation in the city. Thus, as it became clear, within a few days they were supposed to find breaches in the work of the Executive Committee or City Council and then to tell Kirovohrad residents: 'Look what kind of people complain that they are being pressured and not allowed to participate in the election campaign.' The executors were in a big hurry. Thus, ignoring current legislation, they first seized the papers pertaining to previous sessions and then made an attempt to carry off financial and economic documentation. I emphasize that all that was done without opening a criminal case and against the law. Thus we consider what happened here as a political reprisal against those who do not share the views of the highest power echelon."

"And how is the City Council going to defend itself?"

"We plan to set up a deputies' commission for in-depth examination of those issues, and to release all the relevant materials to journalists, human rights organizations, and the Committee for Local Self-Government under the Council of Europe. Because unauthorized actions are insulting and prevent from normal work not only me, the chairman, but all deputies to the City Council. They virtually force us to hold our sessions at night."

Presidential candidate Oleksandr Moroz, who arrived to this oblast center on Saturday, gave his view of the arbitrariness of the Kirovohrad law-enforcers at a press conference: "The Constitution declares the independence of local representative bodies in cities and settlements. I think such actions are illegal and require a more thorough analysis. And I hope that the current guarantor of the Constitution intervenes as the Constitution provides. If worst comes to worst, they should bring to account the violators of the Constitution, and those who sent people with machine guns to the City Council. I think this is an outrage against the principles of democracy and self-government."

And first deputy mayor Mykhailo Tsybarevych, a retired colonel, specified that the formal cause for this act of arbitrariness was supplied by a letter of city resident Mr. Hrytsiuk: "When I read this letter, I recalled the materials of 1937-1938 which I, a young lieutenant then, happened to read. It was the time when they repressed whole families based on similar letters. And then they shot them. To tell the truth, I began to fear for our future."

By Mykhailo AKSANIUK, The Day

LATE BREAKING NEWS

The tenth extraordinary session of the Kirovohrad City Council heard Sviatoslav Hrytsiuk, a guard at a local firm called Black-White, who allegedly had sent the letter to the ECD reporting abuse by council employee Natalia Mykhailenko. "I state that I have no relation to the letter whose content you know," said Mr. Hrytsiuk, "and I did not send any letter on such an issue to the ECD at all." At the moment it was revealed that the authors of the hoax had made a mistake when writing Mr. Hrytsiuk's patronymic. Sviatoslav Hrytsiuk also explained that his wife trades in the local market and does not work as a hospital attendant. Thus, the pretext for Kirovohrad's finest to illegally seize the City Hall has gone up in smoke.