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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

LOCAL GOVERNMENT

26 June, 1999 - 00:00

Reprise of Crimea-Odesa Scenario in Kirovohrad
On the night of June 19, a special detachment of Berkut special purpose
police seized the Kirovohrad City Council. The statement issued by the
City Council Press Center reads that "there were no legal grounds for seizing
the building of local self-government, all actions were taken without initiating
a criminal case, and were based on verbal instructions only." Earlier,
on June 17 "officers of the Economic Crime Department of the Ministry of
Internal Affairs, on instruction of the Kirovohrad Oblast Prosecutor's
Office drew up documents, illegal and not envisioned by the Ukrainian Criminal
Procedural Code, and based on those documents seized, without any foundation,
the original texts and minutes of the 6th and 9th City Council sessions."

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.

 

 

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