Melnychenko’s lawyer: “The Kuchma and Lytvyn teams collude to ward off charges of complicity in murdering Heorhii Gongadze”
A need for resolve in the Kuchma case
The demand to reopen the case against Mykola Melnychenko is aimed at having the Leonid Kuchma case dismissed and bailing out Volodymyr Lytvyn, Melnychenko’s lawyer Mykola Nedilko says in a comment to Ukrainska Pravda. In his view, the main goal of instituting criminal proceedings against Melnychenko for illegally “bugging” the office of ex-president Kuchma is to conclude that the audio tapes is not trustworthy evidence and Melnychenko himself is not a trustworthy witness in the Kuchma case. “To pronounce Melnychenko’s actions illegal and bring him to criminal justice means to automatically dismiss the criminal case opened against Kuchma and not to check whether the other main figures in the case, whose voices are recorded on the “Melnychenko tapes,” including that of the current Verkhovna Rada Speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn, were implicated in the murder of journalist Heorhii Gongadze,” the lawyer affirms. In his words, those involved in this case are trying to remove Melnychenko as the prime witness in the Gongadze case “in any way possible.” “Lytvyn and Kuchma need Melnychenko at least behind bars so that he does not put them there, and I am personally convinced that for them ‘a good Melnychenko is a dead Melnychenko,’” Nedilko says.
Opening a criminal case against ex-president Leonid Kuchma has caused – quite predictably – a big stir all over the world, not only in Ukraine. The public did not expect a move like this, although Myroslava Gongadze and the aggrieved party had been demanding precisely that for years on end. This case provoked surprise and, at the same time, hope for justice. Commenting on this fact, President Viktor Yanukovych said: “A rule-of-law state must at last give an answer to what has been common knowledge for many years.”
Kuchma looked very perplexed after his first visit to the Prosecutor-General’s Office. The impression was that the guarantees he had received from the previous president were no longer valid.
But very soon (which nobody doubted) the prime suspect’s “retinue” launched an attack. Firstly, they mounted a campaign to whitewash Kuchma. It included Soviet-style sponsored letters in his defense from cultural figures, calls for pitying Kuchma, the demonstration of a fragment from the documentary film Battle for Ukraine by the Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky, a “Freedom of Speech” live TV show, as well as frantic attempts to bail out Kuchma and discredit the witnesses and, first of all, Mykola Melnychenko. The goal is clear: to take the tapes out from the case. Kuchma’s lawyers have gone even further now: they are requesting the court to overturn the prosecutor-general’s decision of March 1, 2005, to dismiss the criminal case against Melnychenko.
The Prosecutor-General’s Office recently dismissed Oleksandr Kalifitsky from his job as chief of the Main Department for Investigating Very Serious Cases. No clear explanations were given to the media. It is highly doubtful that anybody could take this important relocation as a “reorganization” of the Prosecutor-General’s Office. Tellingly, the press was almost silent about this sensational event. Even the most gung-ho commentators are keeping mum, though perhaps this may change.
Yurii Vasylenko, a former Kyiv Appeal Court judge who made history in the post-Soviet space by opening a criminal case against the then president Leonid Kuchma, said in a comment to The Day that one of the factors that caused this “reorganization” at the Prosecutor-General’s Office might be “Kalifitsky’s comments on high-profile cases, which ran counter to the top prosecutors’ viewpoint.” “Such cases as those against Kuchma, Tymoshenko, or Lutsenko always follow a political decision,” says journalist and public figure Oleksii Podolsky, also an aggrieved party in this case. “Then investigators take certain procedural actions in line with this decision.” Podolsky seems to be less optimistic now.
An interesting detail: Yulia Tymoshenko is barred from traveling to Odesa, while Kuchma, who is suspected of actions that led to the murder of a journalist, a terrible crime, is being invited to all kinds of conventions, even in France and Israel, which hold roundtables on such “exalted” things as integration and world politics. Incredibly, the Prosecutor-General’s Office allows him to visit these forums.
When the case was opened, there were many opinion polls and conjectures about whether it was a desire for justice or a manipulation. The answers to those questions will depend to a large extent on whether or not the Prosecutor-General has taken a firm position.
