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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

STB Television Channel Asks President for Protection

6 March, 1999 - 00:00

By Anatoly LEMYSH, The Day

On March 3, at 6:15, two masked persons rang the doorbell and broke into
the apartment of Dmytro Dakhno, commercial manager of the STB TV channel.
Keeping Dmytro and his pregnant wife at knife-point, they forced them to
lie on the floor. After ransacking the apartment for over an hour, the
assailants took nothing, not even 500 hryvnias lying in plain view on a
bedside table. One of them asked Dmytro bluntly: "In whose way do you stand?"

Den published this information on March 4. And the STB evening
news bulletin broadcast on the same day an unprecedented statement from
the channel staff in which they sounded the alarm and "asked the President
for protection." For this is not the first bizarre happenstance with the
channel, said Mykola Kniazhytsky live. First, the murder of Oleksandr Deineka
on February 23 [Oleksandr Deineko was an employee of the Chief Directorate
of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for Combating Organized Crime. He left
the post a year ago, and when Kniazhytsky was appointed the president of
Ukraine's National Television Company, Oleksandr Deineko became one of
his advisors. He was supposed to help examine the situation in the company.
It is not known whether Deineko was conducting any investigations after
Kniazhytsky's team was thrown out of the UT-1 channel. Deineko was killed
in the lobby of a building in Radiansky district with two shots in the
heart and a coup de grace to the head]. Then the assault on an STB
film crew in Lviv. On Monday, March 1, the basement of STB president Kniazhytsky's
apartment house caught fire for no apparent reason precisely beneath his
apartment. On Wednesday morning came the assault on Dakhno. All this happened
within ten days.

The STB statement says that many of the channel staff have been shadowed
and studio telephones have been tapped of late. Iryna Vannykova, a newscaster,
said Oleksandr Deineka had also repeatedly told her about surveillance
a few days before his death. STB president Mykola Kniazhytsky thus comments
what has happened:

"We made a 'Sector of Shadow' program on the situation at the Zaporizhzhia
ferrous alloys plant. And on Tuesday Dakhno, as STB commercial manager,
was served a claim from the BIM law office as part of the lawsuit on behalf
of the Ukrainian Credit Bank, their client. The claim essentially dealt
with our tarnishing the Ukrainian Credit Bank's business reputation and
knowingly spreading false information. The loss was estimated at five million
hryvnias. On the same Tuesday he instructed lawyers how to react to the
claim under the law. And on Wednesday morning, this simulation of robbery.

"I want to stress that I am not linking the two events, I am simply
giving you the facts. Other versions are also possible."

"Do you think this string of 'accidents' is connected with a desire
to sink the channel and for someone to take it in hand?"

"Yes, to sink the channel. But the situation is actually much more acute.
We must have become a bargaining chip in the struggle of major financial
and political clans. Since we stood in the way of all of them, someone
decided to provoke a situation that might help some to defeat others in
the future, i.e., to turn us against one side or another." Mr. Kniazhytsky
also does not rule out the connection of these events with the unwillingness
of certain forces to admit him to the National TV and Radio Council, where
he is said to be a candidate for the post of chairman.

All this story again proves the danger of being a journalist in Ukraine
as the elections approach. The opacity of TV channel funding, dependence
of publications on political protection, and close intertwining of shadow,
political, and the television businesses gives birth to high-handedness
in the national information space. Mr. Kniazhytsky described at his March
3 press conference an unprecedented, truly deadly, situation in the Ukrainian
mass media.

 

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