When and why dates coincide

It is, unfortunately, a tradition to meet every anniversary of Heorhii Gongadze’s disappearance in a situation when this high-profile case has not yet been closed. There have been so many events around this tragic story in the past 12 years that one could have written more than one book and made more than one film on this. Only the perpetrators of this crime – former policemen Kostenko, Protasov, and Popovych – are serving a prison term, while their immediate superior Pukach is still on a closed-door trial. And what about the hirers? Everything seems to be common knowledge, but juridical assessment is still to be made. Italian society sought justice in the Andreotti case for 23 years. It will be recalled that former top official Giulio Andreotti was convicted in 2002 for complicity in the murder of journalist Mino Pecorelli in 1979. How long will be the way of our society? And, what is more, will our society understand at last that it is important for it to pass this way?

A hope for the punishment of Gongadze murder contractors shimmered in March 2011, when Renat Kuzmin, First Deputy Prosecutor General of Ukraine, opened a criminal case against ex-president Leonid Kuchma. After this unexpected event, most of the journalists began to search for undercurrents – how and why this happened. They put forward all kinds of hypotheses, such as an assault on Pinchuk’s business, revenge on Kuchma for having allowed the Orange Revolution to break out, deception of the West, and Kuzmin’s own hype. These conjectures may have had some grounds, but now, at a distance of time, it is all the more obvious that they did not help resolve the case. It is no mere chance that Kuzmin said after the Pechersk Court had ruled in December 2011 that it was unlawful to institute criminal proceedings against Kuchma: “I want to ask, including some journalists who always criticize everything: is it easier for you now? Are you happy now? But you had in coming with your critical articles!”

In 2012 two higher courts – of appeal and of cassation – upheld the Pechersk Court’s ruling on Kuchma’s innocence. Then, by logic, there should be the turn of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). “We have not yet turned to the ECtHR,” Mykola Melnychenko’s lawyer Mykola Nedilko says. “The law allows doing so within six months [The High Special Court handed down the ruling on June 26 this year. – Ed.]. It should be emphasized that we, as defenders of a Gongadze case witness, can appeal against Ukrainian justice decisions in the European Court, but it is not the mechanism that will allow exposing those who contracted the murder of Gongadze. It is the Prosecutor General’s Office that possesses this kind of legal powers. It has not yet exhausted its legal potential to spot the hirers. As the Gongadze case is still pending, prosecutors may find other grounds for instituting criminal proceedings against the initiators.”

Incidentally, Renat Kuzmin also spoke about this. He emphasized that if a court had ruled that the case against Kuchma was opened without ample grounds, “the investigator has now an opportunity to reexamine the materials and collect enough evidence this time to open a new criminal case.” According to the First Deputy Prosecutor General, the Melnychenko tapes are not the only evidence against Kuchma. “There is some other as well,” Kuzmin said. By the way, the abovementioned Pechersk Court ruled that Melnychenko’s tapes could be the grounds for a criminal case against him, but they did not become the grounds for instituting proceedings against Kuchma. Double standards?

While the Prosecutor General’s Office is investigating the Gongadze case, Kuchma’s family is trying to reinforce its foothold. The parliamentary elections are a splendid opportunity to bring into the next Verkhovna Rada a large number of people who will defend the family’s interests. The media claim that Pinchuk’s people are everywhere – both on the party lists and in the first-past-the-post constituencies, both in the opposition camp and in the pro-governmental parties, not to mention longtime links between the ex-president’s son-in-law and Arsenii Yatseniuk, one of the United Opposition leaders. It is perhaps for this reason that this political force’s list holds no place for activists of the early-2000s campaign “Ukraine without Kuchma” and such Orange Revolution “field commanders” as Stetskiv, Filenko, and Donii. “That the opposition refused to put on the lists and nominate in [first-past-the-post] constituencies many reliable people and revolutionary fighters devoted to the Ukrainian cause is its big minus,” MP Taras Stetskiv comments. “The public will have to correct this mistake in the October 29 parliamentary elections.” This onslaught of the Kuchma clan on parliament prompts one to ponder hard on who will gain a parliamentary majority.

Our sources say that Viktor Yanukovych is now inclined to believe that links with Kuchma’s family may really help him. His reputation, tarnished in the West by the cases of Tymoshenko, Lutsenko and other oppositionists, is prompting the president to look for ways out of this situation. One of them is based on Pinchuk’s connections. Former US President Bill Clinton, IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, et al often visit Kyiv at the invitation of the Viktor Pinchuk Foundation. For example, Mr. Kwasniewski, a good friend of Kuchma’s family, monitors the course of the Tymoshenko and Lutsenko cases and the ongoing parliamentary election campaign on behalf of the European Parliament. It is very important for the current leadership of Ukraine what the Polish ex-president will be saying in Europe about Ukrainian developments.

“The Gongadze case is an element of blackmail in big-time politics,” Oleksii Podolsky thinks. “It allows the current leadership to have Kuchma’s family by the short hairs. I assume there have been some deals to this end. Taking into account a good deal of clout in the West, Pinchuk may have also promised to lobby the opinion that the Ukrainian elections were not rigged. Should Pinchuk or Yatseniuk suddenly go out of governmental control, new criminal cases may be opened against Kuchma. It is no longer a secret that the opposition leader Yatseniuk is a creature of the ex-president’s family. What we have today is the United Opposition named after Mr. Leonid Kuchma. If Pinchuk and Yatseniuk behave properly, it may happen that the latter will assume the office of prime minister.”

The 9th annual Yalta meeting “Ukraine and the World: Addressing Tomorrow’s Challenges Together” organized by the Yalta European Strategy in partnership with the Pinchuk Foundation is an ideal place for international legitimization of the leadership’s activities. The summit took place from September 13 until 16. For Yanukovych, it was a nice opportunity to mingle with Western politicians and discuss urgent problems, for it had been more and more difficult for him to do so in the last while. And there were people to speak to. He opened the plenary part of this annual meeting together with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. They discussed the topical questions of the development of Ukraine and Turkey as well as the future of “wider Europe” in the 21st century. Incidentally, Aleksander Kwasniewski was the moderator of this debate. He was also chairman of the Yalta European Strategy’s Supervisory Board.

Among those invited to Yalta were also US ex-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; British ex-Prime Minister James Gordon Brown; former World Bank President Robert Zoellick; former IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn; Russian ex-Vice Prime Minister Aleksei Kudrin; EU Commissioner for Enlargement and European Neighborhood Policy Stefan Fuele; Senior Advisor for Innovation to the US Secretary of State, Alec Ross; Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt; EU High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy in 1999-2009, Javier Solana, et al. On the whole, as the fact sheet says, more than 200 leading representatives of political, business, and public circles from over 20 countries were discussiy the main global challenges and their impact on Europe, Ukraine, and the world. Viktor Pinchuk was thus trying to prove his usefulness to the president.

In a word, the distinguished guests were broaching exalted matters. But did they know, incidentally, that the summit would close on September 16, The Day Heorhii Gongadze was killed? They may be pretending not to know or do not really know that it is a challenge not only to Ukrainian society, but also to the international community. But what about the democratic world’s values?

To understand what has been happening around the tragic Gongadze story in the past 12 years, one should look at what its main participants have done in this period.

Mykola Melnychenko is a key witness in the journalist’s case. Owing to the recordings he did in Kuchma’s office room, the public came to know about the ex-president’s numerous unlawful misdeeds. Instituting criminal proceedings against Kuchma, Kuzmin relied on the Melnychenko tapes as evidence. After the 2000 “Kuchmagate,” Melnychenko was dismissed from military service and had a criminal case opened against him for illegally bugging the president’s office room. In 2001 he, a security service ex-major, had to leave Ukraine and received political asylum in the US. Today, Melnychenko is still hiding in the US. He says his life in Ukraine is in danger because of Kuchma’s family. The criminal case against the former security officer was dropped in 2005, only to be reopened in 2011.

Oleksii Podolsky was a Ukrainian Prospect foundation activist in the late 1990s-the early 2000s. This organization actively struggled against the Kuchma regime. In June 2000, three months before the murder of Gongadze, he was kidnapped in Kyiv under a similar scenario, taken out of the city, and beaten up. But Podolsky was lucky to survive. He immediately said after the attempt on his life that he considered the then president Kuchma the one who ordered the crime. As it was noted above, the case against the latter was opened 11 years later. Podolsky is today an aggrieved party in the “Kuchma case” as well as in the “Gongadze-Podolsky case” where Pukach is on trial as chief perpetrator.

“We are going to appeal to the European Court, but the ECtHR cannot instigate criminal proceedings against Kuchma,” Podosky says. “Meanwhile, as far as the Pukach trial is concerned, we will demand that the court summon Kuchma and Lytvyn as witnesses. I will not be surprised if our plea is turned down because the entire Ukraine knows what the Pechersk Court is. If Pukach says that he committed this crime against Gongadze and on the instruction which President Kuchma gave to Interior Minister Kravchenko, the ex-president must be interrogated.”

Leonid Kuchma was the president of Ukraine in 1994-2004. As of today, all the Ukrainian judicial instances have ruled that the criminal case against him was opened illegally. There is still time for the interested parties to appeal to the European Court. Kuchma’s family is one of the richest and most influential groups in Ukraine. The proof of this is, among other things, a powerful campaign to whitewash Kuchma, which was launched after a criminal case had been opened against him. This involved such serious resources as the media, connections, finances, etc.

Volodymyr Lytvyn was chairman of the Presidential Administration in 1999-2002. The press has written very much about his complicity in the crime against Gongadze. In addition, in his official query to Ukraine’s Prosecutor General, Viktor Pshonka, dated April 8, 2011, MP Hryhorii Omelchenko demanded that “criminal proceedings be instituted, on the basis of the available evidence, against Volodymyr Lytvyn on charges that follow from Parts 4 and 5 of Article 19, and Clauses “u” and “i” of Article 93 of Ukraine’s 1960 Criminal Code, as an organizer of and an accomplice to the intentional murder of Heorhii Gongadze.” Lytvyn is the parliamentary speaker, has its own faction in the Verkhovna Rada, and is currently running for a seat from a Zhytomyr oblast first-past-the-post constituency.

These are the most telling examples. We can draw similar parallels with respect to other people “from the two camps,” such as, for instance, Myroslava Gongadze or Leonid Derkach. Has their life changed? Some people have even lost their lives. To quote Kuzmin again, “there is a mountain of dead bodies around the Gongadze case.” Indeed, Colonel General Fere, Colonel General Dahaiev, General of the Army Kravchenko, and Volodymyr Shushko (he found Gongadze’s body) are already dead.

So what is the bottom line after the past 12 years? Naturally, there have been some achievements – the Kuchma case has been reopened and only the time will show the result. Meanwhile, we can see that Lytvyn is clinging to the office he still holds, the second president’s son-in-law is organizing “hot baths” for the current leadership in the shape of the Yalta Summit, while Kuchma himself is being eternalized in a Dnipropetrovsk bas-relief. All this proves that the Kuchma-era misrule is still alive and continues to infect this country. And we will, unfortunately, see this as a result of the October parliamentary elections.

Addressing recently the 64th World Newspaper Congress and the 19th World Forum of Editors, Viktor Yanukovych emphasized that the government was closely watching that there should be no breaches of law in the Gongadze murder trial. “As I have repeatedly stressed, the Ukrainian government wants this case to be free of any pressure, which will guarantee the final legitimate decision,” Yanukovych said.

According to Stetskiv, in spite of dozens, if not hundreds, of promises that top officials from different camps have made, the mystery of Gongadze’s death has not yet been unraveled. “This is a big blemish on the Ukrainian justice system and government, which the current leadership does not seem to be willing to wash off,” the MP says. “Yes, a case was opened against Kuchma, but the current leadership has whitewashed him. The previous president, Yushchenko, must have given Kuchma certain guarantees that he would not trouble him. Kravchenko is dead, there are no key witnesses, Lytvyn’s name does not figure in the compromising materials. Kuchma can now live in peace in the Ukrainian state. I can express my viewpoint on this matter. As I know Mr. Kuchma, even though I am his opponent, I do not think that he issued an explicit command to kill the journalist. I think he just expressed himself in a certain way and some in his inner circle interpreted it as a signal for a direct action. Nevertheless, this does not mean he should not be held responsible.”

Stetskiv also said that a Grand Viche (people’s assembly) would be held in Lviv on September 16. [Kyiv and many other cities of Ukraine will also hold Heorhii Gongadze memorial soirees. – Author.] “This Sunday we will have a sad occasion to mark the anniversary of Gongadze’s death. For me, Gongadze was not only a journalist, but also a personal friend. We met back in the 1980s at the Chervona Ruta festival in Chernivtsi. Later, in 1994, he worked as spokesman during my parliamentary election campaign. We in fact went shoulder to shoulder until the last days of his life. I think Gongadze was one of the exemplary and uncompromising Ukrainian patriots, who had a strong impact on Ukrainian politics and journalism. All we can and will do on this day is pay tribute to his memory. A Grand Viche will be held in Lviv on September 16, and then we will walk to the Lviv downtown tree planted on an anniversary of Gongadze’s death,” Stetskiv said.

Whether or not the Gongadze case will be free of pressure, as the president said, depends today on none other than the authorities. They have enough resources to ensure an independent and transparent investigation into this high-profile criminal case. For example, Viktor Pinchuk should not come to the court for unknown reasons, as he did on the eve of a High Specialized Court session, to solve some problems. The juridical end to this tragic story also depends on the pressure and demands of society. In the opinion of Oleksandr Yeliashkevych, member of the 2nd- and 3rd-convocation parliament, society “has not forgotten the Kuchma regime’s crimes.” “It [society] is bound to debate on this topic again,” he said in a commentary to The Day on August 23 this year. “People have so many problems today that they have hardly forgotten the Kuchma era. Moreover, our current situation is a logical result of what and how Leonid Kuchma built.”

In the ex-MP’s view, “those who are ignoring or deliberately pretending not to know about certain events of the past will not want to be blemished and will resolutely break away from the Kuchma clan’s influence and even from the shadow of Kuchma’s ‘coat.’” Incidentally, this also applies to Yalta Summit visitors who have “failed the exam” by taking part in this meeting, especially on a Gongadze death anniversary. “Once the world’s leading mass media get hold of the information on what the Kuchma regime really was – about the instructions he used to give to persecute his political opponents and journalists and to fabulously enrich himself at the Ukrainian people’s expense – everything will change,” Yeliashkevych concluded.

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Myroslava GONGADZE (excerpts from her blog on http://tvi.ua):

“September is always a difficult month for me. Every time when the date of Heorhii’s death approaches, I remember those days as if it happened yesterday. The feeling of being trapped and terrified and the sense of the unknown and fearful again overwhelm me.

“When I am asked about forgiveness, I say that I forgave a long time ago. I feel sincerely sorry for the people who killed Heorhii. They punish themselves. One of the policemen who participated in the killing said in court: ‘My life ended in that forest, together with the life of Gongadze.’ What I will not forgive is legal impunity. I will do all I can to have all the guilty punished. It is a matter of principle and also a precedent for other cases.

“When I am asked about justice, I say that if there was any justice at all, Heorhii would still be with us today. But if we speak about justice in connection with the investigation and punishment of the guilty, half of today’s politicians and representatives of law enforcement agencies would have to be serving time in prison now. That includes ex-President Leonid Kuchma. If that happened, we would have another country and a different present.

“Today Ukraine is a God-forsaken country ruled by people without consciousness or empathy. It is a state with a nation which has been oppressed and persecuted for years. But at the same time, Ukrainians are a kind, wise and industrious people. When they get tired of living in shackles, Ukraine will become a different country, a country of our dreams.”