Fair Election?

What is most telling about his interview here is not the wealth of information he gives about his decades as a prisoner of conscience but about what has happened since then. Not only did nobody offer to extend Ukrainian citizenship to a Ukrainian who suffered so much and so intrepidly for Ukrainian independence until the final years before its attainment, he has been effectively prevented from doing business here because he wanted to get involved in the election campaign and backed the wrong candidate (from the standpoint of the current regime), Yevhen Marchuk.

The issue here is not a specific candidate's merits or shortcomings but that more and more blatantly the people are being denied the right to make a free and fair choice of who will govern them. In recent issues we have reported how dossiers are being opened on state employees who signed petitions to put candidates other than the incumbent on the ballot. Moreover, it is no secret that structures, included this newspaper, associated with the candidate the current chief executive most hopes to undermine are under extreme financial pressure. An old acquaintance now working in the Presidential Administration recently told me in private conversation, "They'll close The Day before the election."

"How?" I asked.

"The Kievskie Vedomosti scenario," he replied matter-of-factly. Kievskie Vedomosti has recently been bought by pro-Kuchma oligarch Hryhory Surkis, and now, with it firmly in the incumbent's camp, its troubles are over. A similar fate is evidently being planned for us.

They have already been trying for some time. In a world where it is practically impossible not to break the law and practically everybody can be made guilty of something, it is almost always possible to find something to pin on anyone. This means law, in the sense of a set of rules for all, breaks down and is replaced by arbitrary rule. Fortunately, this publication has taken extraordinary care from the very beginning to be purer than Caesar's wife. Still, it is a fair bet that the boys in the Presidential Administration are staying up late at night poring over everything they can get their hands on.

Ukraine's current rulers have let this country slip down to 102nd place in the UN human development index. The authorities claim it is really much higher, between 85th and ninetieth. Those who dug this country into its current hole are not likely to change what impels it to sink ever deeper (see Volodymyr Zolotariov's excellent material on the current President). They see their only chance in pulling out all the stops against whomever threatens them.