The staff of a Dnipropetrovsk television station is complaining of political persecution after local authorities ordered it shut down for bureaucratic reasons.
On March 17, local officials, who earlier this month had begun interrupting the station’s broadcasts, ordered that the channel’s transmission antennas be dismantled. The station’s staff members were removed from their offices and barred access to the roof where the antennas were located.
The next day the station’s staff staged a silent demonstration in downtown Dnipropetrovsk. They wore bandages over their mouths to symbolize their having been silenced by authorities.
Reportedly the station had not registered for permission to run a radio line between its programming station and the broadcast center. However, many believe the station was closed for political reasons.
The channel, which was co-founded by parliament deputy Yulia Tymoshenko, was also linked to former Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko. Lazarenko, who escaped to the United States last month before he could be arrested on charges of stealing $2 million from the state, is a bitter enemy of President Leonid Kuchma.
According to the station’s staff, ever since Lazarenko fell out of favor with Kuchma and was dismissed as prime minister in 1997, parliament deputy and Kuchma ally Viktor Pinchuk has been trying to buy the popular, profitable station.
Pinchuk, head of the Interpipe holding company, is reportedly one of the main backers of the Fakty newspaper, a cheap and widely distributed tabloid that generally supports the Kuchma administration.
Mykola Tomenko, director of the Institute of Politics, wrote in the institute’s Political Calendar newsletter that the station now belongs to Pinchuk, but the company’s workers could not confirm that.
‘Rumor has it that Viktor Mikhailovich [Pinchuk] is already the owner, but he has problems with the regional administration [which is loyal to Lazarenko], and that’s why they still are not broadcasting,’ said Oleksandr Antropov, a manager at Inform-Sobor information agency, which is a part owner of Channel 11.
Channel 11 director Ruslan Uralov said he had no information about the current ownership structure.
The station joins many other Ukrainian media outlets that have complained of political persecution recently. Three pro-Lazarenko national newspapers – Pravda Ukrainy, Vseukrainskiye Vedomosti and Kievskiye Vedomosti – have been shut down since the beginning of 1998.
‘This is another example of attempts to kill off the opposition mass media, and the people who suffer the most are journalists who stay jobless,’ said Iryna Polyakova, director of the European Institute for Media’s Kyiv office.
Meanwhile, Dnipropetrovsk is in danger of losing another local television station. Staff at Dnipropetrovsk’s Privat-TV announced on March 20 that they will go on strike in April if their back wages are not paid by then.
