The majoritarian election system expected to make parliamentary elections more honest and transparent has instead led to dozens of violations, according to candidates and election monitoring organizations.
More than 80 candidates have already
withdrawn their candidacies, due to a variety of methods used to pressure them
into leaving their political races.
Opora, an election monitoring
organization, reported nine confirmed cases of candidate intimidation.
But there may
be many more abuses – and many more to come.
“We
have 35 majoritarian candidates, and not one of them has had a smooth
campaign,” said Yuri Stratiuk, spokesman for the nationalist Svoboda (Freedom) party.
The dirty tactics candidates have endured
in the run-up to the Oct. 28 parliamentary election include beatings,
sabotaging of their public appearance events, criminal cases launched against
them, firing from jobs and attacks with colored liquids meant to stain their
skin and clothes.
“Any pressure is used to confront the campaigns of the
competitors and to make them withdraw from the election race, or at least
reduce their campaigns due to personal problems,” said Opora director Olga
Aivazovskaya.
Unsafe campaign
On Sept. 19, the car of Maksym Shkuro was
stopped by five strangers in the village of Muzychi, near Kyiv. The assailants
pulled him out, beat him and stabbed him with a knife. Shkuro survived, but has
spent several days in rehabilitation and is expected to undergo reconstructive surgery
on his face.
Shkuro is an assistant for Dmitry
Andriyevsky, an opposition candidate from district 222, located in Kyiv.
“There are no doubts that the attack is
related to his [Shkuro’s] political activity,” Andriyesvky said. “He’s not in
any business. For the last two years he did nothing but work for me.”
Observers of the election monitoring
organization Mission Canada reported 35 cases of candidates and their campaign
staff suffering harassment and threats, Shkuro’s case included.
Another reason to connect the assault to
politics is the timing of the incident. According to Andriyevsky, Shkuro was
beaten 20 minutes after strangers crashed eight campaign tents of Batkivschyna,
Andriyevsky’s party, in Kyiv.
The purpose of the attack, Andriyevsky
suggests, was to scare his people and to disrupt the key figure of his campaign.
As the head of Andriyevsky’s office, Shkuro coordinated his entire campaign.
Now Andriyevsky’s waiting for the results
of the criminal investigation and says that his office is working even more
intensely now.
Make it dirty and green
A brilliant green dye, familiar to
everyone as a popular antiseptic, used for small wounds, was given a new purpose
this election campaign. The antiseptic liquid, mostly known as zelyonka, has
since become a popular weapon.
Though zelyonka attacks had happened before,
it was an incident involving imprisoned ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s
attorney Serhiy Vlasenko that popularized the act.
On July 16, in Kharkiv, a young woman
poured zelyonka on Vlasenko’s face. On August 31, the assault was repeated when
Vlasenko was heading to the Kharkiv airport. That time the green liquid only made
contact with his clothes.
Not long after the attack on Vlasenko, Oleksander
Kirsh, a Batkivshchyna candidate from district 169 in Kharkiv, was splashed in
the face with zelyonka by unknown assailants during a public meeting.
Kirsh noted that the people who flung
zelyonka at him were standing in the audience during his public meeting, not
worrying about being filmed and photographed. This, Kirsh says, shows that they
felt sure of their impunity.
Kirsh blames the authorities, including
Kharkiv’s Governor Mykhaylo Dobkin and Mayor Hennadiy Kernes. They both released
statements implying that Vlasenko’s assault was a self-staged PR move, and by
that, Kirsh said, assured that “it is OK to pour [zelyonka] on the opposition.”
“Even if my attackers were just hooligans, it was those
statements that gave them the freedom to do that,” Kirsh said.
Another candidate who suffered a “green
attack,” was Tetyana Chornovil from district 120 in Lviv oblast. A former
investigative journalist, she was hit with green paint on Sept. 13, when
leaving an elevator in a residential building. Later, on Oct. 6, Chornovil was
beaten when she tried to stop the distribution of fake leaflets which encouraged
voters to sponsor her campaign in a rude and mocking way.
Got a job, candidate? Not anymore
When Roman Volkov, a candidate with Vitali
Klitschko’s Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reforms from district 43 in Donetsk,
returned to his job as a business manager after being officially announced as a
candidate, he had a call from his boss’s office. On the call his boss gave him
an ultimatum: abandon your political career, or resign. He chose to leave the
job where he spent three years.
“She [the boss] knew I was going to be a candidate, and
at first seemed not to have any problems with that,” Volkov said. “I was ready
to leave the job officially, but to still help with part of my duties for free.
But that option didn’t satisfy them anymore.”
The reason for this sudden turn of events,
Volkov suggested, is his boss’s Party of Regions membership. He believes the
decision was made by her colleagues in the ruling party.
When the Kyiv Post contacted Volkov’s
former boss, she refused to provide any comments on the situation.
Now Volkov is going to concentrate on his campaign
and live on savings till the election it is over.
But it’s much more complicated for
candidates who own a business and don’t just work for one. According to the Central
Election Committee, every third single-mandate candidate is a businessman.
“We’re so lucky that almost not one of our candidates
runs any business,” said Svoboda’s Stratiuk. It makes it much harder to crash
[their campaigns].”
One of Svoboda’s candidates, Oleg Debeliy
from Kharkiv, once was a businessman, but not any longer. His cafe, Alvanta,
was demolished by local authorities after they ruled the construction of it was
unauthorized on July 28, days before his campaign began. Debeliy states that
the cafe that took him over Hr 100,000 in investments and 12 years of work was
absolutely legal, and he has documents to prove it. A trial in his case is
scheduled for October.
“I know that several businessmen in our districts
received warnings about unauthorized constructions, but I’m the only one who
had my building demolished, and the only one in politics,” Debeliy said. “And
they demolished my cafe right after I had given a speech against the authorities
on a local market issue.” He believes the demolition of his business is a
direct result of his political activity.
Candidates under investigation
Many people remember the spoof ad placed
in Dniprodzerzhynsk in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast in the middle August. The ad
featured an old lady who claimed that she changed her will, leaving her house
to her cat, after her grandson voted for the Party of Regions. The ad’s author,
Maksym Holosnyi, an independent candidate from district 30 in Dniprodzerzhynsk
and former Party of Regions member, now can only campaign on the Internet,
since he is under criminal investigation and is wanted by the police.
Through his website, Holosnyi claims that the
investigation is meant to stop his political activity. The reason to believe
that, according to him, is that a case of missing supplies from Yelizavetovka
village council, of which Holosnyi was once the head, was opened in Nov. of
2011. It didn’t move forward until late July of 2012, just days before
registration of candidates began.
“They reclassified the case on July 26 and declared me
wanted on July 27. How can I be declared wanted if I didn’t even get an official
notice of accusations first?” Holosnyi wrote on his website.
A Dnipropetrovsk oblast police office reacted
to Holosnyi’s statements, rejecting any connection between the criminal
investigation and Holosnyi’s political activity, though he didn’t explain why
the case was reclassified eight months after it was first launched.
Holosnyi is not the only candidate under
investigation.
Vitaliy Klitschko addressed the prosecutor
general of Ukraine, asking to look into the case of Vadym Krivokhatko, head of
Udar’s Zaporizhya regional office and majoritarian candidate, who is now in hiding
after four criminal cases were opened against him.
Klitschko claims the authorities opened
the cases in order to stop the candidate.
“We were the first party to publish a list of
majoritarian candidates, and right after that severe pressure on them started,”
Klitschko said in a statement on July 27. “The law enforcement system works for
the parties in power exclusively.”
Kyiv
Post staff writer Olga Rudenko can be reached at rudenko@kyivpost.com.
