President Leonid Kuchma has finally made it onto a top-10 list of world leaders, placing sixth on a press-freedom watchdog group's ranking of the world's greatest enemies of the press.
The ranking was released by the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based non-profit group. The group said Kuchma deserved his high ranking due to the significant deterioration in press freedom that Ukraine has experienced over the last year.
Kuchma's sixth-place finish left him short of notorious gag masters Slodoban Milosevic of Yugoslavia, Jiang Zemin of China and Fidel Castro of Cuba. But he edged out Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad and apparently placed well ahead of Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko, who did not even make the list.
'Using tax and libel laws as instruments of his hostility to journalists, Kuchma runs roughshod over any expression of opposition,' read the press release from the committee on World Press Freedom Day, May 3.
The release accused Kuchma of tacitly accepting violence against the press, shutting down newspapers through crushing fines, and encouraging draconian tax laws that make media little more than vehicles for businessmen to extort favorable publicity.
It was a Ukrainian leader's first appearance on the list, which is published by the CPJ annually.
The Kuchma administration brushed off the report, which it said was biased and based on hearsay.
'This American public organization is getting involved in the election campaign, which is very sad,' said presidential spokesman Oleksandr Martynenko.
Kuchma's presence among some of the world's most nefarious dictators – placing well-ahead of most of them – did seem incongruous. The committee cautioned that Kuchma's high ranking did not necessarily imply that he was more oppressive to free speech than those dictators. Rather, it implied only that his track record over the last year had declined significantly.
'It's not a list of countries with the worst press-freedom climates – otherwise places like North Korea, where there is no alternative, opposition or independent press at all, would always be listed,' said Chrystyna Lapychak, the committee's program coordinator for Eastern Europe.
'We felt we needed to emphasize the fact that President Kuchma has presided over a very serious decline that has progressively intensified because of last year's parliamentary elections and this year's presidential elections,' she said.
Belarus' Lukashenko, who had made the list for three years in a row, was crossed out this year. Lapychak said that Lukashenko's omission had nothing to do with improvements in freedom of the press in Belarus.
'The fact that we omitted President Lukashenko this year does not mean he's improved press freedom conditions, but that we felt the rate of deterioration of press freedom conditions in Ukraine this past year was greater than in Belarus,' Lapychak said.
Local media and analysts said that Kuchma's rating was well-deserved.
'I do not doubt the committee's decision; it's taken on the basis of solid facts and scrupulous analysis,' said Volodymyr Natalchenko, a press analyst at the European Institute for Media in Kyiv.
He said that before concluding whether violations of press freedom had happened, the CPJ talks to several unbiased sources and contacts the victim in each particular case.
Presidential spokesman Martynenko still insisted that the survey was unfounded. He took special exception to the accusation that the Kuchma administration tacitly accepted violence.
'I qualify this kind of statement as lies. On numerous occasions when newspapers were oppressed, President Kuchma gave orders to power organs to sort the situation out,' he said.
Martynenko cited several specific cases in which the president had intervened on behalf of press freedom.
He said Kuchma asked the prosecutor's office to throw away a lawsuit against weekly newspaper Zerkalo Nedeli in February 1999. In March, Kuchma ordered local authorities to ensure that Channel 11 in Dnipropetrovsk stay on the air after being suspiciously yanked, according to Martynenko. He added that Kuchma ordered a prosecutor to stop a criminal case against a reporter from Kyiv daily Den last year.
Martynenko also took offense to CPJ's claim that Ukraine's tax policies hinder free speech.
'The part of the document that talks about the President of Ukraine has two references to tax legislation, which they presume is formed by the president. Obviously, this American NGO has no information how the legislation is formed,' he told the Post.
The remark was meant to imply that parliament was responsible for drafting tax legislation. But enforcing that legislation is the refuge of the State Tax Administration, which is linked to the president.
Natalchenko said that, if one is really looking for proof that the CPJ's conclusions are legitimate, one could simply observe how the report was handled by Ukrainian media.
'On May 3, the television channels 1+1 and Inter reported on the [CPJ list], but they did not mention that Kuchma was in it,' he said.
CPJ's Web site listed the high-profile cases over the last year that have gotten the administration in trouble.
The site mentioned Interior Minister Yury Kravchenko's $2.5 million libel lawsuit against daily Kievskie Vedomosti; a $250,000 lawsuit brought against weekly Slovo Odessa by Antarktika, a fishing company; and the as-of-yet unprosecuted burning of the office of the daily Vseukrainskie Vedomosti, followed by a $1.8 million defamation lawsuit lodged against the publication by wealthy parliament deputy Hryhory Surkis.
Both Surkis and Kravchenko are believed to be close allies of Kuchma. Slovo Odessa is supported by Eduard Hurvits, former Odessa mayor and chief rival to current Odessa Mayor and close presidential ally Ruslan Bodelan.
All three of those newspapers were shut down due to lack of funds, although Kievskie Vedomosti started printing again recently under new ownership.
Martynenko said that the president was not involved in any of the cases mentioned on the Web site.
'All the cases on the Web site are lawsuits from private individuals, who have nothing to do with the president,' he said. 'The conclusion about the president's involvement in these cases was made on the basis of words of people whose interests are served by letting this information out.'
Volodymyr Ochkolas, the general director at Kievskie Vedomosti, attributed the problems with his newspaper and the press in general to the attitude of government officials, who are still used to seeing an instrument of propaganda in them.
'I don't know if Kuchma personally deserves the sixth place [in the rating], but the Ukrainian system as a whole should be given first place, not sixth,' he said.
