Rada nearly brawls before vote to tighten Ukraine's ties with ex-Soviet countries
Parliament looked like a circus on March 3 as leftists claim victory in their long-drawn-out efforts to have Ukraine join the Commonwealth of Independent States’ Interparliamentary Assembly.
Debate prior to the final vote turned into a near brawl, with nationalist deputies yanking microphones off leftist leaders and leftists using those mikes as weapons to keep the nationalists at bay.
The parliament’s large Communist faction and Speaker Oleksandr Tkachenko had been lobbying hard for Ukraine to join the assembly for months. The Communists had been blocking ratification of several loan agreements with the World Bank since December in order to get the measure passed.
Although the vote was secret, the narrow majority appeared to be similar to the one that elected Tkachenko as speaker in July 1998 after two months of deadlock. As after the July vote, there were immediate accusations of a secret deal between leftist leaders and the presidential administration.
The Interparliamentary Assembly, formed in 1992, was intended to coordinate the legislation of CIS members after the breakup of the Soviet Union. However, it rarely meets and has no real power. Even current assembly members in reality do little or nothing to coordinate their legislation.
However, nationalist deputies were opposed to any move toward closer integration with the Moscow-dominated CIS, even a purely symbolic one.
Early speeches by Communist leader Petro Symonenko, top Rukh members and People’s Democrats were all clearly aimed toward the public and not other deputies. The parliament’s sessions are broadcast live by radio.
After several paragraphs of nostalgia for the Soviet era, Symonenko made clear that unless parliament approved joining the assembly, leftists would continue to block ratification of any international agreements on credits, grants and other assistance. Symonenko spoke first because he proposed the bill.
The parliament was scheduled to review a number of such agreements on March 4, including ones with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The World Bank often requires parliamentary ratification of its loans; the IMF generally does not.
Rukh deputy Ivan Zayets argued that joining the assembly would bring Ukraine nothing but additional state spending. He said the law was unfit to vote on and asked Tkachenko to hold a vote on that.
Tkachenko angrily refused and ordered Zayets’ microphone switched off. And then the show started.
Despite the party’s ongoing split, all Rukh deputies surrounded the Speaker’s podium in an attempt to force him to switch on Zayets’ microphone. One of Rukh deputies then pulled Tkachenko’s microphone and tore it off the wire.
That made Tkachenko angrier still. He used the loose microphone to hit Pavlo Movchan, who happened to be standing the closest.
Meanwhile, another Rukh deputy, Bohdan Boiko, started pulling microphones off others around Tkachenko. A loose microphone was passed to Communist Deputy Speaker Adam Martynyuk, who waved it for a while in a gesture that suggested he was ready to use it as a weapon.
Meanwhile, Tkachenko waved his arms and got the seated deputies to hold a vote by secret ballot on the proposal. After it failed, he asked for another vote. After it failed again, he asked for another. And then another – but he was still three votes short of the 226 vote majority.
Tkachenko ordered a half-hour break to let the deputies cool down.
After some air, some coffee and some cognac, deputies returned to the session hall. The microphones were fixed, but the atmosphere remained tense.
Tkachenko added to the tension by saying that ‘the kind of vandalism manifested by Rukh toward the material values of Verkhovna Rada will be returned from their salaries.’ Rukh laughed and the Communists cheered.
Tkachenko then suggested that two people should speak in favor of joining the assembly, and two people against. The whole of Rukh again jumped up and ran to the podium. Tkachenko proceeded.
First at the mic was Progressive Socialist leader Natalya Vitrenko.
‘If we don’t vote to join the assembly, we [leftists] will raise an issue of quitting the Council of Europe and will not support a single [international] agreement – then we’ll see how Ukraine will be able to survive independently,’ she said.
‘It’s very important to preserve motherly relations with Russia,’ Symonenko chimed in after her.
Boiko from Rukh then spoke about violations in the session hall rather than the actual law. He said that a number of deputies who were in Spain to watch a Dymano Kyiv soccer game had left behind cards allowing other deputies to vote for them.
Boiko said those deputies included Social Democrats Leonid Kravchuk, Hryhory Surkis and Oleksandr Zinchenko. Tkachenko interjected that Boiko had no way of knowing who had voted and how.
Rukh shouted that they wanted an open vote, but Tkachenko ignored them. In the fifth secret vote, 230 voted for and 42 against out of 290 present in the session hall.
The Communist faction stood up and cheered, and then started shouting ‘Shame on Rukh.’
Immediately after the vote, right-wing deputies said they would ask the Constitutional Court to annul the new bill because of ‘gross violations’ of voting procedures and other reasons.
Yury Kostenko, leader of one of the two rival Rukh factions, charged in a statement issued that evening that the presidential administration had supplied the necessary votes for the bill in return for a promise from the left to go along with the privatization of the national telecom. He said Rukh would oppose that privatization unless Kuchma vetoes the Interparliamentary Assembly bill.
