Mayhem broke out at Ukraine’s parliament on Aug. 31 – inside and outside – as lawmakers passed the first reading of a controversial bill on decentralizing the country’s system of government.
Inside the parliament, the Radical Party of Oleh Liashko attempted toderail voting by blocking the parliament tribune and sounding klaxons as lawmakers spoke for and against the bill.
Outside, protesters attacked police with sticks and snatched riot shieldsfrom officers, as massed ranks of police formed a heavy cordon around theparliament building.
Flags of the right-wing Svoboda (Freedom) Party and the ultranationalist Right Sector group waved.
One riot officer was reported killed when a protester threw a grenade at police.
Around 50 other policemen were wounded in the attack, Ukrainian media have reported.
The bill, which supporters say is designed to satisfy Ukraine’s commitments under the Minsk II peace agreement signed on Feb. 12, caused serious splits inUkraine’s governing coalition, but in the end it was passed in the firstreading by 265 votes – well clear of the 226 required for such a bill to pass.
“This is not a betrayal; it is decentralization and deoligarchization,”
parliament head Volodymyr Groisman said after the bill was passed, denouncing
criticism that the changes would actually concentrate power in the hands of the
presidency and play to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s interests by potentially
extending the scope of self-governance in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine.
The bill now goes on to the next stage of scrutiny in parliament, and will
have to garner 300 votes from the 450-member Rada to proceed, as it entails
amendments to Ukraine’s constitution.
The three smaller parties in the five faction governing coalition – the
Radical Party, the Batkivshyna Party and the Samopomich Party, voted against
the changes, and the bill was only passed with the help of former Party of
Regions lawmakers from the Oppositional Bloc faction.
The Radical Party and Batkivshyna protested a key amendment which opened the way for extended self-governance in the occupied areas in eastern Ukraine.
Radical Party leader Oleh Lyashko said the amendment was a part of “Putin’s plan for federalization of the nation aimed at destruction of Ukraine.”
“Building our country by handing over Donbas is an invitation to Putin
to move forward and take more,” Batkivshyna leader Yulia Tymoshenko said. “Putin has no interest in Donbas – his aim is more war and destabilization. Both
Minsk I and II were connected with major military defeats for Ukraine, so
fulfilling Putin’s demands leads to war, not peace. We have to stop giving in and begin real negotiations.”
The constitutional amendment didn’t specify the actual nature of the special administration
of the conflict zone in eastern Ukraine, but merely allowed for the issue to be
set out in a separate law. Critics said however that any talk about special administration in Donbas would translate into a de jure recognition of the Russian-separatist occupation.
The changes in the constitution are widely seen as allowing Ukraine to
argue that it is fulfilling commitments for more local democracy in the
occupied territories, a promise it made on signing the Minsk II agreements, and
to state that it was now up to Russia to do its part – withdraw its troops and
restore Ukrainian control of the border between the two countries.
Yury Boiko, the leader of the Oppositional Bloc, said the amendments “provide
a chance for a peaceful solution of the conflict, and that is what the
Ukrainian people expect of us.”
Taras Beresovets, owner of public relations company Berta
Communications, said that with the bill passed, the EU would retain its
sanctions against Russia, so the ball was now in Putin’s court.
In parliament Radical Party lawmakers briefly stopped chanting “Shame, shame” when 82-year-old former Soviet political prisoner and lawmaker of
the Radical Party Yuriy-Bohdan Shukhevych addressed parliament and accused the
Western powers of “giving up Ukraine just like Czechoslovakia was given up in
1939.” Shukhevych said that the separatists would be allowed to operate their own justice system including police and prosecution.
“Europe is forcing us to pass this (bill),” he said.
Defending the text of the bill about a special administration for parts of the
Donbas, Groisman said that special measures would be necessary to normalize the
situation in the region after a Russian withdrawal, so the bill was actually the
opposite of justifying Russian-separatist control. Groisman also argued that
the enhanced local democracy included in the constitutional bill could be
instrumental in breaking the influence of oligarchs in the country.
“We now have a chance to end the serfdom of Ukrainians bowing to corrupt
officials,” he said.
More control over regional issues was a key demand made by pro-Russian
protesters in Donbas after the Euromaidan Revolution in central and western
Ukraine in February 2014, and decentralization became a part of the Minsk II
agreement under the pretext of the concerns of Donbas. But pro-presidential bloc parliamentary leader Yuriy Lutsenko said
the changes also fulfilled the demands of Maidan protesters for more local government
powers and democracy – and less power for corrupt officials.
Lutsenko said the decentralization push included in the constitutional
reform would essentially cancel the Soviet model of government partly still in place
in Ukraine 24 years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, “where a party boss
in Kyiv ruled the country at his own discretion.”
Political expert Dmytro Levus, the director of the Ukrainian Meridian
research center, said that the constitutional changes had symbolic importance
first and foremost, as they were only the start of a push for democratization
that would be prolonged and produce many political battles.
“Democracy is not a thing you can install once and for all, it’s a process,”
Levus said.
Hyped as decentralization, the constitutional changes could potentially
strengthen local democracy by transferring power to locally elected bodies from
central government institutions and presidential appointed heads of oblast
and district administrations. If passed in the second reading by Parliament
during the autumn session, the changes in local public administration would
take effect in 2017.
Kyiv Post
staff writer Johannes Wamberg Andersen can be reached at [email protected]
