Editor's Note: In this article published on June 10, 1999, Oleksandr Moroz dishes some dirt -- and there was plenty to dish -- on President Leonid Kuchma.
Oleksandr Moroz on June 7 fired the first salvo in a presidential campaign that promises to escalate into mudslinging war, accusing President Leonid Kuchma’s team of using bribery, intimidation and other dirty tricks to suppress his candidacy.
Moroz noted several incidents that he alleged the president was behind, including the murder in early June of Raisa Zabila, an activist with Moroz’s Socialist Party from the town of Bila Tserkva. Zabila had received various threats and warnings from local executive bosses to leave the Moroz camp in advance of the murder.
Moroz also noted that a section of the Dnipropetrovsk headquarters of the Socialist Party had been burned on the night of June 6. He said the burning took place because that is where Moroz’s forms for collecting signatures were being kept.
“These incidents are part of a blatant campaign to make it easier for incumbent President Leonid Kuchma to get re-elected,” Moroz told a press conference.
Moroz wrote an open letter to Kuchma asking him to stop the acts of violence and breaches of law.
The Kuchma team quickly brushed off each of Moroz’s claims.
Oleksandr Martynenko, the presidential spokesman, said that Moroz’s ungrounded claims were merely an attempt by the leftist stalwart to remain in the eye of the press.
“Any accusations of any officials, including the president, have to be proved. Otherwise, it’s just a political statement designed to portray Moroz as the main rival of the president,” Martynenko said.
Moroz said that the presidential administration is concentrating its efforts on Moroz’s signature-collection team. All candidates must collect 1 million signatures by July 13 in order to register as presidential candidates with the Central Election Commission (see related story, page 3).
Moroz said that members of his collection team are being offered money to quit. He also says they are also being bribed into making intentional mistakes on individual signature lists, which may lead to the annulment of entire lists.
Yury Buzduhan, leader of the Democratic Party of Ukraine, which also supports Moroz for president, said that signature collectors are being offered up to $100 to hand over Moroz’s signature sheets so that Moroz can’t use them. He implied that it was Kuchma’s team that was making such offers.
Buzduhan said that the presidential camp is offering entire teams of Moroz signature collectors substantial sums of money to switch camps. He said the head of one of Moroz’s best signature-collecting teams, from the Moscow district in Kyiv, was offered $500, his deputies $300 and signature collectors $100 just to leave Moroz and come to work for Kuchma.
Moroz claimed that Kuchma taps into the National Fund for Social Welfare, a private charity fund that serves as Kuchma’s major campaign-finance vehicle, to fund the expensive drive to steal Moroz supporters. He said the fund has over Hr 1.5 billion – all accumulated illegally – at its disposal to spend on the president’s campaign.
“This money is accumulated through illegal means – by blackmailing and threats to directors of enterprises,” Moroz said.
Meanwhile, Moroz said he was having trouble replacing the signature lists lost in the Dnipropetrovsk fire, and said that the Central Election Commission, backed by the president, was also giving other presidential rivals a hard time obtaining extra lists.
The candidates he named were mainly rightists.
They included the leaders of the two warring factions of Rukh Party – Henndady Udovenko and Yury Kostenko – and Oleksandr Basyliuk of the Slavic Party.
The CEC explained that it had no money to print extra copies, and that it was also forced to deny Kuchma extra lists.
Moroz appealed the CEC decision in court, won, and received the requested 150,000 copies of subscription lists.
Kostenko told the Post that his signature staff has experienced problems similar to those that Moroz’s team has had to deal with. He said his staffers are approached at their places of work by superiors – or sometimes complete strangers – and threatened with beatings or firings if they don’t quit collecting signatures.
Both Kostenko and Moroz said they will manage to collect their quota of signatures despite the pressure.
‘We’ve already collected 100,000, and we’ll collect the rest on time if there aren’t any unexpected surprises,’ Kostenko said.
‘The president shouldn’t even get his hopes up – we’ll be able to collect the needed million,’ he said.
None of the other leftist candidates for president has come forward with similar accusations against the president.
That bears out the predictions of many analysts that Kuchma is supporting leftist opponents of Moroz to reduce the chances that he will have to face his most feared rival in a run-off election.
