Report comes as blow to Kuchma opponents, who were hoping that unequivocal outcome would increase international pressure on Ukraine's president
After stating in a long-awaited report that it was highly unlikely that the notorious Melnychenko tapes had been doctored,
the International Press Institute stopped short of declaring the tapes real and referred the case back to Ukrainian law-enforcement authorities.
“The technical experts expressed their conviction that it is nearly impossible to detect manipulation with a nearly absolute level of certainty,” the Feb. 28 report said.
The report was a blow to Kuchma opponents, who were hoping an unequivocal statement by IPI that the tapes are real would increase international pressure on Ukraine’s embattled president.
The IPI report did say that there is almost no chance that Mykola Melnychenko, the former presidential security guard who allegedly made the tapes, or someone else could have doctored such a large volume of footage.
“If the existing evidence had consisted only of the approximately 25-minute long recordings related to the [Georgy] Gonagdze case, one could possibly imagine some manipulations or doctoring by a ‘potential aggressor,'” wrote IPI Director Johann P. Fritz. “However, as the total volume of recordings available covers hundreds of hours of conversations over the period of several months, it seems hard to believe that such a huge amount of documentary evidence may have been doctored or manipulated.”
With the report, IPI and its partner in the analysis, U.S.-based human rights watchdog Freedom House, effectively washed their hands of the matter. Ukraine had questioned the necessity of outside analysis, and the tests threatened to harm already worsening relations between Washington and Kyiv.
But the report also reflected the reality that, no matter what the result, it would be ignored by Ukrainian prosecutors.
Prosecutor General Mykhailo Potebenko has made it clear he will rely only on the conclusions of local audio experts, who say at least some of the Melnychenko recordings were doctored by inserting and deleting words and phrases.
“No one gave [the recordings] to our specialists. The tapes released by Moroz in parliament are fakes,” Kuchma reiterated to millions of Ukrainians in a two-page question and answer in Ukraine’s most popular tabloid, Fakty, on Feb. 23.
Oleksandr Chaly, Ukraine’s permanent representative to the Council of Europe said flat out that Ukraine would refuse to acknowledge the results of IPI examination.
Ukraine’s state-controlled media also played down IPI’s reputation last week, referring to the institute as a “mere public organization” unfit to organize an objective examination of Melnychenko’s recordings.
In reality, the tape authenticity question was solved back in November, when TNO, the Dutch Institute of Applied Physics and a world leader in voice recognition, did an independent analysis on one of the tapes and found that it had not been doctored.
It said nothing about whose voices were on the tape, but Kuchma took care of that several weeks later when he admitted it was his voice.
Another institution, the Berlin Center for General Linguistics, came to the same conclusion as TNO last month.
For whatever reason, those analyses failed to achieve the attention of the IPI tests.
In advance of the IPI report, Mykola Melnychenko, the 34-year-old former security guard who began archiving up to 1,000 hours of audio records in 1998, said he had expected the IPI to confirm the authenticity of voices, which he claims belong to Kuchma and top officials.
In an interview with the Prague-based Ukrainian Bureau of Radio Free Europe (RFE) and the New York Times, Melnychenko indicated he would wait for IPI to complete its weeks-long evaluation before turning over additional audio records “even more criminal” than those relating to the Gongadze affair.
The official request for IPI to “determine the authenticity and the correspondence of the taped voices and those of state officials of Ukraine” was granted by Oleksandr Lavrynovich, the chairman of an ad hoc parliamentary commission investigating what Ukrainian prosecutors now call the murder of Gongadze.
Prompted early last December by Freedom House President Adrian Karatnycky, Lavrynovich formally invited IPI to organize an independent examination of the 11 excerpts of conversations lasting 25 minutes first released by Socialist Party leader Oleksandr Moroz.
On Feb. 1, Lavrynovich’s commission hand delivered to IPI offices in Vienna highly compressed audio copies of these and hundreds of other conversations, along with exclusive Toshiba software required to convert the files into the PC format (WAV) used to make cassette copies.
The software (DMR-KIT2) is bundled with the Toshiba’s line of digital memory recorders that use SmartMedia – tiny memory cards used to store recordings, which can later be uploaded to a personal computer, exchanged over the Internet or copied to tapes (see diagram).
Retailing for less than $300, the pocket-sized gadget is equipped with an omni-directional microphone capable of hours of continuous or voice-activated recording.
In short, the gadget is advanced enough to pick up voices in a room from under a couch – exactly how Melnychenko claims he recorded Kuchma in the president’s office.
