President pledges to ax three top officials in face of mounting pressure to resign
President Leonid Kuchma said Dec. 20 that he is ready to consider the resignations of his top law enforcement officials, but only if Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko makes an official request for their ouster.
His statements came after an hour-long meeting with a group of anti-presidential protesters calling themselves Ukraine Without Kuchma. The group has been demanding Kuchma’s resignation following the release of audiotapes allegedly linking the president and two of his top aides to the disappearance of journalist Georgy Gongadze three months ago.
Following the meeting, Interfax quoted protesters as saying that Kuchma agreed to demand the resignations of Interior Minister Yury Kravchenko, SBU chief Leonid Derkach and Customs chief Yury Solovkov. Later, however, presidential Press Secretary Oleksandr Martynenko backtracked, claiming that the president never said he would fire the officials, only that he would consider the action at Yushchenko’s request.
Late Dec. 20 protesters met with Yushchenko, who said he would begin the process to seek resignations.
“The question of the resignations should be resolved in a legitimate way,” the leader of the protesters, Yury Lutsenko, quoted the prime minister as saying. “He will order that the documents be prepared and a special session of the Cabinet will be scheduled as soon as possible.”
The agreement came a day after more than 5,000 protesters marched from Maidan Nezalezhnosti to the Verkhovna Rada to demand Kuchma’s resignation. The march was one of the largest political demonstrations in the history of independent Ukraine and quickly gained the attention of Kuchma, who agreed to meet with the leaders of the movement. In addition to demanding resignations, the protesters also said Kuchma agreed to seek independent analysis of the audiotape that triggered the scandal and independent forensics testing on a headless corpse found near a village outside of Kyiv in November. The remains are suspected to be those of missing journalist Gregory Gongadze.
Protesters said they also were promised airtime on state TV channel UT-1.
“We reached a compromise that will allow us to send the youth home until we get the results of the expertise in the Gongadze case,” Lutsenko said after the meeting. The protesters agreed to vacate their encampment by the morning of Dec. 21.
Whether the protest will start up again depends on parliament’s vote on an impeachment law. Currently there is no law on the books allowing parliament to impeach the president.
The group also wants parliament to issue a no-confidence vote against Prosecutor General Mykhailo Potebenko. He is expected to make a report on the Gongadze case before parliament next week.
The scandal erupted last month after Socialist Party leader Oleksandr Moroz released an audiotape containing conversations allegedly between Kuchma, Kravchenko and Presidential Administration head Volodymyr Lytvyn discussing Gongadze’s kidnapping. The tape’s release was followed a week later by videotaped testimony from retired SBU officer Mykola Melnychenko, who had given the audiotape to Moroz.
Melnychenko testified that he recorded Kuchma’s conversations by placing a Dictaphone under the president’s couch.
The stunning testimony caused an unusual union of political parties in parliament. For the first time in the history of independent Ukraine, political forces from the Communist and Socialist parties, Narodny Rukh, the Christian Democratic Party, extreme nationalist party UNA-UNSO as well as centrist Sobor and Yabloko joined forces.
During the march, protesters from opposing parties walked side-by-side – the Communists holding red banners, nationalists carrying their yellow-and-blue flags, students holding signs with anti-Kuchma slogans and the Christian Democrats carrying icons.
The first protests began Dec. 15, when a handful of demonstrators, mostly students and young adults, set up half a dozen tents at a makeshift campsite on Maidan Nezalezhnosti. They initially said they would stay until Kuchma resigned and until they knew the truth about the disappearance of Gongadze.
The next day Kuchma supporters set up their own six tents to protest against he protesters.
As the days passed, the camp at Maidan Nezalezhnosti became a forum for different political leaders. Communist Party chief Petro Symonenko addressed the protesters on Dec. 19 saying that according to his data, 35,000 people had disappeared in Ukraine during the past year. He blamed Kuchma’s administration. Then he gave a plug for returning to communist ideology.
“Let’s unite our efforts and return in a legitimate way – through Verkhovna Rada – the factories and plants that were stolen from the people and let’s stop the pillaging of Ukraine’s resources by foreign capitalists,” Symonenko said.
Later, a member of the Christian Democratic Party, Oleksandr Serhienko reminded the crowd that Kuchma rose to power as a left-wing candidate and was supported by predominantly Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine.
While members of opposing factions pointed fingers at one another for the current political mess, the sides did find common ground; they agreed that it was time for a change.
“The aim of this demonstration is not to support any ideology. Let’s put aside our banners and slogans, free Ukraine from criminal authorities and then sort things out,” Sobor party leader Anatoly Matviyenko said Dec. 18.
While the leaders of the various factions jabbed each other, their followers mixed and mingled, showing little animosity.
Many of the protesters admitted that they had never heard of Gongadze before his disappearance.
They had their own reasons to protest.
“It’s not right that old people are starving and young people can’t find jobs after graduating,” said Anya, a student from Sumy who came to Kyiv to protest with her friends from the Socialist Party.
Anya said she heard about the scandal only a few days earlier. In her hometown all TV channels except for state-run UT-1 had gone off the air six weeks earlier. And UT-1 didn’t provide full coverage of the scandal.
Another protester, Ruslan Zaitsenko, a member of the ultra-nationalist UNA-UNSO party from Cherkasy said that he didn’t consider it strange that leftists and right-wing supporters were marching together.
“Kuchma has to go,” he said. “That will sort things out. Then our first choice will be Yushchenko. But we could also support Moroz. He is an honest man.”
The leaders of the movement were Lutsenko, a Socialist and editor of the opposition newspaper Hrani, and Volodymyr Chemeris, a member of the Ukrainian Republican Party and a former deputy. Chemeris is also a veteran protester. He was involved in the Revolution on Granite student strike that led to Prime Minister Vitaly Massol’s resignation in 1991.
The current protest gained momentum Dec. 19 when busloads of people from the regions joined in. Protesters came from Vasilkiv, Bila Tserkva, Brovary, Krymenchukh, Chernihiv and Sumy.
After the demonstration on Maidan Nezalezhnosti, protesters headed to the Rada building chanting “Kuchma Out!”
The column of protesters stretched from Khreshchatyk to the Rada and nearly bumped into a smaller rally of Kuchma supporters. Among about 500 counter-protesters were many college students who freely admitted to journalists that they agreed to support the president for the modest sum of Hr 10.
The pro-Kuchma rally retreated through the park near the Rada while Ukraine Without Kuchma protesters demanded that their leaders be allowed to speak to parliament.
Their request was denied after pro-presidential factions voted against it. The column of protesters then trudged to the Presidential Administration to see Kuchma. They were told that he wasn’t in. At that time, Kuchma was across town speaking to a roomful of police being honor on Policemen’s Day.
The only demand of the protesters that Kuchma refused to consider was the resignation of Kuchma himself. “He flatly refused to consider this,” Lutsenko said.
