Salome Gongadze, the daughter of slain investigative Ukrainian journalist Georgiy Gongadze, has been chosen as next year's youth governor of Virginia. A general assembly of other high school students elected the 17-year-old on April 18.
Called the Model General Assembly Program, it aims to familiarize high school students with the legislative process in the state, according to the group’s website. It is administered by the YMCA Youth and Government program, a faith-based group established in 1936 that currently operates in 38 states and Washington, DC.
While taking part in the program, Salome Gongadze had successfully drafted and adopted a law on maternity leave, which does not exist in the U.S., according to the Facebook page of her mother, Voice of America journalist Myroslava Gongadze.
Expressing pride in her daughter’s election, Myroslava wrote that Salome became the state’s first female youth governor in the program’s 17 years of existence in a “rather conservative patriarchal Virginia.”
Each year, the program gathers approximately 600 delegates from more than 60 high schools at the Capitol in Richmond, Virginia where they submit and discuss their legislative bills in groups. Although the bills don’t have juridical power, Myroslava believes her daughter’s “laws will once change the lives of people, especially for women.”
Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko congratulated Salome on his administration’s official Facebook page on April 20. He said that “the challenge of our generation is to create opportunities for youth (in Ukraine).”
Salome has a twin sister, who is following in her mother’s footsteps as the chief editor of her school’s literary magazine Inspire.
Four Interior Ministry officers, supervised by former Gen. Oleksiy Pukach, were convicted of kidnapping and murdering her father on Sept. 16, 2000. They are serving prison sentences. A former interior minister, Yuriy Kravchenko, was killed by two gunshot wounds to the head on March 4, 2005, the day he was scheduled to give testimony. The death was ruled a suicide.
Meanwhile, those who ordered Georgiy Gongadze’s death have never been brought to justice, including former President Leonid Kuchma, who maintains his innocence.
Myroslava and her two daughters received political asylum in America and moved to Virginia in 2001. In an interview with Ukrainska Pravda in 2009, she said that both girls speak Ukrainian and visit their native land on occasion.
Kyiv Post staff writer Anna Yakutenko can be reached at [email protected].
