It’s hard to believe that Georgiy Gongadze would be 51 today if he had lived. The nation and world would be better places today if he were still alive. Instead, Gongadze is fixed forever in our minds as the 31-year-old innovator and pioneer of fearless independent and investigative journalism.
We long ago tired of the injustices and betrayals of a succession of incompetents, obstructionists, and corruptionists who let ex-President Leonid Kuchma, ex-parliament speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn, and ex-Security Service of Ukraine chief Leonid Derkach escape any credible investigation. But we know why it happened: The tyrant Kuchma and his son-in-law Victor Pinchuk, enriched during a decade of kleptocratic rule that crippled the nation as neighbors like Poland joined the European Union, made sure that only obstruction and misdirection took place until Kuchma left office in 2005. They behaved like the guilty people we suspect they are.
Viktor Yushchenko, who disappointed a nation that brought him to power in the 2004 Orange Revolution, was incompetent and no reformer. But at least the investigation advanced enough during his single term to have Oleksiy Pukach, a top-ranking police general, arrested. Pukach and three other officers who carried out the actual crime were convicted and sentenced to prison. Then, in 2010, when Viktor Yanukovych took power, his prosecutors liked to put a scare into Kuchma from time to time, charging him formally with involvement in ordering the murder in 2011. Renat Kuzmin, the discredited hatchet man for Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka, once even accused Kuchma of paying $1 billion to avoid criminal charges and a trial.
But the charges were dropped, and Kuchma went from being an official suspect to not being an official suspect so many times that it’s hard to count. The official investigation is and was always going to be a farce — because that’s the way it is involving powerful people in Ukraine. But the official status doesn’t change an evidence trail that leads straight to Kuchma, who has always denied any involvement.
Those in power don’t mind when journalists get killed, beaten, or harassed occasionally — it’s meant to send a signal that our lives are disposable and investigations will go nowhere. Pukach said it best: Kuchma and Lytvyn should be in the prison cell with him.
It’s a testimony to the indomitable strength of Myroslava Gongadze, his widow, and others that partial justice took place. Among Georgiy’s best legacies are, of course, his twin daughters born in 1997. One, Salome, recently wrote an op-ed in The New Statesman that concluded: “I suspect that if he were still around, he would say we were part of the same fight. He would be proud of the new generation of Ukrainians, who live more freely thanks to his efforts, and carry them forward. And he would remind us not to give up, because he never did.”
Wise words and reason for all of us to keep up the fight for truth and justice for as long as we live.
