Today we’re living in a different time, in the world of Internet, which cannot be limited with borders; we should have developed antibodies to fear; it seemed we came to the conclusion that any closed system is inefficient, and that nobody or nothing can control everything.
Nevertheless, this is exactly what’s happening. The secret service of this state of 46 million people conducts “preventative talks” with civic activists, attempts to explain to university rectors why their students need to abstain from taking part in protest actions, checks non-government organizations surviving on grants, and detains workers of foreign funds at the airport.
I do not understand why people who introduced themselves as representatives of the State Security Service (SBU) come to my concierge to ask for information on the residents of my apartment. I don’t understand why they’re interested in the people who live there, who come and go. After all, they can address all these questions to me directly – I have nothing to hide.
In a free country secret services can develop an interest in particular citizens based on concrete suspicions of actions that threaten national security. I would be very interested to know what parts of my public, human rights protection or journalistic activities are so disliked by the SBU.
However, to have a conversation like this one has to have a good reason. In a free country secret services can develop an interest in particular citizens based on concrete suspicions of actions that threaten national security. I would be very interested to know what parts of my public, human rights protection or journalistic activities are so disliked by the SBU.
It’s also unclear why the secret services waste their time talking to the activists of the Democratic Alliance youth organization. The organization’s mission is the political education of youth, meaning that young people are taught to understand the essence of the rule of law, and how a citizen can defend his or her rights. It would seem that the state itself should be interested in spreading such information.
I don’t understand why the main voice of President Viktor Yanukovych Hanna Herman talks about the high professionalism of SBU chief Valery Khoroshkovsky, if Ukraine has had to officially deal with several international scandals caused by the very service he heads.
These include the detention of Niko Lange before Yanukovych’s visit to Germany, talks with rector of the Catholic University in Lviv during a conference of rectors of European universities, and so on.
I also fail to understand why people in the president’s office on Bankova stubbornly fail to see Khoroshkovsky’s conflict of interests in the whole saga with Channel 5 and TVi. Khoroshkovsky does not hide the fact that he owns nine TV channels, and at the same time, his wife’s media company sues these two independent channels to take away their frequency licenses.
Is it so difficult to understand that against the background of all these facts any declaration made by Yanukovych about his “devotion” to the ideas of democracy and free press seem like mockery.
I was surprised by a recent remark made to me by parliament deputy Inna Bohoslovska during a discussion about freedom of the press and the SBU’s actions. Commenting on the “collection of information” about civic activists by the nation’s secret service, she asked who finances the Institute of Mass Information, which I head. Then she proceeded to answer that it’s George Soros, an American billionaire and philanthropist, and said that everyone should remember “how the Orange Revolution was exported.”
It seems that in the ranks of the party of power, which has concentrated the most power anyone has ever had in Ukraine, this is still a sore point. It seems that they still have not realized that a revolution cannot be created with the money of even a dozen Soroses, that the revolution was made by Ukrainians, induced by the actions of the Ukrainian authorities.
People were induced by the censorship on TV, which today is so carefully reinstated by the current set of managers; by the overwhelming corruption which is only “fought with” using only words; by the economic policy in the interest of several oligarchs, at the expense of small and medium business; by the complete detachment of the power elites from their own people, who simply fail to see the reality from behind the windows of their Mercedes cars and expensive restaurants.
But these explanations for the reasons behind the revolution are uncomfortable, because it would mean that people in power would have to change. It’s much easier to blame the “export” and foreign funds.
The current set of people in power much more easily accept and learn from the experience of the neighboring Russia. They control TV Russian-style, destroy self-governance the same way, marginalize the opposition and tell the West about their “sincere devotion to the ideas of democracy and human rights,” while at the same time refusing people the right to hold peaceful demonstrations.
It seems that the most important thing that the current top power brokers have failed to understand is a simple truth that former President Leonid Kuchma once loudly announced: “Ukraine is not Russia.” This stubborn refusal to accept the reality can cost them a lot.
Viktoria Siumar is head of the Institute for Mass Information in Ukraine, a non-profit organization. You can read more about its activities on http://imi.org.ua.
