Several hundred Kyivans gathered in a square near Serafimovycha Street on the city’s eastern bank on Aug. 13 to protect a green zone near their homes.
Angered by plans of property
developer Telbin Iva to
cut down trees and build a large supermarket, they crushed the
metal gate
surrounding the construction site and burned a poster announcing
plans for the
project in protest.
“We want fresh
air for our children, not
another supermarket!” locals chanted at the protest. Local
residents set up
tents in the small park at Serafimovycha 6A – the only green
area that divides
the neighboring apartment houses from the busy Vozyednannya
Highway – in July,
when Telbin Iva cordoned off the square with a fence and began
cutting down trees.
But their
outrage reached its peak on the
morning of Aug. 13, when hundreds of unknown men dressed in
black kicked
protesters out and closed the gate to the square. Activists
clashed with the
men, who never revealed their identity, and eventually tore down
the gate.
“On Aug. 12 we
got a call from an intermediary
who said the owner of Telbin Iva wants to meet us and reach a
compromise. Then,
the next morning this happens. You see what kind of compromise
they are pushing
for,” says Iryna Kovalchuk, an activist who lives in the
building adjacent to
the square.
The property
developer says it has rights
to the land for 49 years, and that the requisite permits and
documents are in
order.
The Kyiv City
council gave Telbin Iva permission
to lease the plot in 2002. The agreement was signed by Valeriy
Ishchenko, who headed
the company, but who now serves as a member of parliament from
the UDAR
opposition party, headed by world heavyweight champion Vitaly
Klitschko.
Mykola
Lototsky, Ishchenko’s aide, says he
headed Telbin Iva until 2009, but then went into politics and
sold the company.
“Since then, according to our information, the company was sold
several more
times and we have no information on who the current owner is,”
Lototsky said.
He adds that
building a supermarket at the
spot seemed like a good idea in 2002, due to a shortage of shops
in the
district.
No work was
done on the plot until July
2013, though, and local residents say they believed there would
be no
construction. The workers who started cutting down trees and
putting up a fence
came as a shock to them. In protest, they have ripped down the
fence and
planted new trees.
They say they
were neither consulted by
the company about its plans, which is required by the law in
cases of such a
construction, nor informed of them.
However, the
Dniprovsky district
prosecutor found no violations in the company’s documents,
Oleksandr Ryabov,
deputy head of the Dniprovsky district prosecutor, told
journalists on Aug. 12.
However, he added that the prosecutor requested documents from
the city council
regarding its 2002 decision to lease the plot.
Since law
enforcement began investigating
the situation, Teblin Iva has sued the activists for Hr 500,000
in business reputation
damages. Dmytro Vitokha, who heads Telbin Iva, says that all
requisite documents
of the company are in order and it is losing both money and its
reputation due
to the protests.
“Apparently,
their reputation costs half a
million and our lungs cost nothing,” Andriy Nakonechny, one of
the sued
activists, said at an Aug. 13 demonstration as a crowd behind
him cheered.
“Each time they will put up a gate, we will crush it! There will
never be a
supermarket here!” he and others shouted.
But some
people in the crowd were much
more skeptical. “People here seem to think that they can secure
a victory by
crushing a fence. But my neighbors and I have been fighting for
our square
since November, including crushing fences at least 5 times and
going through
many courts. But we are still far from winning,” says Tetyana
Denysiuk, an
activist from Balzaka St. 54A in neighboring Troyeshchyna
district.
She and her
neighbors have been protesting
against the construction of a large restaurant some 5 meters
from her house – a
buffer zone where development is prohibited.
“A very long
and tiring process is ahead. I
just hope both they and we have the strength to go through it,”
says Maksym
Mashkovsky, an activist from Troyeshchyna, on Mayakosvkogo St.
4, where locals
have been fighting with developers since 2012.
See photos from the protest here
Kyiv Post
staff writer Svitlana Tuchynska
can be reached at [email protected].
