Ukrainian journalists and writers gathered in central Kyiv on May 21 to commemorate Georgiy Gongadze, the Ukrainian-Georgian journalist murdered in 2000 over his reporting, and to award the first Georgiy Gongadze Award.
The newly-created award is meant to honor Ukrainian journalists who shape the local media field; who are innovative, liberal, and true to the professional principles and values. It was founded by PEN Ukraine, a writers’ organization, in partnership with the Association of Kyiv-Mohyla Business School and local media Ukrainska Pravda. The award comes with a $3,000 prize.
The first-ever Gongadze Prize was awarded to Vakhtang Kipiani. Kipiani, 48, is the editor-in-chief of the online media Istorychna Pravda (Historic Truth) and the TV show by the same name on ZIK TV channel.
“Georgiy is a person I cried about most,” Kipiani said in his acceptance speech at the award ceremony in the Taras Shevchenko National Museum.
Kipiani knew Gongadze. Kipiani’s website operates under the umbrella of Ukrainska Pravda, the media co-founded by Gongadze shortly before his murder, and one of the key news sources in Ukraine.
“We are a part of this big project. And every day I am proud that it’s written (on the homepage) that it was started by Georgiy Gongadze, and that we are keeping that bar high,” Kipiani said.
Other finalists for the prize were the co-founder of The Ukrainians website Taras Prokopyshyn and the first deputy editor of Dzerkalo Tyzhnya (Mirror of the Week) newspaper Serhiy Rakhmanin. They were picked from 21 nominees.
The award ceremony took place on what would be Gongadze’s 50th birthday. His widow, the chief editor of the Ukrainian Service of Voice of America Myroslava Gongadze, and one of his two daughters, Salome Gongadze, were present at the ceremony.
Gongadze Award’s jury has nine members, four of them are constant members: Myroslava Gongadze; president of PEN Ukraine, writer Andrei Kurkov; Ukrainska Pravda founding editor Olena Prytula; and Nikolay Demchenko, the head of Kyiv-Mohyla Business School Association.
Only this panel can nominate journalists for the award, and only its constant members can invite other panelists. In order to be nominated, a journalist has to work in Ukraine over the last five years and never leave journalism.
“This is the dream come true. As a journalist, I dreamed of creating a prize like this,” Tetyana Teren, an executive at PEN Ukraine and a co-founder of the Gongadze Award, said at the event on May 21. And although Teren is “from that generation that got to know about Gongadze from textbooks,” she recognizes the influence Gongadze had on journalism and freedom of speech in Ukraine.
Teren hopes that this award will help start up more journalistic projects and unite local journalists “to fight for our professional rights and when our colleagues face pressure for their professional activity to talk about the problems that occur.”
Delivering an opening speech at the event, Kyiv Post chief editor Brian Bonner outlined the importance of the prize as a way to remember Gongadze as a person who fostered the freedom of speech in post-Soviet Ukraine.
“He was a digital pioneer, a brave man, willing to criticize, take a risk. At the time people were still afraid to criticize (ex-President Leonid) Kuchma,” Bonner said. He was murdered, but “his legacy lived on.”
According to Bonner, Gongadze’s work as a journalist made Ukrainians understand that they could change something in the country, raise their voices and be heard, thus propelling the Orange Revolution in 2004, which put Viktor Yushchenko in power, and the EuroMaidan Revolution in 2013-2014, which ended Viktor Yanukovych’s rule.
But the crime remains unsolved as the name of those who ordered the assassination remains unknown. Only four Interior Ministry police officers went to prison, including a high-ranking general, Oleksiy Pukach, who has said he was acting on the orders of Kuchma. A key witness in the case, ex-Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko, was found dead, with two gunshot wounds in his head, on March 5, 2005, the day he was supposed to give testimony about the Gongadze murder.
Bonner said he believed that the biggest challenge for Ukraine’s journalism today is to cope with the consequences of the unsolved Gongadze crime, for such injustice and impunity led to the murder of journalist Pavel Sheremet in 2016, to the murder of activist Kateryna Gandziuk in 2018, and to other attacks, such as journalist Vadym Komarov being in a coma after an assassination attempt. All of them were scrutinizing officials and investigating corruption in Ukraine, as Gongadze did.
