Verkhovna Rada hearings focus on Ukrainian information space (01/21/01)

Verkhovna Rada hearings focus on Ukrainian information space

by Yarema A. Bachynsky
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

KYIV - Ukraine's information space was the subject of hearings in the Verkhovna Rada on January 16. National deputies, government officials, experts and others gave their assessment of the state of affairs, demonstrating that the policy debate over what Ukrainians read, listen to and watch is shifting into high gear.

"It is no secret to anyone that the state of freedom of speech is unsatisfactory," Interfax-Ukraine quoted Oleksander Zinchenko, the head of Parliament's Committee on Information and Freedom of Expression. Mr. Zinchenko harshly criticismed state authorities for attempts to impose political censorship on the national, oblast and local levels. Among periodicals that have been subjected to harassment by fiscal, law enforcement and other bodies are the newspapers Silski Visti, Polityka, Svoboda and Pravda Ukrainy, all Kyiv-based nationally distributed publications. The latter's editor, Oleksander Horobets, was arrested, jailed on trumped-up charges of rape and released only after a court battle that concluded with a determination that the charges against him were baseless.

"Virtually all cases of pressure upon mass media and journalists are in fact illegal," continued Mr. Zinchenko, listing a number of journalists whose killings over the years of Ukraine's independence have remained unsolved. These include the late editor of Vechernaya Odesa Borys Derevianko, fatally shot in 1997; journalist and National Deputy Vadym Boyko, who went missing and whose body has not been found; Kievskiye Viedomosti reporter Petro Shevchenko, found hanged in 1998 in a Kyiv apartment; and Heorhii Gongadze, who went missing on September 16, 2000, and whose beheaded corpse was apparently identified last week through DNA analysis.

Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe member Andrzey Urbanczyk, who took part in the Verkhovna Rada hearings, said that PACE is particularly concerned about government pressure on the media, particularly in light of the Gongadze matter. "Freedom of speech should not be given away or held ransom by fire inspectors or tax officials," said Mr. Urbanczyk.

The hearings took on a somber tone when Mr. Gongadze's mother, Lesia Gongadze, addressed those gathered with a plea to ensure that the investigation of her son's disappearance and apparent killing be conducted openly and that those responsible be discovered and brought to justice.

The concerns expressed at the parliamentary hearings are echoed by public sentiment. In a survey of over 2,000 persons throughout the country conducted in October 2000 by the Ukrainian Center for Economic and Political Studies, 69 percent of respondents believed that a high or substantial degree of political censorship exists in Ukraine, and 52 percent agreed with foreign assessments that have placed Ukraine in the top 10 countries where freedom of speech is most flagrantly violated.

Vice Prime Minister for Humanitarian Affairs Mykola Zhulynskyi gave a tough assessment of the present state of affairs in Ukrainian publishing and broadcasting. "The Cabinet of Ministers believes that in order to ensure effective state information policy and the unobstructed and comprehensive development of the national information space, we need to implement a policy of protectionism through legislation and implementation of this legislation," said Dr. Zhulynskyi, addressing the fact that only one of four periodicals published in Ukraine are in the Ukrainian language.

He also criticized numerous violations of broadcasting regulations that require 50 percent of all television programming to be in the state language, Ukrainian. The National Council on Television and Radio Broadcasting has recently begun cracking down on wayward broadcasters, but violations of the language requirement persist on the national level, and in particular on the regional level, where up to 90 percent of all television programming is in Russian. Many regional broadcasters also "sublet" their assigned frequencies to other channels instead of airing originally produced programming, thus violating regulations that require significant originally produced programming of most TV broadcasters.

The vice prime minister noted that the state needs to radically decrease the fiscal and tax burden on the country's publishers of both periodicals and books in order to make the publishing industry competitive domestically and internationally. At present, books and periodicals published in neighboring Russia are up to 30 percent less expensive because Russia does not impose a value-added tax (VAT) on books and periodicals, and because newsprint in Russia is plentiful, while Ukraine produces only 25 percent of its annual paper needs.

The chairman of the State Committee on Information, Ivan Drach, reiterated many of Dr. Zhulynskyi's points and also indicated that his committee would continue to promote the de-Russification of the Ukrainian information space despite recent criticism by both the Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry and Russian media of alleged forced Ukrainianization and discrimination against Russian speakers' rights in Ukraine.

Messrs. Zhulynskyi and Drach have at times been at odds with National Deputy Zinchenko over how to stimulate the Ukrainian publishing industry and strengthen Ukrainian broadcasters. Recently Mr. Zinchenko, who is also honorary president of Inter, Ukraine's premier Russian-language TV channel, labeled calls for changes in Ukrainian orthography developed by an official panel of scholars as utter nonsense.

Today there are approximately 10,200 publications, 791 television and radio stations, and 35 information agencies registered in Ukraine. Last year, the total print run of Ukrainian-language periodicals was 713.7 million copies, with Russian-language periodicals were far ahead at 1.84 billion copies, according to the Book Palace of Ukraine, an organization that tracks the state of the publishing industry in Ukraine and represents publishers' interests.

Ukrainian-language book publishing was in a somewhat stronger position last year, with 20.06 million books printed in Ukrainian as opposed to 10 million in Russian. However, the Book Palace has noted that total print runs of books are decreasing with every year and that, according to UNESCO standards, the per capita number of books published in Ukraine is far below that of Western and other developed countries.

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