ANALYSIS: Will Ukraine's president survive? (02/25/01)

ANALYSIS

Will Ukraine's president survive?

by Jan Maksymiuk
RFE/RL Newsline

Despite the evidence implicating President Leonid Kuchma in the murder of independent journalist Heorhii Gongadze, and the protests triggered by those revelations, it seems unlikely that Kuchma's political future is threatened.

This month's two strongest anti-Mr. Kuchma protests gathered some 5,000 people each and both of them were held in Kyiv. There have been some anti-Kuchma protests outside the capital within the past month, but they gathered several hundred people at most. As some Ukrainian commentators say, what is really wrong about Ukraine is not Kuchma's authoritarian rule or his alleged responsibility for ordering Mr. Gongadze's disappearance, but the fact that most Ukrainians do not care about who rules them and how.

Ukraine's current political unrest was provoked by President Kuchma's former bodyguard, Mykola Melnychenko, who bugged the president's office for several months last summer and subsequently publicized the tapes allegedly proving the complicity of Mr. Kuchma and other top officials in the disappearance of Mr. Gongadze, an outspoken critic of the ruling regime, on September 16 of last year.

Socialist Party leader Oleksandr Moroz publicized the Melnychenko tapes on November 28, 2000. It is now almost three months since the Gongadze case made headlines in the Ukrainian and world press, but nothing has been definitively clarified since then.

Officially, a body found near Kyiv and widely believed to be Mr. Gongadze's was identified by genetic tests as his "to the extent of 99.6 percent." And this means, that Mr. Gongadze is not dead from the legal point of view. As Mr. Gongadze's wife told the Ekho Moskvy radio station, "if there is no crime, then there is no perpetrator of the crime."

Officially, the Melnychenko tapes have been dismissed as a fake. The Procurator General's Office - in an enigmatic statement early this month - said some conversations on the tapes actually took place, but on the whole the tapes were "compiled from separate words and fragments, which is essentially a falsification."

Mr. Kuchma himself has flatly denied any involvement in the disappearance of Mr. Gongadze, telling the Financial Times that he did not even know the journalist. He said the bugging scandal was staged by a "well-organized force" with "a great deal of money and capabilities," but failed to identify that force.

Some 60 lawmakers and opposition politicians set up a Forum for National Salvation earlier this month with the aim of impeaching President Kuchma and transforming Ukraine into a parliamentary-presidential or even parliamentary republic. But the group has so far failed to muster any significant support outside Kyiv.

The authorities counterattacked by arresting former Vice Prime Yulia Tymoshenko, a prominent member of the forum, on charges of bribery, smuggling, tax evasion and document forgery.

Mr. Kuchma has simply shrugged off the current anti-presidential protests in Ukraine, saying he does not see any "civilized" opposition to himself within the framework of "Ukraine Without Kuchma" rallies. This may mean, among other things, that he is now ready to use not quite "civilized" means against his opponents.

As for the Forum for National Salvation, the president said in a written statement that the group is not seeking salvation for the nation but "for themselves from political bankruptcy and oblivion ... [and] criminal responsibility."

Many were shocked that this statement was also by signed Prime Minister Viktor Yuschenko, who has so far preserved the image of an independent politician, apparently not involved in shady economic deals or dirty political games in Ukraine.

The Forum for National Salvation objected that Mr. Yuschenko's siding with President Kuchma "contradicts both God's and human laws." This may be, incidentally, true, but Mr. Yuschenko's decision surely does not contradict the common sense of a man who occupies a leading position and wants to remain there as long as possible.

Prime Minister Yuschenko is now 46, and some 50 percent of Ukrainians believe he stands a good chance of becoming Ukraine's next president. If President Kuchma dismissed him now, his prospects of remaining in the spotlight until the next presidential elections would be uncertain.

How could President Kuchma survive the current political unrest virtually unscathed? The answer is very simple: because neither the West nor Russia actually wants him to step down.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's recent talks with Kuchma in Dnipropetrovsk signaled to many that Moscow wants to extend a helping hand to the Ukrainian president in order to seek some profits for Russia in Ukraine from the bugging scandal.

The West, which has been carefully portioning its financial and moral support to Mr. Kuchma in a bid to prevent Ukraine from siding with Russia too strongly, may be somewhat baffled as to what to do now. However, the fact that there has so far not been even a hint of disapproval from major Western leaders for how Mr. Kuchma is behaving means only one thing: the West wants him to survive and continue his course.

Paradoxically, one of the victims of the bugging scandal may be Ukraine's moderate nationalist right-wing, which supports Mr. Kuchma politically in the Verkhovna Rada in the so-called parliamentary majority. Why "national democrats" support Mr. Kuchma is obvious, although commentators perhaps do not always dwell on the reason: because the "national democrats" traded their support for Leonid Kuchma, a former Communist Party apparatchik, for his agreement to "Ukrainianize" Ukraine - to establish a truly Ukrainian education system, first of all.

Nobody will deny that building the Ukrainian nation not only in the corridors of powers but also in people's minds warrants some political sacrifices and compromises. But now the question has arisen: is this one compromise too many?

Jan Maksymiuk is the Belarus, Ukraine and Poland specialist on the staff of RFE/RL Newsline.

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