Leading candidate from Ivano-Frankivsk fatally shot two days before election (04/07/02)

Leading candidate from Ivano-Frankivsk fatally shot two days before election

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - A leading candidate to Ukraine's Parliament from Ivano-Frankivsk was shot to death less than two days before the elections in what law enforcement officials are calling a political assassination.

According to Ukrainian state militia reports, an unidentified assailant shot Mykola Shkribliak on March 29 at approximately 10:10 p.m. as he was about to enter his apartment building, firing at least a dozen rounds at the candidate, nine of which found their mark. Mr. Shkribliak, 42, was raced to a local hospital where doctors operated on him without success. He was announced dead about four hours afterwards.

Assistant Procurator General Oleksander Bahanets said on the morning after the killing, which he identified as a contract hit, that law enforcement agencies were not excluding the possibility that someone murdered Mr. Shkribliak in connection with his run for a parliamentary seat.

The death further brought into question the legitimacy of what has been a contentious election season in Ukraine filled with reports of fraud, underhandedness and mudslinging

Mr. Shkribliak, oblast director of the Social Democratic Party (United) and the assistant chairman of the oblast energy department, was in a tight race with National Deputy Roman Zvarych in a rural district of Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast with a history of strong nationalistic underpinnings. The district includes the counties of Dvorianskyi, Yaremche and Verkhovyna. Slava Stetsko, the leader of the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists, previously held the seat representing the district.

Adding more color to the race is the fact that Mr. Zvarych, who was born in New York to Ukrainian immigrants, gave up his U.S. citizenship to become a Ukrainian citizen in 1994.

The race for the seat in District 90 was filled with mudslinging and underhanded tactics, explained Mr. Zvarych, a member of the Our Ukraine Bloc of Viktor Yushchenko, during a press conference in Kyiv on April 3, four days after he had taken 61 percent of the vote to win the district handily.

Mr. Zvarych, who is not a suspect in the murder and has not been questioned by police, said various tactics had been used against him to get him out of the race.

He explained that in several flyers that had passed through the district, he had been accused of being a CIA spy and a Zionist agent, as well as a Taliban supporter of Osama Bin Laden.

In fact the U.S. Embassy issued a statement on April 1 calling reports that Washington was somehow involved in the killing of Mr. Shribliak as "just plain wrong." The statement was directed at the newspaper Kievskie Viedomosti, which is controlled by the SDPU. The newspaper ran a story on April 1 implying that a representative of the U.S. Embassy had met with Mr. Shkribliak prior to his death and threatened him with harm if he did not withdraw from the race.

Mr. Zvarych said that he had come under pressure not to run in the district even before the campaign season began. In November, Ivano Frankivsk Oblast Chairman Mykhailo Vyshyvaniuk had told Mr. Zvarych that all the administrative resources at his disposal would be utilized against the former U.S. citizen.

Mr. Zvarych also explained that, if indeed the killing of Mr. Shkribliak was politically motivated, it was undoubtedly done either to invalidate the elections or besmirch and cast a dark shadow over his own name. On the eve of elections the oblast election commission had considered suspending polling in the region at the urging of its chairman, a fellow member of Mr. Shribliak's SDPU, until late into the night, when a decision was made to proceed as originally intended.

"I cannot exclude [the possibility] that in order to make sure that I did not get elected my opponent was killed. If they would have killed me I would undoubtedly have become a hero," explained the Our Ukraine member. "I was explicit in that I am a Ukrainian nationalist and I was running under the blue-yellow Ukrainian flag and the black-red flag of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. In order to make me a political corpse, they needed to kill my opponent."

Mr. Zvarych said the violence also might have been aimed at him because authorities were angry that he had spoken openly with voters about the high level of corruption, including the illegal taking of oil and natural gas deposits and the timber resources of the Carpathian Mountains in the Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast.

Mr. Zvarych added that he did not have any idea specifically who ordered the hit, but noted that, based on information he had received, "there was no way to exclude that it could have been a politically motivated killing." Still, he expressed surprise at the quick decision made by authorities only a few hours after the murder to exclude other possibilities.

Due to his position as a highly placed administrator in the region's Department of Energy, Trade, Investment and External Affairs, Mr. Shkribliak was a key player in the oil and gas and timber industries. Coincidentally or not, several top-ranking members of the Social Democratic Party (United) have vast business interests in the same industries. At least one news source said on April 3 that Mr. Shkribliak had hired bodyguards early last year after receiving death threats.

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