September 30, 2016

In memory of Gongadze, Sheremet and all slain journalists

More

Traditional remembrance events on the anniversary of journalist Heorhii Gongadze’s abduction and subsequent murder are especially poignant this year as they come just two months after the killing in Kyiv of Pavel Sheremet, the renowned Belarusian journalist and former prisoner of conscience. Ukraine’s media unions and other organizations have called on their colleagues to join in honoring their memory and that of all journalists who were killed while carrying out their work.

There is hopefully no reason to suspect any officials or higher in Ukraine of involvement in Sheremet’s killing, or of unwillingness to carry out a proper investigation. There does not, however, seem to be any major progress in finding his killer. Sheremet, who was just 44, had resigned from Russian ORT two years earlier in protest at the virulent warmongering propaganda against Ukraine. He was living permanently in Kyiv, together with his partner and owner of Ukrayinska Pravda, Olena Prytula.

Gongadze was a co-founder of Ukrayinska Pravda, who wrote hard-hitting reports during the presidency of Leonid Kuchma which had by then become increasingly authoritarian and intolerant of independent media. He was abducted by police officers on September 16, 2000, and his headless body was later found in a forest near Kyiv.

On this anniversary, as on all others, there are calls within Ukraine and abroad for those who ordered his killing to be identified and held to answer. The calls are correct, but the chances of this ever happening seem minuscule.

The reasons have probably been clear from very early on. Two months after Gongadze’s disappearance, a cassette made by Mykola Melnychenko, one of President Kuchma’s guards, was made public. If genuine, and it is widely assumed to be so, this incriminates Mr. Kuchma, as well as the head of his administration, Volodymyr Lytvyn. They have always denied any involvement, as, of course, anybody in their position would.

After the Orange Revolution, Viktor Yushchenko promised a real investigation into the Gongadze murder. This never happened, and in 2006 Mr. Yushchenko even awarded a state honor to Mykhailo Potebenko, the former prosecutor general who had effectively blocked any investigation at the time.

In March 2008, three former police officers – Valentin Kostenko, Mykola Protasov and Oleksandr Popovych – were found guilty of abducting and killing Gongadze. Mr. Protasov was sentenced to 13 years, the other two got 12-year sentences.

Their superior – ex-police general Oleksy Pukach went into hiding, but was arrested in July 2009. In January 2016, the Court of Appeal in Kyiv upheld Mr. Pukach’s life sentence almost four years after the initial sentence had been passed, and well over 15 years after the killing.

The entire Pukach trial had been extremely long and all behind closed doors despite protests within Ukraine and abroad given the very serious grounds for suspecting that Gongadze’s killing had been ordered by people in high positions.

The investigators had found (controversially) that Mr. Pukach carried out the murder on instructions from Yuriy Kravchenko, then minister of internal affairs, who is officially recorded as having committed suicide (with two gunshot wounds to the head) in early 2005.

In his final words to the court, Mr. Pukach said that Messrs. Kuchma and Lytvyn, who for some time during the trial had been parliamentary speaker, should have been on trial with him. He said he had tried to tell all the truth, but that nobody had wanted to hear.

At the time, Valentina Telychenko, the lawyer representing Gongadze’s widow, Myroslava Gongadze, told Ukrayinska Pravda that she was delighted the accusations had finally been heard by journalists. Unlike her, they had signed no undertaking to keep the court proceedings secret. She asserts that in his pre-trial and court testimony, Mr. Pukach repeatedly spoke of Messrs. Kuchma and Lytvyn, about where and when he met with Mr. Lytvyn, however that had never been used in the “investigation” into who ordered the murder.

This investigation is, in theory, still continuing.

Much was made in early 2011 when criminal proceedings were initiated against Mr. Kuchma over the Gongadze case. President Viktor Yanukovych was already under heavy criticism for violations of press freedom, as well as selective justice, and his people tried to tout the criminal proceedings as proof that it was Mr. Yanukovych, not his predecessor Mr. Yushchenko, who was willing to reveal the truth about the Gongadze killing. Within months, however, the Constitutional Court had obligingly ruled that evidence could not be used that had not been legitimately obtained by an investigative body. The stand that evidence illegally obtained cannot be used may well be justified in many situations. Here, however, it eliminated the Melnychenko tape which, if authentic, clearly contained vital information.

Journalists and other members of the public held the traditional remembrance gathering on Friday evening on Independence Square. The event is taking place, as in the last two years, under the shadow of war. During the remembrance, the names were read out of 61 journalists who had died in the course of their work, as well as those of a number of journalists, including six foreign correspondents, killed in the Donbas.

This commentary above was published by the Kharkiv Human rights Protection Group on September 16 (see http://khpg.org/index.php?id=1473981642).

Comments are closed.