JOHN MARONE, KYIV
WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND IN UKRAINIAN POLITICS
Ukraine has got a new prosecutor-general, who really isn’t new at all, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone who has followed the country’s politics.
Top officials are changed like underwear, socks and sheets. The only problem is that the laundry doesn’t get any cleaner as a result.
Oleksandr Medvedko was given his job back on Friday, June 1, as part of a series of compromises between President Viktor Yushchenko and his political nemesis Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych.
Compromise is important in democracy, especially in a fledgling one like Ukraine, where the court system leaves a lot to be desired.
However, as the personal and political duel between the reform-minded Yushchenko and the eastern-oriented Yanukovych continues into its third year, one gets the impression that back-room deals, rather than the rule of law, have been confirmed as the preferred means of avoiding all out war.
The objects of barter in the deals are more often than not state appointments.
The re-appointment of Medvedko, who is closely aligned with Prime Minister Yanukovych, is a classic example.
In return, Yushchenko got to appoint his man, Volodymyr Shapoval, to head the reshuffled Central Electoral Commission.
Shapoval will be important to the president in ensuring that the upcoming early parliamentary elections are fair.
The fact that early elections are going to be held at all can be considered a victory for Yushchenko, as he’s the one who called them, in a last ditch effort to prevent Yanukovych from further assuming presidential powers.
Everyone from foreign governments to local business interests had been calling for a resolution to the two men’s latest standoff, which is rooted in their battle for the presidency three years ago.
The country’s former president, Leonid Kuchma, didn’t have any serious competitors for power, which he largely concentrated in his own hands.
Nevertheless, Kuchma also replaced officials quite regularly.
Like most clever politicians, he set one official against another to secure his own position, and fired them to divert any blame against himself.
A good example here is Oleksandr Kuzmuk, who served as the country’s defense minister for most of the Kuchma years.
Kuzmuk was fired after the Ukrainian military accidentally shot down an airliner full of passengers over the Black Sea in late 2001.
Then in late 2004, when the presidential race between Yushchenko and Yanukovych, whom Kuchma endorsed as his successor, started getting ugly, Kuchma reappointed Kuzmuk.
More recently, as the stand-off between Yushchenko and Yanukovych was escalating, Kuzmuk was made deputy prime minister for national security and defense.
Although closely associated with the Kuchma administration, which became a pariah in the West, Kuzmuk has survived along with the numerous other officials who returned to the government under Yanukovych last summer.
Out of naiveté or lack of an alternative, Yushchenko himself allowed this to happen.
It was also Yushchenko who revived the career of Kuchma’s last prosecutor-general, Svyatoslav Piskun, a political phoenix if there ever was one.
Piskun was hired, fired and then rehired by Kuchma. As in the case of General Kuzmuk, Kuchma rehired Piskun during the peak of the country’s Orange Revolution.
But unlike Kuzmuk, Piskun was not fired when Yushchenko took office in early 2005.
Yushchenko had promised the crowds of Orange street demonstrators who had ushered him into office that he would put the thugs of the old regime in jail.
However, in what observers have said was a backroom agreement between Yushchenko and Kuchma, Piskun remained in office.
None of the officials who were accused of trying to steal the 2004 presidential elections, raping the country of its wealth or killing journalists who reported the truth was sentenced to prison terms.
To this day, the people who poisoned Yushchenko himself have not been brought to justice.
Eventually, in late 2005, Yushchenko replaced Piskun with Medvedko.
Then, in keeping with the policy of his discredited successor, Yushchenko rehired Piskun during the latest political showdown last month only to replace him in a backroom compromise weeks later.
The tragedy is that although both Piskun and Medvedko enjoyed sufficient time as the nation’s top law-enforcement official, neither managed to prosecute high-profile murders such as the 2000 beheading of investigative journalist Georgiy Gongadze.
Now, as during the peak of the 2004 Orange Revolution, Yushchenko appears to have sacrificed the opportunity to prosecute past crimes for the chance to win a democratic election.
It really doesn’t matter whether Medvedko or Piskun is in charge of prosecutions.
Even Piskun, who has challenged every one of his dismissals with the courts, seems to be happy now.
“I am ok with the appointment of Oleksandr Medvedko. I recognize him as the prosecutor-general,” he said on Friday.
The main thing in Ukraine is that no one gets prosecuted, from the past or in the future, so that power can be divided up during backroom deals.
In this sense, not much has changed in the country since the days of Leonid Kuchma, who himself was accused of high level crimes by the opposition and others.
The government and parliamentary majority contain many familiar faces from the Kuchma days.
In addition to the prosecutor-general, Yuschenko’s enemies also control the Interior Ministry, which only last week had sent in special units to keep the president from firing Piskun a second time.
But unlike under Kuchma, Yushchenko now has the support of the State Security Service and the Ministry of Defense – despite the re-appointment of Kuzmuk.
Moreover, the president seems to have learned his lesson from last summer, when he allowed Yanukovych to become premier through the exploitation of infighting among Orange factions.
With new elections scheduled for September 30, the president’s Our Ukraine party looks firmly aligned with the Bloc of Yulia Tymoshenko (BYuT), who supported Yushchenko in his rise to power only to be fired as his first premier in late 2005.
“Today our political presence can change the principles according to which the country’s political order is formed,” Yushchenko announced during a meeting between Our Ukraine and BYuT on Saturday.
If Our Ukraine, BYuT and other democratic parties get enough votes to form a majority, and actually put together a reformist government, Yushchenko might get a chance to appoint a prosecutor-general of his choice, establishing the rule of law for the first time in independent Ukraine’s history.
If not, appointments and other issues of authority will continue to be decided in backdoor barter deals, and the reformists won’t have much to trade.
John Marone, Kyiv Post Senior Journalist, based in Ukraine.
June 4, 2007
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