JOHN MARONE, KYIV
SAVING THE UKRAINIAN PRESIDENT’S FACE
Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko has lost a lot since the heady days of his country’s Orange Revolution – executive power (due to constitutional changes), voter support (due to endless infighting) and international prestige (for lack of reform). More recently, his reputation as a martyr for democracy has also come under threat.
This last laurel was conferred upon Mr. Yushchenko when his face was disfigured by dioxin poisoning during his campaign for the presidency in 2004.
Now, facing re-election in a year’s time, Yushchenko is being accused of inventing his poisoning – one of the seminal events in Ukraine’s democracy movement, which galvanized public opinion at home and abroad in support of the Orange leader’s promises of reform.
And the person most responsible for smearing Yushchenko’s victim status is not a member of the old guard of former President Leonid Kuchma, or a representative of one of the presidential hopefuls currently challenging Yushchenko’s re-election bid.
It is a lawmaker in the faction that the president himself endorsed in the last parliamentary elections, a politician who stood beside Yushchenko during his long and trying march to power the first time around.
David Zhvaniya, who can be seen in summer-vacation photos with the Yushchenko family, is now one of their greatest detractors.
Mr. Zhvaniya, who was with Yushchenko on the night he is thought to have been poisoned, recently told the BBC that Yushchenko had merely suffered from food poisoning.
“It was common food poisoning. The diagnosis was made the first day. These kinds of poisonings happen a lot, to every third person in the world,” Zhvaniya said.
“It was a stomach infection. On the day that he went to the doctor, they all came to this same conclusion. I was there. Then they decided that he should fly to Austria [for medical care]. I was opposed ... because the proposed clinic had nothing to do with stomach infections. It was a cardiologic center,” he said.
In a different interview, with a Ukrainian publication, Zhvaniya sowed doubt on the president’s belief that he was poisoned during a dinner meeting with the head of the country’s security service (SBU) at the time, Ihor Smeshko.
Zhvaniya, who by his own admission organized the September-5 meeting between Smeshko and Yushchenko at another SBU official’s dacha, told journalists that Yushchenko had partaken in an earlier meal just before the Smeshko visit, and before that had stopped off at the home of a completely unknown tinkerer where the president downed no small quantity of moonshine.
Zhvaniya further claimed that all subsequent tests showing that Yushchchenko had been poisoned by dioxide were falsified and that the Orange campaign team had thought up the poisoning version for political gain.
However, Yushchenko was not only positively tested for dioxine poisoning in Austria, but his blood sample was tested by three different laboratories in Belgium, Germany and the UK, all of which came to the same conclusion.
Yushchenko’s attorney, Mykola Poludenny, said in a recent media interview that despite being stalled in their efforts by the Prosecutor General’s Office at the time, officials involved in the testing took every precaution to guarantee that the results were not compromised at any stage of the process.
Western specialists were not only able to determine that Yushchenko had been poisoned by dioxide, but also when the poisoning happened – on September 5.
In the wake of Zhvaniya’s comments, his own faction, Our Ukraine-People's Self Defense, accused the lawmaker of "exceeding the limits of decency."
“In and of itself, the attempt to sow doubt on the poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko, which shocked the world, and pretend that the crime never happened, shows that Mr. Zhvaniya, in his public rhetoric, has sunk to the level of the worst kind under Kuchma,” reads a statement released by the faction.
The Prosecutor-General’s Office, which is still ‘investigating’ the poisoning after nearly four years, accused Zhvaniya of contradicting his own earlier testimony.
The PGO’s press service released a statement last month in which it said, “The poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko has been irrefutably proven by investigators and court medical experts; therefore, David Zhvaniya’s statements cannot be true; they contradict his early affirmations and are compromising the objective investigation of this crime.”
The PGO further accused Zhvaniya of using his lawmaker immunity to ignore prosecutors’ requests that he show up for further questioning.
In short, despite the public attention that he has been able to command, Mr. Zhvaniya’s credibility is highly suspect.
But, unfortunately, so is virtualy every other political figure's credibility in Ukraine.
For example, how do people like Zhvaniya get on the lists of parties endorsed by the president? For that matter, how does the president manage to make so many ‘friends’ into enemies?
Secondly, if the PGO is so certain that Yushchenko was poisoned, why have they been unable to charge anyone for almost four years? It’s the president who appoints the prosecutor-general, including the one who hampered his case back in 2005 and his sucessors who have continued to hold up numerous other high-profile crimes.
Since at least last year, the president himself has claimed to know who poisoned him but declined to enlighten the rest of us.
“The investigation is in its final stage,” the president told journalists in Dnipropetrovsk last September.
More recently, in an interview with an Austrian newspaper, Mr. Yushchenko said that three individuals had masterminded his poisoning and were hiding in Russia, where they had been given citizenship, while Ukraine continues to request their extradition.
In addition, Russia is one of three countries which make the dioxin found in Yushchenko’s blood. But unlike the other two countries, the UK and the US, Russia has yet to provide convincing evidence that the poison did not come from there.
Yushchenko has said that he personally asked Putin to check into the matter but to no avail.
The Ukrainian president also said the investigation cannot go forward without the testimony of the three fugitives.
Although Zhvaniya’s attempts to dismiss the plainly visible scars on Yushchenko’s face are ludicrous if not profane, it is equally far fetched to believe that the investigation is being held up by Russia alone.
According to a recent poll, only 36 percent of Ukrainians believe Yushchenko was purposely poisoned.
If Yushchenko wants people to again believe that he really was poisoned for his dedication to democracy, he can start by naming the people who poisoned him.
It may not get him re-elected or even return him the hero status that he enjoyed immediately after the Orange Revolution, but it could save his face.
John Marone, a columnist of Eurasian Home website, Kyiv, Ukraine
July 15, 2008
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