JOHN MARONE, KYIV
FEAST DURING THE PLAGUE
Ukraine appears to be in the grips of an epidemic, but that hasn’t put a damper on the country’s political buffoonery. Five years ago, during the last presidential election campaign, Ukrainians turned a political revolution into a carnival, and now they are doing the same with a flu outbreak.
Swine Flu exists and it’s dangerous. Moreover, it has either reached Ukraine or soon will. Whether the country’s health care system can cope with a serious outbreak is already in doubt. But as in Alexander Pushkin’s little tragedy, Feast during the Plague, sickness and death only serve as a backdrop to dramatize the affairs of the more privileged classes.
From the confusing flurry of official announcements made over the past week or so, the following can be more or less accepted as facts: Around 100 people in Ukraine have already died of flu in October, according to the Health Ministry. Almost 30, 000 people had been hospitalized as of November 5, which is nearly 5, 000 more than a day earlier. Lastly, almost 4,000 military personnel are suffering from some sort of acute respiratory viral infection, the army reported.
What is less known is that anywhere from 4,000 to 6,000 Ukrainians die of flu every year – many of these deaths presumably among the elderly. Death from flu is actually down in Ukraine this year, although there was an alarming spike in the stats in October.
The Health Ministry has acknowledged that Swine Flu appears to have arrived in Ukraine, as expected. A team from The World Health Organization [WHO], which arrived in country on November 3, is operating under the same assumption.
But it is still not clear whether any of the flu deaths noted above are from Swine Flu. And this hazardous lack of clarity is exactly the kind of setting that Ukrainian carnivals work best in.
You can’t blame the average citizen for donning a gauze mask before going out into the street, or for the stockpiling of lemons and garlic. And, lacking initial foresight, the government was right to order the closure of the nation’s educational institutes and the banning of large public gatherings.
Nevertheless, with another mudslinging presidential election campaign under way, one cannot help but notice the similarities between this year’s flu outbreak and the Orange Revolution of 2005 – two serious national affairs turned into a three-ring political circus. In both cases, the public has been galvanized more as a diversion to political intrigue rather than as participants in some meaningful process.
This isn’t to say that the street demonstrations of late 2004 didn’t affirm democracy in Ukraine, nor that wearing a mask in public this year won’t help prevent infection. But it does mean that someone should be keeping his eye on the ball.
For example, should Kyiv Mayor Leonid Chernovetsky’s proposal to quarantine the capital be interpreted as hysterics or the desperate attempt of an unpopular politician to look useful? Ultimately, the city’s voters will have to decide.
But as during the Orange Revolution, it’s not just the top political players who are looking for a role in the carnival. A group called Femen, which purports to battle sex tourism in Ukraine, released a statement blaming foreigners for infecting their nation with the new flu strain.
All of this is, of course, par for the course in a democracy. Unfortunately, in Ukraine, the politics takes precedence over the most fundamental operation of the country.
One might ask, for example, why the country is so ill-prepared for an outbreak. Warnings about the spread of Swine Flu have been around for a while. In fact, the government allocated USD 6m to prepare for the problem back in April. To date, it’s not clear exactly where this money has gone.
What is clear is that the issue has become a political ping pong among the leading contenders for the nation’s top job. The villain of the Orange Revolution, former prime minister Viktor Yanukovych, is demanding the dismissal of the health minister and a criminal investigation into where this money was spent.
Unlike current Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and President Viktor Yushchenko, Mr. Yanukovych is well placed to criticize the handling of the flu outbreak from the sidelines.
Ms. Tymoshenko’s team was quick to announce that an additional billion hryvnias has been diverted from the state budget to fight flu, but no one seems to know where the money will come from.
President Yushchenko also took advantage of the situation to attack his former Orange ally by suggesting the government has been negligent in its response to the impending epidemic.
“I have addressed the general prosecutor of Ukraine with the request to institute criminal charges of negligence committed by, first of all, the chief sanitary inspector, Kyiv city sanitarian and the officials, who, despite having daily information on the epidemic situation in the country, neglected it in pursuit of political dividends and ambition," he said in a recent national address.
A presidential aid even had the cheek to suggest that the government’s handling of gas contracts with Russia could prolong the flu epidemic.
Other presidential candidates, such as underdog Arseny Yatsenyuk, have called a spade a spade. Appearing on national television, the former speaker and top diplomat suggested that the flu epidemic was being exaggerated to divert people’s attention from more pressing problems.
Indeed, much of the government’s efforts to restore calm are pure populism. For example, citing gouging at Ukrainian pharmacies, Tymoshenko called for the creation of a government drug store chain (?), while parliament passed legislation freezing drug prices at the level of last year. Drug makers were quick to point out that most of the country’s medicine is imported and thus would soon be in shortage.
Lacking any other plan, President Viktor Yushchenko appealed for international help from the international community. Such an appeal may indeed be just what saves Ukraine; however, it also underlies the country’s inability to manage itself.
How ever, the drama ends – with the president declaring a national emergency or the premier successfully riding out the crisis – this year’s flu epidemic has already shown what we can continue to expect from Ukrainian leaders down the road: a feast during the plague.
John Marone, a columnist of Eurasian Home website, Kyiv, Ukraine
November 9, 2009
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