Canned Democracy

Halya Coynash

It was a bad week for democracy in Ukraine with formal democratic processes as close to the real thing as canned laughter on a TV show to genuine mirth.

The door to Europe, and specifically the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement was all but slammed shut by the rejection on Wednesday of former Interior Minister Yury Lutsenko’s cassation appeal.  Ukraine’s High Specialized Court upheld the outcome of a trial, which, as repeatedly pointed out by the EU and the democratic community, “did not respect international standards as regards fair, transparent and independent legal processes.”

Rule of law was just as removed from a courtroom in Zaporizhzhya, which on 2 April convicted two former sacristans of the Svyatopokrovsk Church and the brother of one of them to 15 and 14-year prison sentences over the bomb blast in the Church on 28 July 2010.  Judge Minasov ignored the fact that there was no evidence in the case aside from multiple “confessions” made without proper defence, and almost certainly under physical and psychological pressure.  The confirmation of this by two forensic psychologists was ignored, while a third report which interpreted smiles, gestures etc during the night interrogations as evidence of an “inclination to crime”  was quoted in detail in the judgement.  Minasov had rejected applications to have all forensic psychologists summoned to give evidence.  The list of irregularities in this case is as long as that in the trial of Lutsenko, and widely believed to be linked with the fact that President Yanukovych at the time demanded arrests within the week.

In both these cases, as well as the ongoing attempt to charge former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko with murder, few believe that the judges – or prosecutor – in the cases are acting autonomously.

The case against Tymoshenko encountered a bump on 2 April with a key witness Serhiy Taruta testifying that at the time of the killing of MP and businessman Shcherban, there was no conflict between him and Tymoshenko.

The case is so dodgy that inconvenient bleeps may not overly worry those pulling the strings.  Renat Kuzmin, Deputy Prosecutor General, whose trips abroad to justify the trials of opposition leaders are organized by such PR companies as Burson-Marsteller, will simply accuse all critics, including authoritative western observers of defamation if they suggest any political motivation.

There were plenty of other uncomfortable subjects during the week.  They included the President’s income declaration which, for the second year in a row, declared 15 and a half million UAH in “royalties.”  The latter must be understood very loosely since the President did not publish a single word in 2012.  In fact, had he published even one book the royalties received per word would quite possibly outdo many international bestseller writers. The amount would also instantly bankrupt most publishing houses, at least in Ukraine.  Not, however, the Donetsk publisher Novy Svit which in 2011 paid 16.4 million UAH for all President Yanukovych’s works, past, present and future.  It now transpires that this was only the first instalment of an ongoing fee.

The use of the rightwing VO Svoboda Party to present the Party of the Regions as antidote to creeping fascism and xenophobia had a novel application on Wednesday with a number of Svoboda activists detained by police in Kyiv and interrogated for many hours.  The events had seemed to promise high drama with a Party of the Regions MP Iryna Horina reporting on Tuesday that after the close of the Verkhovna Rada’s evening session she and other women MPs had been pelted with snowballs, ice and dirt by members of a political protest.  She later apparently claimed that there had been an attempt to kill her.

A criminal investigation is underway, and the police felt no need to follow the restrictions of the new Criminal Procedure Code on how many hours witnesses can be interrogated. From a PR point of view, a trial would be as much of a loser as trying now to bring charges of hooliganism against the young man who so famously felled the then presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovych with an egg in 2004.

Thursday was a full-on day for Ukraine’s MPs though few of the events bore much relation to parliamentary democracy.  With the opposition continuing to block the Verkhovna Rada tribune, the Party of the Regions, Communists and others who vote with the government decided to attempt a kind of outreach parliament – in the premises of the parliamentary committees on Bankova St.   There was supposedly a vote on this with 244 in favour (226 is a simple majority), however leader of the Batkivshchyna faction in parliament, Arseny Yatsenyuk asserted that only 168 MPs were actually present.

It was one side’s word against the other’s since opposition MPs were not allowed into the building on Bankova St.

Interpretation of the Parliamentary Regulations also depends on which side you listen to, and how one is to understand “exceptional circumstances”.

This is of enormous importance since the pro-government MPs (in person, or in name and MP card alone) managed to vote on 22 laws, one of which changed the 2013 State Budget.  All of this without open discussion and without the presence of the opposition who numerically cannot override a government vote, but can at least point to dangers in the laws passed.

What is particularly disturbing is that analysts asked by the Deutsche Welle Ukrainian Service considered the votes to be illegitimate, but were not at all confident that they would be revoked. Former MP Yury Klyuchkovsky pointed out that there had been similar situations during the 2000s and the laws passed, however dubiously, remained in force.  The Constitutional Court then refused to consider submissions from MPs asking for the laws to be declared unconstitutional.  In this regard it’s worth noting that the Constitutional Court in March for the fourth time refused to consider the highly controversial language law signed into force by President Yanukovych in August 2012.  This law effectively ignores the constitutional norm stipulating that Ukrainian is the sole official language and significantly increases the role of the Russian language.

Another specific smell from Ukraine’s parliamentarianism comes from turncoats or, in the Ukrainian, “tushki” (carcases).  On Thursday Speaker Rybak announced that four Batkivshchyna faction MPs had changed sides.  Interpretation of motives and / or incentives will inevitably depend on whose version you trust, however the phenomenon cannot under any circumstances be considered healthy.

It is also difficult to see it as democratic. Even during the last elections where 50% of the candidates entered parliament on party lists and 50% stood for election on an individual basis, the vast majority of voters would have voted for the party.

If MPs can then choose where the grass for them is greener, the voters’ electoral choice is rendered meaningless, like so many other fundamental components of democracy increasingly treated as cosmetic props.

Raiders’ State

Mykola Riabchuk

This time, I have to start with a frank disclosure. For 40 years, I have been a faithful reader of the Kyiv-based journal “Vsesvit” (“The World”). For more than 30 years, I have been one of its contributors. For two decades, I have been a staff editor there, ending my career in 1994 as a deputy editor-in-chief. And today, after moving to academia, I still remain a committed reader, author, and member of the editorial board.

“Vsesvit” is an independent journal, with very limited resources acquired painstakingly from various grants, but with high and well-grounded ambitions: to promote world culture and literature in Ukrainian translations. I greatly respect all the people who work for “Vsesvit” – for a meager salary and symbolical royalties but also for an encouraging feeling of doing something good and important.

A few days ago, I learned that on April 26, a group of unidentified individuals broke into the “Vsesvit” office at the Hrushevsky Street, ironically located next to the Ukrainian parliament and Cabinet of Ministers and not very far from the President’s administration.  The intruders demanded that Chief Editor Oleh Mykytenko vacate the premises and renounce his claim to the office legally owned by the Vsesvit Publishing Company. They behaved in an extremely rough fashion, tried to damage Vsesvit property, and threatened personnel with further repercussions if they did not step down. Some suggested they were acting on behalf of a certain Valeri Kharlim, an MP from the Party of Regions (little surprise), protected reportedly by the first vice Prime-Minister Valeri Khoroshkovsky. They argued they had their own documented claims to the Vsesvit property, which were apparently faked but convincing enough from the point of view of Ukraine’s thoroughly corrupted and subservient courts (
http://khpg.org/index.php?id=1335554817
).

The story is hardly unique and certainly not the most eye-catching against the background of some other events in Ukraine that have recently drawn public attention. Whereas mass media discuss the alleged beating of Yulia Tymoshenko by prison guards and four mysterious blasts in Dnipropetrovsk, attributed to unspecified “terrorists,” the raiders’ attacks on property in Yanukovych’s Ukraine is a daily practice that evokes little international attention, except for the cases where foreign companies are involved and western embassies interfere.

“Raiding,” as Andrew Rettman defines it, “is a form of hostile take-over in which someone bribes or blackmails courts to enforce a bogus claim against a profitable business. It can involve a van-full of balaclava-wearing men breaking into your office to tell you that you are no longer the owner. In extreme cases it can involve people shooting at your staff. Most victims are small-and-medium-sized Ukrainian firms in the agricultural sector. But foreign companies are not immune.” Indeed, even the steel giant Arcelor Mittal that purchased unwisely the Kryvorizhstal mill for $5 billion from the previous government, became four years later a target of coordinated raiders’ attacks and pressure from the authorities (
http://euobserver.com/24/114646
).

“This problem,” one expert contends, “is on the increase and it is common knowledge that it cannot happen without collusion from the authorities.” To prove this claim, Andrew Rettman refers to Transparency International’s latest corruption ranking in which Ukraine dropped 18 places and now ranks below Nigeria. The European Business Association (EBA) has also lowered Ukraine significantly in its index of investment attractiveness. “You cannot protect your legitimate interests in the courts,” the EBA director Anna Derevyanko says. “This comes up in many conversations with potential investors. It makes them reluctant to go ahead.”

Not surprisingly, not only foreigners but also Ukrainian businessmen prefer to invest their money abroad rather than in Ukraine. Small-and-medium-sized companies have little choice, however, in this regard. And even less options are at stake for cultural journals. All of them seem helpless vis-à-vis powerful gangsters and unscrupulous government: intertwined and interconnected, nearly fused in Ukraine into one body. One by one, they are raided and racketeered, raped and pillaged, even though there are thousands of them, and all they need for successful resistance is unity and solidarity. Two years ago, we Ukrainians allowed the raiders to take over unlawfully the parliament and the government. Now, we allow them to destroy and subdue us gradually, one by one, one business after another. “Vsesvit” has never been a political journal. Its editor has always believed, perhaps sincerely, that culture is universal, and any government is able to appreciate it as a much-needed public good. He was wrong. Ukraine has a government that appreciates only brute force, endless amounts of money, and cynical lies.

Much of the international criticism of Ukrainian authorities was expressed within the past two years. Their typical reaction can be graphically exemplified by a recent decision of the ruling Party of Regions (PoR) to hire one of the world’s largest corporate communications companies Burson-Marsteller to whitewash the regime. Or, as Robert Mack, a senior manager at Burson-Marsteller, explained it: “Our brief is to help the PoR communicate its activities as the governing party of Ukraine, as well as to help it explain better its position on the Yulia Tymoshenko case.” Less euphemistically, it means a task to intensify a smear campaign against former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and to tame the international criticism of the Ukrainian authorities, especially the president who has become, since last year, virtually an international pariah (
http://euobserver.com/24/116076
).

They seem to believe – naively or, rather, arrogantly – that money can fix any problem. And if it is insufficient, bigger money is needed to settle everything. Burson-Marsteller might be a good choice for a government in big trouble. In the past, “the PR company was employed by the Nigerian government to discredit reports of genocide during the Biafran war, the Argentinian junta after the disappearance of 35,000 civilians, and the Indonesian government after the massacres in East Timor. It also worked to improve the image of the late Romanian president Nicolae Ceausescu and the Saudi royal family” (
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2002/jan/08/gm.activists
).

One may recollect here also Leonid Kuchma’s attempt to rescue his image after the “tapegate” with the assistance of similar whitewashers. What all these exclusive clients of PR companies fail to understand – either naively or perhaps arrogantly – is that they can win many battles: against Tymoshenko, Lutsenko, “Vsesvit”, or even Arcelor Mittal. But they can never win the war for the truth and for the real place they occupy in history.

 

LIKE FATHERS, LIKE SONS

Mykola Riabchuk

Recently, 18-year-old Oksana Makar was beaten and raped by three drunken youngsters in the South Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv. To hide the crime, the miscreants tied her up and set her on fire. Oksana later died in hospital from horrendous burns.

The city was shocked and hundreds of people took to the streets to protest after a rumor spread that the culprits had been released, placed under house arrest, and were likely to avoid punishment, which typically happens in Ukraine when the children of big bosses and wealthy businessmen are involved in crimes.

The rumors proved unfounded, but people have become so accustomed to daily lawlessness and the rampant impunity of the strong and wealthy that they tend, naturally, to overreact.

A few years ago, Dmytro Rud, the 25-year-old son of the Dnipropetrovsk prosecutor, ran down three women at a marked road crossing and disappeared after being placed under house arrest. Serhy Kalynovsky, the 23-year-old son of a rich oil trader, crashed at high speed into a parked car containing two passengers, killed both, and eventually escaped from the hospital and took a chartered plane to Israel. Oleksandr Shpyrko, the son of a colonel of the National Security Service in Odesa, heavily drunk, plowed into a boat on his scooter killing one person and injuring three. Again, as the typical story goes, he was released on probation and, after due pressure on victims, witnesses, investigators and judges, received a four-year suspended sentence, later repealed by an amnesty [http://tsn.ua/ukrayina/mazhorni-vitivki-yak-diti-vplivovih-batkiv-unikayut-pravosuddya.html].

By late 2010, as such tendencies became all too obvious, I began to collect the stories of violent crimes committed by Ukrainian VIPs and, especially, their offspring. The list is certainly not exhaustive since I picked up the stories occasionally, inter alia, while searching materials for different projects and screening only a handful of sources. Yet, having gathered about a hundred stories of this kind in less than a year, I found out it tempting to classify them and to denote some distinct features and tendencies.

First of all, the lion’s share of violent incidents in which VIPs and their progenies are involved pertains to speeding (usually in a state of drunkenness), or to some restaurant and post-restaurant brawls (again most frequently with the perpetrators in an inebriated condition). Predictably, young people are much more prominent in this activity, partly because of the age and respective hormones, and partly because their progenitors use (as a rule) personal drivers and bodyguards, in order to preclude such problems.

So, when a minor oligarch and MP from Luhansk, Volodymyr Landyk, happened to be stopped by a traffic policeman because his car was traveling at double the speed limit, he had no need to contest the charge. It sufficed to order his bodyguard: “Go and sort him out!” (The Russian form is much cruder: “Пойди въeби его”) [http://gazeta.ua/articles/374929)] and the issue was settled. The policeman ended up in a hospital with concussion and bruises to his chest, whereas Mr. Landyk swore solemnly that nothing illegal had occurred: “The injuries he has got, well, he had probably inflicted them upon himself, no one beat him!” (“Ті травми, які він отримав, напевно, завдав сам собі, ніхто його не бив!”).

This spectacular chutzpah seems to be the Party of Region’s trademark. Back in 2010, after the bloody melee in the parliament, when oppositionists blocked the podium protesting procedural violations and Mr. Landyk’s colleagues broke their noses in response, Mykhaylo Chchetov, the informal “director” of the Party’s parliamentary faction, brashly explained the incident to the journalists: “There was no assault. Maybe they [hospitalized oppositionists] beat their heads [against a wall] themselves and now decided to blame it on us.” («Драки никакой не было… Может, они сами головой бились, а теперь на нас сваливают” [http://glavred.info/archive/2010/12/17/170622-9.html].

In any case, whenever senior VIPs or their junior offspring are involved in killing a pedestrian or beating a commoner, the pattern of investigation and the subsequent findings are virtually the same. The speed of their cars is always recognized as being within the permissible limits and is never found to be 150-200 km per hour, the speed at which they usually drive. Alcohol is never found in their blood, even though witnesses often attest that they are barely able to speak or even stand. All of them are placed on probation, even though many fled from the accident scene rather than help the victim. In every case, the victims’ relatives and victims themselves (if alive) are intimidated or bribed or both, to withdraw their claims [http://gazeta.ua/articles/403732]. And witnesses are pressed by both the defendants and investigators to reconsider their earlier testimonies or merely to forget some details [http://gazeta.ua/articles/375925].

Another habitual feature of all these stories is their almost exclusive localization in Southeastern Ukraine—the area firmly controlled by the Party of Regions, alongside the capital city of Kyiv where an enormous number of national VIPs is ominously concentrated. It is no accident that all the heroes of these stories are either members of the Party of Regions or their close political-cum-business associates. The only story in my collection that occurred in the West of the country refers to a young man and his cronies at Kalush, Ivano-Frankivsk region, who tried to solve a road incident with the help of gas and traumatic [rubber bullet] pistols. Remarkably, the main culprit, yet again, was the son of the local Party of Regions MP Volodymyr Lychuk.

All these youngsters, like their parents, are strongly convinced that might is right. And they are very cognizant of the open secret of who holds the real power in this country and how. They have no doubt that the law, or whatever this silly word may mean in Ukraine, is on their side. Actually, it is them and their parents and friends who own it. They have captured the state like an alien army, and can pillage it now as they wish.

Police, as a rule, avoid confrontations with these new landlords and their bubbling offspring. (The poor fellow from Luhansk who dared to stop Mr. Landyk was an exception: his singular bravery, or perhaps naivety, would rarely be replicated by anyone, including himself.) One can see in this video how reluctant they are to detain an aggressive youngster whose heavily inebriated monologue sounds like a motto for his entire generation:

“I’m Vladimir Kryvko, f…! Get off my way, f…! I’m having a good time, as I like it. It’s up to me, f…, either to smell coke, or inject, or drink, or drive, or f…, or shoot. I’m Vladimr Kryvko! Any questions?” ["Я - Володимир Кривко, бл... ь! Відійдіть з моєї дороги, бл... ь! Я торчу, відпочиваю як я хочу. Я хочу, бл... ь, нюхаю кокаїн, хочу колюсь, хочу п'ю, хочу їду на машині, хочу е...у, хочу стріляю. Я Володимир Кривко! - Є питання?" [http://gazeta.ua/articles/425850)].

Last year, a big scandal occurred in Luhansk when Roman Landyk, a deputy of the city council and, yes, the son of the same Volodymyr Landyk whose bodyguard knocked out the traffic policeman, brutally attacked a young woman in a night club because she refused his gentle offer to have a good time with him at some other place [http://www.unian.net/ukr/news/news-444915.html]. The story would have probably have had no consequences for the junior, just as the earlier incident had had no impact on his father. But, unfortunately for him, it was recorded on camera and placed on the Internet. The authorities had to react, so they brought the playboy to court and sentenced him to three years in prison – suspended, despite the fact he had never repented. On the contrary, he constantly and openly threatened the victim and journalists with revenge, behavior that in a normal country may have cost him more than three years in prison. Today, the cheerful owner of a 230,000 Euro Bentley Continental needs only to wait for the next pardon (likely in August, by Independence Day) and then try to fulfill all his promises and concealed desires, perhaps with a better luck, i.e. no cameras around.

This assumption may sound somewhat grotesque, but all those who know the story of Dmytro Kravets, the son of a member of the Odesa regional council (one can guess from which party), would certainly recognize it as quite common. This car-lover had killed, at high speed, a young man and seriously mutilated his partner. The prosecutor (under the Orange government) demanded six years in prison for him but the government changed meantime, and the speedster received a pardon. What makes the story even more poignant is that Mr. Kravets Jr. had already been pardoned twice after receiving minor sentences for stealing 16 (!) cars, just for fun [http://tsn.ua/ukrayina/mazhorni-vitivki-yak-diti-vplivovih-batkiv-unikayut-pravosuddya.html].

One should not be surprised, however, by the leniency of Ukrainian judges, if they belong to the same caste as their VIP clients (and patrons). They cooperate in a mutually beneficial enterprise of state capture and looting. And in most cases, they expose the same love for a dolce vita and disrespect for the law. My favorite story of this kind is that of Dmytro Chernushenko, a former deputy of the Odesa city council and, now, a consultant for the anti-corruption (!) committee in the Ukrainian parliament. His drift to the capital coincided, remarkably, with his father’s career jump from the position of a judge in Odesa to the head of the Court of Appeal in Kyiv. Both events (and many more of the sort) coincided with Yanukovych’s ascendancy to power.

Last July, a young lawyer with his girlfriend who also appeared to be a member of the legal profession, a judge of the district court in Kyiv, went to a nightclub in Odesa in which all visitors were required to pass the metal detector gate. The pair refused and, reportedly tipsy, began a brawl with the club personnel. When the police arrived, the “Kyiv lawyers” badmouthed them with obscenities and promised all would be fired. The journalists also got their portion of slander: “I don’t give a s…t whether you’re journalists,” the young district judge put it elegantly, “You will pay for this!”

“We cannot do anything,” a police officer confessed to journalists, under conditions of anonymity, “If we detain them, we would have a lot of trouble. The most we can do is compile a protocol and charge them a minor fine for petty hooliganism…. We encounter problems like this all the time. Children of judges, MPs, top officials behave here like hoodlums. They even spit on the police. They can beat anybody and will be released regardless.” [“Сынки судей, чиновников и депутатов ведут себя в Аркадии, как последние хамы. Плюют даже на милицию. Могут избить любого - все равно их отпустят" (http://zadonbass.org/news/crime/message_33711)%5D.

It is depressing even to read the titles of these stories: “Policeman in Kyiv charged 225 hryvna [$28] for killing a mother with a child at a street crossing” [http://gazeta.ua/articles/375237]; “Judge from Kupyansk [Kharkiv region] who killed two people with his Jeep is acquitted” [http://gazeta.ua/articles/402656]; “A judge from Luhansk who killed a women with a boy at a street crossing is promoted to the High Court” [http://blogs.pravda.com.ua/authors/svirko/4d486d5f00cab/] ; “A young member of the Valky city council [Kharkiv region] kicked a 17-year-old girl” (the story is very similar to that of Mr. Landyk Jr., with the only difference that here the hero’s father, the head of the local council, did not try to excuse his scion: “He drinks too much. We tried to cure him but in vain. He is 26 years old, all I can do is give him a good telling off” [http://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2011/10/24/6698926/].

Perhaps the ugliest story in this collection of the lawlessness that reigns supreme in Ukraine comes from the recent publication in Kyiv Post about three mobsters who, back in 2007, kidnapped a man’s business partner-cum-rival, tortured him for three days, and then, as the story relates, “tied an iron radiator battery to his back and tossed him over a bridge into a Dnipro River canal with the words: “Say hello to [Jacques] Cousteau!”

Only one of the killers, Oleksander Kudrin, was convicted for intentional murder and received a seven-year prison sentence, exactly like Yulia Tymoshenko for her unfortunate gas contracts with Putin. Two other accomplices, Serhiy Levchenko and the alleged ringleader Serhiy Demishkan, were given milder sentences on the lesser charges ofkidnapping and concealing a crime. District judge Volodymyr Yeremenko provided this remarkable revelation about the possible usage of heating radiators tied to victims’ backs: “There was no intent of premeditated murder,” he told the journalists. “They (the culprits) wanted to take him (the victim) to a notary public… Perhaps their actions led to accidental manslaughter” [http://www.kyivpost.com/news/nation/detail/122175/].

However strange the court decision, a real miracle happened in December 2010, when a Kyiv appellate court judge ordered an additional investigation into the case and freed Mr. Demishkan with a suspended sentence. The reason for the court’s lenience was very simple: Volodymyr Demishkan, Serhiy’s father, was the head of the state roadway service Ukravtodor and a good friend of the incumbent president Viktor Yanukovych.

Demishkan Senior deserves a book to himself, but it requires a genre that I would rather leave for Ukrainian followers of Mario Puso or Martin Scorsese. Suffice it to say that he is cofounder (with Messrs. Yuri Boyko and Serhiy Tulub, the incumbent and former ministers of fuel and energy) of the Society of the Hunters and Fishermen “Cedar,” patronized by the chief hunter of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych. Such patronage pays off: at the end of last year, “Cedar” received 9,000 hectares of highly valuable reserve lands in Crimea at cut-price rates [http://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2011/12/26/6868443/].

To Mr. Yanukovych’s credit, neither of his two sons is alleged to have beaten traffic police or uncooperative girls, or to have tied radiators to the backs of their political rivals or business competitors. There was a minor incident with Viktor Yanukovych Jr. last year when journalists filmed him roaring drunk in the street and cursing with his full vocabulary. He did not asault anyone, however, nor even sue, though he threatened to do so after the video was placed on Youtube. Both he and his older brother Oleksandr are serious statesmen and businesmen (in Ukraine it is a normal combination), with personal bodyguards and therefore the state apparatus that can do the dirty jobs rather than they themselves [http://obkom.net.ua/articles/2012-03/02.1713.shtml].

Oleksandr Yanukovych came to prominence as the alleged shadow owner of “Tantalit,” a murky offshore company that lends the president the estate on which his opulent residency is located, as well as a helicopter and other facilities—using taxpayers’ money, of course, and doubtless at exorbitant prices [http://www.pravda.com.ua/articles/2011/11/21/6773868/].

This is how the pyramid ends. Or, rather, begins. And everything one sees at the bottom is just a reflection of what is happening at the top.