Viktor Yushchenko received a respectful and at times enthusiastic welcome from the Congress yesterday. This is a special honor, as few foreign heads of state have been given such an invitation.
Blog de Connard has some quick observations here. I have to agree that the speech was a bit mundane, but I also feel that the occasion of the speech has more resonance than the speech itself. The call for support for accession to the EU and NATO is by now boilerplate, although the the request for help containing Chernobyl to me was an interesting item to include in such a speech.
What I also found interesting was his pledge to end the media monopoly in Ukraine and solve the Gongadze case. Now, I'm not sure of the translation but it seemed that he had subtly change his rhetoric from saying that the case had been solved to saying that it would be solved.
I had expected higher rhetoric but what we got was more or less a list of requests. It's possible that Yushchenko had decided to make the most of the opportunity and get in as much as possible.
The Guardian is reporting that two former police officers have plead guilty to the murder of Georgiy Gongadze. The confessions don't instill any sort of confidence and will not satisfy those who are demanding answers to various questions.
For instance, why is prosecutor general Pyskun still investigating the case and still in office?
Was his appointment part of a general deal with former president Leonid Kuchma to go quietly in exchange for a promise not to prosecute?
Why wasn't Yuri Kravchenko (Interior Minister, dead by a two-bullet suicide) taken into custody for his safety and for the sake of the investigation?
Why haven't Mykola Melnychenko's tapes been transcribed and published? Speculation is that the tapes (most of which have yet to be heard) contain conversations that would be embarrassing or damaging for Yushchenko.
abdymok posts on the tapegate scandal, saying that Melnychenko is on the run:
the book project, supported by the danish association for investigative journalism, was an attempt find out more about the recordings, melnychenko and the tapegate affair.
in short, the people who evacuated and hid melnychenko in 2000 agreed to talk, show pictures, recall, provide proof, et cetera.
basically, the "investigation" involved sitting down for three months with a tape recorder in starnberg and ostrava coaxing memories, browsing through photographs, diary entries, correspondence, examining discs, recordings etc., drinking beer and reconstructing a chronology.
sbu veteran general valery kravchenko lent spiritual support, only.
the book reports - not spins - the facts, kill-bill style, de-mythologizing the actors in the tapegate scandal.
according to melnychenko, it's all a lie.
if he's right, that means all the stuff published on abdymok is propaganda and wealthy people owe bob lots of money.
For more background, follow his links. (When this is all over, if it ever is, I sure hope that Peter sits right down and writes a book).
The tapes have taken on a Rosetta stone-like quality. While few know what they contain, there is wild speculation as to what actually is on them, who they implicate and who has copies. Russian businessman Boris Berezovsky says he has them and will blow the top right off when and if he publishes them:
Russian emigre tycoon Boris Berezovsky claims that he has the tape recordings made by Mykola Melnychenko, the fugitive former bodyguard of former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, in Kuchma's office in 1999-2000. Many observers believe the recordings may shed light on the murder of journalist Heorhiy Gongadze and secret sales of Ukrainian arms to rogue states such as Iraq and Iran. Berezovsky, ahead of Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko's visit to the United States, has accused Kyiv of being unwilling to solve the Gongadze puzzle. He also hinted that the recordings might cast a shadow on Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In early March Hryhory Omelchenko, who heads the Ukrainian parliamentary commission looking into Gongadze's murder, failed to persuade parliament to hear his report on Gongadze. Speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn said that Yushchenko had asked parliament to postpone the hearing. Omelchenko, who holds Kuchma and Lytvyn responsible for Gongadze's death, accused Yushchenko of having guaranteed immunity to Kuchma -- a charge that Yushchenko indignantly denied. An interview with Volodymyr Tsvil, a former consul in Munich who helped Melnychenko escape from Ukraine in 2000, released on March 17, strengthened suspicions that the recordings might be used to blacken the new authorities. Tsvil claimed that the recordings contain "a lot of conversations of Kuchma with Yushchenko and [Prime Minister Yulia] Tymoshenko, in which they look much worse than they claim to be."
A Tsvil interview from 2002 is here.
But undoubtedly all of us as people concerned for the future of Ukraine, we are all troubled with a question of truth, troubled with the question that would be answered sooner or later, troubled with question of journalists harass, troubled with question of solving crimes. And that today the crime about Georgij Gongadze who was my good friend and whom I knew well, and whom I respected as a journalist, has not been solved, that's also, I think, a big defect of the law-enforcement agencies, especially the General Prosecutor Office, which not once said things differently, thus setting up the official power, setting up the President and giving the chance for people to think and make assumptions that the truth exists, but no one is interested in it, neither America, nor Europe, nor Moscow.
Yushchenko
has charged that his poisoning was perpetrated by the Kuchma regime
with the support of Putin. Berezovsky is saying that "I intend to
publish the part of the recordings that deals with relations between
the previous Ukrainian government and the Russian government
implicating both in corruption."
Prosecutors have also reopened the case of the 1999 death of opposition leader Vyacheslav Chornovil.
Pressure has mounted on Viktor Yushchenko since becoming president in January to order a new investigation into the death of Chornovil, who was killed instantly on March 25, 1999, when car he was riding in slammed into the side of a truck.
Authorities said it was an accident but doubts grew when the government refused to investigate any other possibility and quickly granted amnesty to the truck driver, dashing hopes for an open trial. A video-recorded confession of alleged police involvement surfaced, but then was mysteriously misplaced.
Yushchenko's
American adventure is coming to and end and he faces mounting questions
when he returns home. I wrote yesterday that we should give him a
moment. The moment has passed. Time to get back to work.
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