[Ohio UZO News] AP; KP (2); US Senate Ukraine resolution

[Deychak, Orest]

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Ukraine rejects Russian proposal in Yushchenko poisoning investigation 

By MARIA DANILOVA 

Associated Press Writer

19 September 2007

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - Ukraine has rejected a Russian proposal on how to determine the origin of the poison that sickened President Viktor Yushchenko three years ago, officials said Wednesday. 

Yushchenko, who was a leader of the political opposition at the time, was poisoned with dioxin during the 2004 presidential election campaign, disfiguring his face. No arrests have been made, but suspicions of Russian involvement persist -- both because Yushchenko was running against a Kremlin-backed candidate and because Russia is one of four countries that produces the specific formula of dioxin used against him. 

Although the dioxin from all four countries is chemically identical, differences in the manufacturing process yield various byproducts; testing samples from each country for these byproducts could determine the origin of the dioxin found in Yushchenko. 

Three countries that produce this type of dioxin -- Britain, Canada and the United States -- have submitted samples to Ukraine for testing, investigators say, but Russia has refused. This month it offered to test samples of its dioxin in Russia and report the results to Ukraine. 

The Ukrainian Prosecutor General's office rejected that offer this week, and again asked Russia to let the test be conducted in Ukraine, a spokesman said. 

"Under Ukrainian law, the tests will only be valid if they are conducted on Ukrainian territory," spokesman Yuriy Boychenko said. 

Yushchenko has complained that Russia was stalling the investigation by refusing to provide the dioxin samples and hand over key suspects. Ukrainian authorities have not named any suspects, but Yushchenko has said the suspects are hiding out in Russia. 

On Wednesday, he said prosecutors would travel soon to Russia to meet with their counterparts, a visit he said he hoped would solve the stalemate. 

"Maybe in the course of that dialogue negotiations will be concluded concerning the tests of dioxin which is produced in the Russian Federation and holding accountable those people who are hiding in the Russian Federation," he told reporters. 

The Kremlin strongly backed Yushchenko's rival, Viktor Yanukovych, in the bitterly contested 2004 presidential election, which deepened rifts between Moscow and the West. Yanukovych was initially declared the winner. Massive street protests -- dubbed the Orange Revolution -- broke out, and the Supreme Court threw out the results on grounds of fraud. Yushchenko won a court-ordered repeat vote. 

Yushchenko has hinted that he knows those responsible for the poisoning. While refraining from naming the alleged culprits until the investigation is over, he has hinted that the poisoning could have been masterminded from outside the country. 


Kyiv Post


Millions of voters face ballot woes


by Stephen Bandera, Kyiv Post Editor
Sep 19 2007

Electoral falsifications may play crucial role in dead-heat election

Problems with electoral law can lead to nearly a million Ukrainians losing the right to vote and have created additional opportunities for falsification in the Sept. 30 vote for parliamentary seats, analysts said.

The new electoral provisions are designed to prevent the millions of falsified votes that sparked mass protests in a 2004 presidential contest dubbed the Orange Revolution. In the second round of the presidential race in 2004, 2.8 million ballots were rigged, according to the Committee of Voters of Ukraine.

But the changes may see parties lose – or steal – crucial points in a tight race between the three front-runners: Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich’s Party of Regions, opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko’s Byut bloc, and Our Ukraine-Peoples’ Self-Defense, which is loyal to President Viktor Yushchenko.

“This is a battle for 300,000 to 400,000 votes that will determine who will win enough of the few seats required to form the majority in the next parliament,” said elections administration expert and former Member of Parliament Volodymyr Kovtunets.

Sociologists showed between three and seven parties, including the Communists crossing the three percent qualifying barrier for seats in parliament. More than ten percent of voters were undecided in early September before a publication ban on poll results came into effect last week.

A million votes represent approximately four percent in the final tally. With the so-called Orange (BYuT and OUPSD) and Blue coalition (Regions) forces in a dead heat, the “golden share” of seats will determine who will make or break a coalition in the next Rada. Polls show that several political camps have a chance of landing the kingmaker position, namely OUPSD, the bloc of former parliamentary speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn, and the Communist party.

 85 percent suspicious

In its weekly election monitoring report, the CVU election watchdog expressed concern about “the declarations by politicians and sociologists concerning very high voter turnout in separate regions. According to CVU estimates, the voter turnout will be between 60 to 70 percent.”

Ballot stuffing and multiple voting by certain voters is a concern.

“If voter turnout at separate polling stations will be higher than 85 percent then the CVU will conduct a factual verification of voters concerning the reality of their voting.”

 Falsification versus Disenfranchisement

Certain categories of citizens will not be able to cast their ballots due to changes in electoral law. These include elderly and disabled people who are immobile and live in distant villages. Voters entering the country after Sept. 27 will not be able to cast their ballot; students and migrant workers who are not at home on Election Day will not be able to vote.

CVU spokesperson Oleksandr Chernenko said that these measures, together with mistakes in voter lists, can result in 1.5 million voters losing the right to vote on Election Day.

 Voting at home

On Sept. 30 at least 102,000 of more than 450,000 polling station commissioners will leave the premises of their stations to conduct what is known as mobile-voting or voting-at-home – a major source of alleged electoral falsification in the 2004 presidential race.  The commissioners will get into a car with mini ballot boxes to collect the votes of immobile persons who are bound to their homes due to age or illness.

Mobile-voting – as high as thirty percent at polling stations in Mykolayiv and Donetsk regions during the fraud-ridden presidential elections in 2004 – is potentially a major source of falsification, according to Kovtunets.

“The decisions on who votes at home are ultimately made at the polling station level,” Kovtunets explained. “If we see that more than three percent of total votes at urban polling stations were cast ‘at home’ that will give us reason to be suspect.”

He said that up to 30 percent of elderly people unable to move from their homes in the country’s distant villages will not be able to vote on Sept. 30 if the mobile voting groups do not visit them.

Kovtunets said that the race for the Rada is so close that false votes can decide the balance: “You have more than 33,000 polling stations – ten false ‘votes-at-home’ or ten ballots stuffed in the ballot box at each station – nobody will detect falsification,” Kovtunets said, adding that all parties are responsible for electoral funny-business to varying degrees.

“CVU observers have found an abnormally high number of voters who want to vote at home in certain regions. Although these incidents are few, they show that falsifications are being prepared.

In Kharkiv region the CVU found that the number of Ukrainians requesting voting at home is between 2 to 3 percent, while in two districts of the regions that number reaches 10 percent.

“A large number of ‘dead souls’ were found in the voter lists for the city of Lozova [in Kharkiv region],” according to the report, “this confirms information that the city’s government is preparing a technology to vote for these ‘voters.’”

In the last elections, more than 1.1 million voters applied to cast their ballots at home. After voting was done more than 950,000 had voted from their place of residence – nearly 4 percent of the total final vote tally.

 Voters returning home

The Ministry of Internal Affairs performed a pre-election sweep of homes to verify residency records.  Local police officers randomly checked 890,000 apartments from June to August of this year, the ministry’s press service reported on Sept 17. Police registered or removed residential records for 402,000 citizens while 69,000 were determined to be living abroad. Nearly 95,000 people were found to not be living at their registered place of residence. Nearly 26,000 were charged for breaking administrative law.

The Regions’ press service picked up the information from the police ministry – run by Socialist Vasyl Tsushko – and said that there were 3.32 million Ukrainian passport holders located outside of the country in mid-August. The blue party’s spin doctors said that 1.16 million of the Ukrainians abroad (around 35 percent) come from four of the country’s westernmost regions – the heartland of orange electoral support.

The Regions accused the president-appointed heads of regional administrations of beefing up the voter numbers in the “traditionally-orange oblasts” of Lviv and Sumy.

“These facts are proof of the purposeful use of the administrative resource by the president aimed at creating the condition for falsifying voting results,” the statement alerts election observers.

On Sept. 27, the state border service should provide the Central Election Commission with passport numbers of registered holders who are outside of the country. These passport holders will be stricken from the voter lists.

“There is a potential problem with voters arriving in Ukraine in the last week before elections. Up to 400,000 votes could be lost if we consider that 75,000 Ukrainians enter the country on a daily basis,” calculated Kovtunets.

The Constitutional Court began hearings on the border-crossing voter provisions on Sept. 18.

 Voters not at home 

One source of multiple voting by a single person in the past has been eliminated for these elections, namely absentee ballots. CVU’s Chernenko estimated that abuse of the absentee certificates resulted in a half million votes stolen in 2004. In the March 2006 elections, only 20,000 absentee voting certificates were issued due to stricter controls, and the certificates have been completely eliminated for these elections.

Kovtunets estimated that nearly half a million voters will be disenfranchised due to the innovation, including students and domestic migrant workers. Domestic migration stood at nearly 343,000 persons in the first seven months of this year, according to the State Statistics Committee.

 Voting abroad

More than 420,000 Ukrainians will be eligible to vote at polling stations outside of the country, the CVU reported on Sept. 17. The NGO said that the Foreign Ministry has included nearly a half million Ukrainians in the voter lists for foreign voting stations. But CVU head Ihor Popov told Deutsche Welle radio that no more than 10 percent of that number will actually cast their ballots on Sept. 3. Popov said that no political party or bloc is “seriously concerned” about voter abroad, because of the expected low voter turn out. On Sept 30 polling stations will be open at 115 polling stations in 79 countries, according to the CEC.

 

 

Kyiv Post

 

 

Opinion » Op-Ed

Regions prove they cannot change

 

Sep 19 2007, 21:29

 

There is little evidence to believe US consultants that the Party of the Regions has changed into a modern and democratic party

 

By TARAS KUZIO

 

In the last three years US political technologists and other US-based consultants have routinely argued that Viktor Yanukovych and the Party of Regions have changed into a modern and democratic party. Little evidence has been shown to prove this argument but nevertheless the mantra has been chanted at every available opportunity.

 

Two factors explain such dogged claims. This first is the ideological support for an oligarch-controlled economy and lack of scholarly objectivity. The Yulia Tymoshenko government came under intense criticism by US think tank senior fellows in academic and media articles who used every speaking engagement to attack its record as ³odious.²

 

At the same time, these senior fellows have never criticized the Yanukovych government for pursuing anti-market reform policies: oil price capping, banning grain exports and non-transparent insider privatizations. They have never sought to criticize any aspect of the Party of Regions, which includes numerous senior deputies from the Kuchma era, such as energy mogul Yuri Boiko and former Central Election Commission Chairman Serhi Kivalov, as Œodious¹ in the same way as the criticism that they unleashed against the Tymoshenko government and BYuT.

 

Secondly, financial support. Ukrainian and Russian media have claimed that political technologist Paul Manafort¹s contract with the Party of Regions is worth millions of dollars.

 

Ukrainian oligarchs have reportedly distributed largesse to at least two think tanks and one democracy promotion NGO in Washington DC. According to an April 17 article entitled ³How Lobbyists Help Ex-Soviets Woo Washington² in The Wall Street Journal, ³A company controlled by Mr. Akhmetov donated $300,000 in 2005 to a human-rights charity run by Mr. Jackson and his wife, an Internal Revenue Service document reviewed by The Wall Street Journal shows. Mr. Jackson said he was grateful for the support.² Bruce Jackson is head of the Washington-based Project on Transitional Democracies who supported the Orange Revolution in 2004.

 

Beyond wishful thinking there is no evidence to show that Prime Minister Yanukovych or the Party of Regions have fundamentally changed from the Kuchma era.

 

Five policy areas prove that the Regions and Yanukovych have changed only cosmetically since the Kuchma era.

 

Firstly, the Party of Regions pursues a Janus-face approach to politics, just as did former President Kuchma. The nice image cultivated by the Regions in the West is very different from the reality on the ground in eastern Ukraine where the Regions are entrenched.

 

This can be readily ascertained from a communication recently received from

Kharkiv: ³The expansion of Donetsk capital in the Kharkiv region is very great. The ŒDonetski¹ are also expanding  their Soviet political culture into the Kharkiv regon through the use of Soviet discourse, exploitation of the myths of the ŒGreat Patriotic War¹ and an aggressive stance towards Ukrainian nationalism and the 1933 artificial famine,² explained my colleague in Kharkiv. He said that in his city, the Regions have aligned themselves with former local organized crime boss Hennadiy Kernes.

 

Secondly, the Regions¹ unwillingness to distance itself from discredited Kuchma-era officials. The Regions¹ Rada faction and the Yanuovych government are full of such officials who, if President Viktor Yushchenko had implemented his election promises, would have faced criminal charges.

 

Thirdly, continued non-transparency and corruption in the energy sector, as evidenced by the return of Yuri Boiko as Minister for Fuel and Energy.

Boiko¹s links to the non-transparent, corrupt intermediary Rosukrenergo have never been in doubt.

 

In the 2007 elections Rosukrenergo majority shareholder Dmytro Firtash¹s representatives are in the Regions¹ list. Of the major parties likely to enter parliament this year only the Regions are in bed with Europe¹s biggest money launderer, Rosukrernergo.

 

Fourthly, the return to non-transparent privatizations: Renat Akhmetov¹s Donbas Fuel-Energy company, the energy arm of Systems Capital Management, was the only company effectively permitted to purchase shares in Dniproenergo, Ukraine¹s largest thermoelectric generator. The Odessa Portside Plant could be the next major strategic asset  to be privatized by Regions¹ oligarchs in such a brazenly corrupt manner.

 

The two Yanukovych governments in 2002-2004 and 2006-2007 have never undertaken any clean privatization tenders. Akhmetov¹s and Viktor Pinchuk¹s privatization of Dniproenergo resembles that of Kryvorizhstal in 2004.

 

As the Kyiv Post pointed out last month, BYuT is the only political force that has questioned Akhmetov¹s takeover of Dniproenergo. The Tymoshenko government organized Ukraine¹s only transparent privatization of Kryvorizhstal in fall 2004 when it obtained four times the value previously paid.

 

Fifthly, continued pursuit of undemocratic policies. The official reason for failing to initially register BYuT rested on a legally dubious claim of lack of full information provided by candidates in the BYuT list submitted to the CEC. BYuT retorted that the method of preparation of the list was exactly the same as that used for the March 2006 parliamentary elections.

 

The refusal to register BYuT throws into doubt the evolution of the Regions whose members on the CEC refused to register BYuT.

 

Since the 2004 elections Prime Minister Yanukovych and the Party of Regions have worked through political technologists and consultants towards changing their poor democratic image in the West by claiming their adherence to the international principles of Western democracy. There is no evidence to show that the Yanukovych government and the Party of Regions are committed to four core principles: battling corruption, bringing transparency to the energy sector, holding clean privatizations and adhering to democratic norms and the constitutional balance of power.

 

Ukraine¹s elections later this month give the country a chance to introduce policies that were demanded by the one in five Ukrainians who participated in the Orange Revolution three years ago. These four core policies will never be implemented if the Yanukovych government and the Anti-Crisis coalition return to power after the elections. Ukraine needs real democrats and reformers in power who can only come from the orange camp.

 

Dr. Taras Kuzio is a Research Associate at The Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, George Washington University.

 

Senate Resolution on Ukraine Elections

 

The following resolution on the upcoming Ukrainian elections was introduced in the U.S. Senate by Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE), Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, along with Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN), Ranking Member of the Foreign Relations Committee and Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD), Co-Chairman of theU.S. Helsinki Commission and Member of the Foreign Relations Committee:


S.RES.320


Recognizing the achievements of the people of Ukraine in pursuit of freedom and democracy, and expressing the hope that the parliamentary elections on September 30, 2007, preserve and... (Introduced in Senate)

SRES 320 IS 

110th CONGRESS

1st Session

S. RES. 320

Recognizing the achievements of the people of Ukraine in pursuit of freedom and democracy, and expressing the hope that the parliamentary elections on September 30, 2007, preserve and extend these gains and provide for a stable and representative government. 

IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES


September 18, 2007


Mr. BIDEN (for himself, Mr. LUGAR, and Mr. CARDIN) submitted the following resolution; which was referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations 

________________________________

RESOLUTION

Recognizing the achievements of the people of Ukraine in pursuit of freedom and democracy, and expressing the hope that the parliamentary elections on September 30, 2007, preserve and extend these gains and provide for a stable and representative government. 

Whereas the people of Ukraine have overcome financial and political hardships to achieve a democratic system in which decisions have been reached without violence and through free and fair elections; 

Whereas Ukraine has already conducted elections considered free, fair, and consistent with the principles of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe on 2 previous occasions; 

Whereas the people of Ukraine deserve an elected and representative government that can work together and pass legislation to improve the quality of life for all Ukrainians; and 

Whereas the people of Ukraine have successfully established a growing free press, an increasingly independent judiciary, and a respect for human rights and the rule of law, which enhance freedom, stability, and prosperity: Now, therefore, be it 

Resolved, That the Senate--

(1) acknowledges the cooperation and friendship between the people of the United States and the people of Ukraine since the restoration of Ukraine's independence in 1991 and the natural affections of the millions of Americans whose ancestors emigrated from Ukraine;

(2) expresses the admiration of the American people for the ongoing success of the Ukranian people at removing violence from politics, for which Ukrainians should be proud, in particular the free and fair presidential elections of December 26, 2004, and the parliamentary elections of March 26, 2006;

(3) encourages the people of Ukraine to maintain the democratic successes of the Orange Revolution of 2004, and expresses the hope that the leaders of Ukraine will conduct the September 30, 2007, elections in keeping with the standards of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), of which both the United States and Ukraine are participating states;

(4) urges the leaders and parties of Ukraine to overcome past differences and work together constructively to enhance the economic and political stability of the country that the people of Ukraine deserve; and

(5) pledges the continued assistance of the United States to the continued progress and further development of a free and representative democratic government in Ukraine based on the rule of law and the principle of human rights.

 

 

 

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