The Ukrainian government did not want parliament to pass all of the government-proposed WTO bills to begin with. This paradoxical statement partly explains the confrontation between the government and parliament in the past two weeks, as well as the tongue lashing unleashed by the government on the parliament leadership. After all, the real progress of Ukraine’s accession to the World Trade Organization is fundamentally different from the way the government presents it. According to the official story, to join the WTO by year’s end Ukraine must fulfill the key requirement of bringing its laws into compliance with WTO standards by passing a series of bills. Parliament has not coped with this task entirely. Early last week the government shed more light on this issue. Speaking after the July 5-8 session of the working party on Ukraine’s WTO accession, Minister of the Economy Serhiy Teriokhin stated that five bills that have been already passed will suffice for Ukraine to join the WTO this December, and went on to express his absolute certainty regarding the latter, the more so if parliament passes the remaining bills in early fall.
However, a prominent British publication, Financial Times, has interpreted the results of this session somewhat differently. It quotes the Canadian diplomat, Sergio Marchi, who heads the working party on Ukraine’s accession to the WTO, as saying: “The WTO committee that is reviewing Ukraine’s application can still approve the December accession date if Ukraine achieves new results before the committee’s next meeting in mid-September. Kyiv has to convince the working party that it will pass all bills and complete bilateral accession talks with the USA, Australia, and other [countries].” The main phrase here is “Kyiv has to complete bilateral talks.” Only a miracle can help Ukraine meet this requirement by this September. Put simply, aside from passing a number of bills Ukraine must complete bilateral talks with all participants of the working party without exception. To do so Ukraine must agree on terms of protocols with 14 countries. According to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, talks with five of them (China, Japan, Peru, Columbia, and Iceland) are on homestretch, and completing them before September is quite realistic. The US can be added to this list after the passage of the intellectual property law. It is unclear, however, what has to be undertaken with regard to the remaining eight countries, talks with which have yet to begin. Moreover, it is quite likely that most problems during the talks will come not from rich countries, the likes of Australia, but from Armenia and Kyrgyzstan, which remain under the political influence of Russia, while the latter is bending over backwards to delay Ukraine’s accession to the WTO.
The government realizes this full well. Quite likely, we will not be invited to join the WTO this year, since Ukraine will not be able to complete bilateral talks on schedule. Ukraine will not get another chance to jump on the bandwagon of global trade before the end of 2007, the date when WTO ministers are slated to meet in conference, which has the powers to admit new members. Perhaps to protect the incumbent president from accusations of failing to fulfill his team’s main promise in the foreign policy arena for the current year, the government has decided to make a scapegoat of parliament. In this connection the government ministers have suddenly become so insistent about the need to urgently pass the package of WTO bills. At the same time, somebody is orchestrating resistance from the opposition in parliament. The obvious purpose of this is to organize a show in which parliament is not passing urgent bills and opposition factions are held responsible for this. So far the government has played its part splendidly.
Speaking of what happened in the parliament session hall last week, political analyst Andriy Fedorov pointed out that “no matter how much it would seem that there is disorder in the session hall, in reality there is only well- orchestrated chaos.” No matter who initiated this chaos, it will result in partial adoption of WTO bills, which is something that the government really wanted from the outset. The public’s attention has been drawn to this event by means of yet another scandal with the participation of the nation’s leaders. Apparently, they are preparing ground for the election campaign this fall. So when asked why Ukraine never joined the WTO as promised, the government will point an accusing finger at the opposition, which has allegedly delayed a timely passage of WTO bills. There is no way the people will hear a frank answer from the government: “We have messed up the talks.”
