On September 20, 2005, after three long years, Ukraine’s parliament finally heard the report of the ad hoc parliamentary commission to investigate the Gongadze case. In the report Hryhoriy Omelchenko, head of this commission that investigates high-profile crimes, names Ukraine’s former president Leonid Kuchma and the late former interior minister Yuriy Kravchenko as the masterminds behind the abduction of Heorhiy Gongadze. The report also names Leonid Derkach, the former security service chief, and Volodymyr Lytvyn, the former presidential chief of staff and now Parliamentary Speaker, as the instigators of the crime. Omelchenko also proposed a vote of no confidence in Prosecutor General Sviatoslav Piskun, who, according to Omelchenko, was familiar with the investigative commission’s findings, but failed to act upon them for three years. The commission’s head believes that, if passed, the vote of no confidence should result in the dismissal of the Prosecutor General.
Surprisingly, the only immediate result of Omelchenko’s report was parliament’s decision to suspend the ad hoc commission that was investigating the killings of journalists Heorhiy Gongadze and Ihor Aleksandrov, the botched assassination of parliamentarian Oleksandr Yelyashkevych, and suspected violations of the Constitution and laws by ranking officials. The motion to suspend the commission’s activities was supported by 342 out of the 383 parliamentarians present. According to the motion, the commission’s report was “taken into account,” and Omelchenko was advised to pass all the materials in the commission’s possession to the Prosecutor General’s Office. Two motions, one containing a proposal to dismiss Lytvyn and the other to pass a vote of no confidence in Piskun and dismiss him, were excluded from consideration. According to First Deputy Speaker Adam Martyniuk, both motions require a special procedure without which they cannot be adopted in parliament.
Speaking from the parliamentary rostrum, Omelchenko said that in August 2002, he was authorized by the 12-member investigative commission created on July 11, 2002, to receive “official testimony from Mykola Melnychenko about the circumstances in which he recorded conversations in the president’s office, which specifically concern Heorhiy Gongadze.” This testimony was taken in keeping with current Ukrainian and US legislation. According to Omelchenko, Melnychenko “underwent psychological examinations in the US, passed a lie detector test, was asked 14 questions, and expert psychologists unanimously concluded that Melnychenko was telling the truth.” On instructions from the ad hoc investigative commission, both in its current and previous composition, “several forensic examinations were performed in the US and elsewhere, which confirmed beyond any doubt that the fragments of Mykola Melnychenko’s recordings that concern Gongadze were not doctored, i.e., they are authentic.” According to Omelchenko, the commission questioned several individuals, including the parliamentarians Ivan Drach, Borys Oliynyk, Taras Chornovil, and Oleksandr Turchynov, who, “after listening to Mykola Melnychenko’s recordings of their conversations that took place in the presidential office, confirmed the recorded voices as theirs, as well as the fact that these conversations really took place.”
Omelchenko also noted that “to analyze the crime against Heorhiy Gongadze out of context is to make a methodological mistake,” since the matter at hand is the previous regime’s “total system of shadowing opposition figures, tapping phone conversations, and staging frame- ups of these individuals.” All of this, according to Omelchenko, “is supported by the collected evidence, which the ad hoc investigative commission handed over to the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine, in particular Prosecutor General Piskun, when he became the prosecutor the first time, to Prosecutor Vasylyev, and to Piskun, when he became Prosecutor General the second time.”
According to Omelchenko’s report, “Melnychenko testified that the former presidential chief of staff and current Parliamentary Speaker systematically reported to the president about Gongadze’s materials, setting President Kuchma against Gongadze with his words. Their decisive conversation took place when, following another publication, the president proposed opening a case against Heorhiy Gongadze, as suggested by his lawyers. Lytvyn responded by saying: ‘No, this should not be done. Have Kravchenko stop by my office.’ After this conversation Kuchma summoned Yuriy Kravchenko and gave him the orders you have all read about. I will not repeat them. Almost every day after that Kravchenko reported on the steps taken against Heorhiy Gongadze, opposition journalists, and opposition publications. If you listened to the conversations between Kravchenko and Kuchma several dozen times, you would notice that at first he [Kravchenko] did not want to use violence against Gongadze. He kept delaying this moment, reporting that the surveillance team had made a mistake or something else still had to be done. But Kuchma kept insisting that necessary steps must be taken against Gongadze. You all know that on September 16 Heorhiy Gongadze went missing.”
“Yuriy Lutsenko, the commission’s deputy head, and I handed over a list of eight or nine individuals with a detailed account of how Gongadze was kidnapped,” Omelchenko said. “This is why Prosecutor General Piskun knew since September 2003 about the individuals who were arrested. From the SBU’s report former Prosecutor General Vasylyev also knew about these individuals.”
“After analyzing the actions of each one of those whom I mentioned and after analyzing the collected evidence, the ad hoc investigative commission reached the conclusion that former presidential chief of staff Lytvyn instigated the crime against Heorhiy Gongadze, which caused his abduction and eventual death. The commission has unanimously found Lytvyn’s actions to possess the characteristics of a crime under Article 27 and Article 146, Part 3, of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. The commission has unanimously found that President Kuchma’s actions qualify him as an organizer of the abduction. The late Yuriy Kravchenko was an organizer at a lower level, who was following Kuchma’s orders. The commission has concluded that former SBU chief Leonid Derkach is also implicated in the crime against Heorhiy Gongadze and found his actions to be those of an instigator. (Obviously, in a democratic country only the court has the right to determine the level of an individual’s guilt — Author). The commission has unanimously recommended that the Prosecutor General open a criminal case against these individuals under Article 27 and Article 146, Part 3, of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, i.e., instigating and organizing Gongadze’s abduction [that was] carried out by a group of individuals as part of a conspiracy, which resulted in grave consequences. All of the commission’s resolutions and all the collected evidence and materials were passed to Prosecutor General Piskun in September 2002. The same findings were passed to former Prosecutor General Vasylyev on March 3, 2003. Under the Criminal Procedural Code, which has provisions for such documents, respective agencies are obliged either to refuse to open a criminal case in view of the absence of elements of a crime within 10 days, or order a criminal case to be launched against such individuals. Three years later no such order has been issued.”
