This is the story of a struggle – but not the one between the good and the bad. It is the struggle “for”... for the resources which are becoming less in the country. One can clearly see: Yatseniuk’s government is being pushed towards resignation and the country – all living things that have developed in it during and following the Maidan-2 – are being dragged into the fight for who will sit in the prime minister’s chair next.
I will not talk here that Yatseniuk is a good prime minister. Neither do I want to discuss whether those who accuse his ministers of stealing are right or not. Let’s leave these issues to the appropriate authorities. Let’s talk about forums as a instruments of struggle.
After all, the governor of Odesa Oblast State Administration Mikheil Saakashvili has left his workplace and spends much time in the capital, seemingly trying to convince us that the Forum is an effective way to fight corruption in the government. Last week he – or rather his advisor Oleksandr Borovyk – assembled young representatives of political parties, experts, and public figures in an expensive Kyiv restaurant. The meeting had two results. The first is a scandal, for “the dinner” was half-clandestine and the expensive metropolitan restaurant offers a menu with prices having three zeros in them. And the second result is more practical – it has been announced that on December 23 a major Anti-Corruption Forum will be held in Kyiv, which will present an effective plan to combat this shameful phenomenon in Ukraine.
Sketch by Anatolii KAZANSKY, from The Day’s archives, 1998
The subject of fighting corruption is not new for Ukrainians. Everyone has promised to fight kleptocrats in the government once they were in opposition, and simulated that fight as they came to power. However, there were essentially no grand-scale changes on this issue in the country – except for short breaks of two to three weeks after deep political crises. Those breaks were the times when the businesses did not bring their money bags, preferring to wait – perhaps something has changed indeed? Until the new minister, director of department, or other official came in and said: you know the drill, let’s continue the work; and the mechanism continued its work. Only now, after these short setbacks, the bribe rates had increased significantly. If one chooses to believe Kuzhel, Firtash, and Kolomoisky, the Orange Maidan had doubled the “gratitude payment” to the corrupt official, and Maidan-2 has put the payback rate to the level of 70 percent of the issue at hand.
Therefore, a society sees the talks of fighting corruption as a part of continuing interspecies struggle. Or, to be more precise – it is seen as a screen to hide the corruption. There were times when the issue of lustration was much discussed – looking back, it was quite a failed story, which was used by one “clan” primarily to remove unwanted competitors.
Just like that, Saakashvili’s sudden intensification in the fight against the corruption in the government of Arsenii Yatseniuk raises questions – after we have repeatedly witnessed the clinches between the president’s and the prime minister’s teams in the public space. After all, we do not know all the circumstances behind the appearance of the Georgian contractors – what authority do they have, under what warranty were they invited and in what numbers. All these answers matter because they will have the consequences in the future. Even after the scandal of Saakashvili, Avakov, and the glass of water broke out, Poroshenko said that he invited them and he does not regret it. That, in fact, means that even if we wanted to believe that Saakashvili and his people are independent – they are, in fact, a part of the president’s team.
SAAKASHVILI ON AN “ANTI-CORRUPTION” DINNER, DECEMBER 18, 2015 / Photo from Oleksandr BOROVYK's Facebook page
Actually, this was the reason why some experts, MPs, and simply respectable people still don’t have a final decision: what to think of the Forum and whether to attend it. “I would not want to be used in promotion of someone’s new political project. Forum is still a tool for political struggle, not for fighting corruption,” said MP Viktor Kryvenko in a commentary to The Day.
THE DUMMY PARTICIPANT
On behalf of the readers, we asked the organizers to clarify what the forum is: is it the creation of a new party, a new public initiative, a public movement? Oleksandr Solontai, chairman of a young political party named Power of People, commented that generally the Forum will demand the government’s resignation and the formation of the new government on fundamentally different principles: the technocratic one rather than quota. Solontai also explained his interest in this forum: “Firstly, among community activists and experts who participate in the Forum, there are so many of those we would like to see in a closer relationship with Power of People: we want them to contribute to the creation and development of the party. Secondly, understanding at the moment that our party is still weak, we see the people who initiated the Forum as partners in various activities to achieve even better results: we are growing, but the events require us to apply even greater efforts than we can give. And thirdly, if it so happens that the president does not listen to us, there would be a split in Poroshenko’s Bloc and the early parliamentary elections would start in Ukraine – then the organizers of the Anti-Corruption Forum will become those with whom we will coordinate in these elections – for example, agree upon the distribution of districts.”
Solontai assured that the Power of People will also become a specific test for honesty for the Anti-Corruption Forum. He assured us that as soon as they feel that the Forum is used only as a tool to replace out-of-favor Yatseniuk with loyal Saakashvili (without changing the principle of the government formation – in fact, without the willingness to break and change the system), Power of People would withdraw from the process.
WHAT DOES THE WORD “CORRUPTION” MEAN FOR UKRAINE?
At a meeting with representatives of Ukrainian community in Toronto, Larysa Ivshyna, Den/The Day’s editor-in-chief, said: “In Ukraine there is no corruption in its conventional meaning. To have the corruption, one should accept the norm. One has to be able to say: this is corruption, and this is – the norm. Where is the norm in Ukraine? Where does it live? On Channel 5, where the salary is paid in envelopes? That what is happening in Ukraine is a forcibly adopted mode of relationships.”
And this is true, in fact.
MP Viktor Kryvenko offered a very good explanation of this process to The Day. He said that the low wage of a civil servant in the country has constructed a certain “tyranny”: a kind of “vacuum cleaner” which penetrated into every crevice of the society, sucking out money and resources and raising them up. And that process has formed circles of people who were connected with this mutual responsibility, from the highest to lower levels. The issue is that the whole system has undergone significant mutations in order to protect itself from punishment. And it seems it won’t give in so simply – at least it surely won’t give in by means of such Forums.
And finally... Novoe Vremia and Ukrainska Pravda are active participants in organizing the Forum. The media is the fourth power, and Saakashvili is the executive power. So, isn’t that kind of symbiosis a sign of political corruption? Shouldn’t the media be at a distance? How can they be in the same company? Who will then monitor Saakashvili?
