His principled and unchanging position is an example for those who want, above all, to go in for politics. Oleksandr Yeliashkevych has been a relentless fighter against “the Kuchma system” for many years. He confesses in The Day’s interview that he would like to do something else and help further promote the development of our state but has had to be sort of an antidote to “the Kuchma virus” for a long time. “As we have not yet been cured of this disease, it is too early to speak of any development. It is the stagnation and mutation of a system,” Oleksandr emphasizes.
Yeliashkevych began his political career in the now remote 1990s. In 1994 he was elected to parliament from a Kherson first-past-the-post constituency. At the age of 28, he was then one of the youngest MPs. Four years later, Oleksandr was reelected from the same constituency. The eight years in parliament (1994-2002) were bright and fruitful. Many participants in the events of that time have often said that Yeliashkevych was one of the most charismatic and promising politicians of that period. The words of two parliamentary speakers, quoted here, properly characterize themselves and our hero.
2000. THE VERKHOVNA RADA OF UKRAINE. OLEKSANDR YELIASHKEVYCH WAS AT THE TIME ONE OF THE MOST ACTIVE AND BRILLIANT OPPOSITIONISTS TO THE SECOND PRESIDENT’S REGIME / Photo from The Day’s archives
“Yeliashkevych is a very clever and sharp-tongued guy, but he uses his intellect in a wrong direction. I said to him: ‘Oleksandr, no one needs your intellect, you are scattering it around. If there is a bag full of gold in the corner, but I am ragged and hungry, what’s the worth of this gold? It should be invested in an enterprise, which will be of benefit for you and the fatherland,’” Oleksandr Tkachenko once said.
“Oleksandr Yeliashkevych is the treasure of the Ukrainian parliament. He rather harmoniously combines the energy of youth, a high professional level, the competence of an economist and a lawyer, and civic courage. No one managed to buy, scare, or subdue him. If Ukraine had at least a dozen of such MPs, people would not be ashamed of our government,” Oleksandr Moroz wrote.
But, in Yeliashkevych’s view, the appraisal from the then President Leonid Kuchma was of a totally different nature. An attempt was made on his life on February 9, 2000, which left the MP recovering in hospital. Thank God, he survived, but, as a politician, he was brought down on his way up. From then on, Yeliashkevych’s confrontation with Kuchma entered a new tough phase. He had to save his own life and the life of his family. Yeliashkevych became the only Ukrainian statesman to be granted political asylum in the US (2002). He came back to Ukraine after the Orange Revolution. He continued (and still continues) to fight against Kuchma.
Yeliashkevych will turn 50 on June 29. We met and greeted him as well as asked him some interesting questions. Here we offer you the text of this interview.
At the moment, the Appeal Court of Kyiv continues to hear the Pukach case. What is the situation in the courtroom, where you represent the injured party – Oleksii Podolsky? What is your goal at this trial?
“The Pukach conviction trial must go down in the history of Ukraine as a show trial. It is the first phase of a major trial over the criminal ‘Kuchma-Yanukovych system’ whose author, architect, and chief inspirer was Leonid Kuchma. Unfortunately, this criminal system has not vanished but modified after the two Maidans, after the Heavenly Hundred heroes and thousands of patriots in eastern Ukraine sacrificed their lives. The cause of this is that the so-called ‘ruling elite’ mostly consists of Kuchma’s pupils who are doing their best to hide the truth which could begin the cleansing of the entire Ukrainian society. For this reason, neither Kuchma, nor Volodymyr Lytvyn, nor the other members of an organized crime grouping with the ex-president at the head (I have every reason to think so, and I am dreaming to see him in court to prove this) have been brought to justice at least as witnesses in the past 15 years. They are very much afraid of the disclosure of the information which is not only recorded on ‘the Melnychenko tapes’ but is also contained in the ample evidence that Podolsky, I, and many other people have gathered. We have sincerely believed all the time that Ukraine will have no chances of reformation unless there are show trials of the leaders of that system.
“Oleksii Podolsky is in fact a ‘living Gongadze’ who was kidnapped, taken to the woods, brutally tortured, and miraculously remained alive. He is a victim and an exposer of ‘the Kuchma-Yanukovych system.’ As his representative, I use this trial to show the entire Ukrainian society the whole cynicism of justice in Ukraine. The objective is to make sure that the normal judicial hearing of a case associated with the accusation of General Pukach should reveal the horrible facts that are known to many but not to the entire Ukrainian society. This trial of General Pukach, the perpetrator of Kuchma’s criminal instructions, should become a logical step in the punishment of those who organized high-profile crimes and used their offices and the law-enforcement bodies they controlled in order to remain unpunished and implement a grandiose enrichment scheme at the Ukrainian people’s expense.”
We can often hear journalists and politicians allege that particular attention to this story, especially in 1+1 TV channel’s programs, is a result of clashes between oligarchs. You and Podolsky are being accused of playing on the side of one of them. Would you comment?
“It is both easy and difficult to comment on what has nothing to do with reality. It is easy because our position and actions have been public for many years. We have changed them neither during the presidency of Kuchma, Yushchenko, and Yanukovych, nor at present, when the president is a ‘Kuchma system’ creature, a cofounder of the Party of Regions, an oligarch who knows how to speak sweetly to audiences in and outside Ukraine. The fact that, at certain stages, various political or financial structures supported, in pursuance of their interests, our attempts to spread the truth about our position, i.e., unbiased information about what was and is going on in Ukraine, means that society will sooner or later not only know all the truth, but also draw proper conclusions and go through the purgatory. Our goal is to bring this process closer and to put an end, as soon as possible, to the current situation in Ukraine. Criminals must end up in the dock, not in the government, and people should be assuming offices not for the sake of enrichment but for the sake of serving their nation. Politics must be an instrument to achieve the goals enshrined in our Constitution.
“The journalists of today have by and large forgotten about their moral and professional debt to Heorhii Gongadze and many other victims of the system that impeded the freedom of speech, created unbearable conditions for journalism, and brought about the still current maladies in this profession. Paid-for materials and personal service to certain media moguls is the result of the fact that the problems created in the now distant 1990s have not yet been resolved. Kuchma became the focus of those problems. He infected Ukrainian society and foreign politicians with corruption that is eating away the mainstays of politics, civil society, morals and morality. It is never too late for journalists of various media to support our position, as well as it is not too late for Ukrainska pravda to repent for selling out and betraying the memory of its founder and becoming the Kuchma family’s mouthpiece. The same applies to many other media outlets which acted immorally and indecently. I am very grateful to the newspaper Den which has been, for many years, impartially covering all about the court sessions and judicial investigations about Kuchma and his clique. I am also grateful to 1+1 TV channel which has invited, for the first time in many years, the individuals who were banned from TV for a long time because not only the ex-president, but also many other politicians do not accept their standpoints. These politicians cashed in on the Gongadze case and other high-profile cases, including Maidan-related crimes, and even traded them off. This still continues because politicians, representatives of the law-enforcement and judicial systems, still use high-profile cases as a way to get rich on the blood of many victims of ‘the Kuchma-Yanukovych system.’”
It is 15 years since you were beaten up and Podolsky was kidnapped. The 15th anniversary of the Gongadze murder is coming up. Why does it take society so long to mature and face the truth?
“Society is maturing. But the Ukrainian media have not yet become an instrument to make society be aware of the scale of the government’s crimes and the danger this country is facing. The people who use blood-stained mechanisms to achieve power and fabulous wealth are extremely dangerous not only to the victims of crimes, but also to the country. What Kuchma built and his pupil Viktor Yanukovych creatively used and brought to perfection is a blind alley in the history of a state, which can result in the loss of statehood. If journalists had been taking a more active civic stand and covering impartially the dangerous topics, our society would have received unbiased information about the government much earlier, properly diagnosed Ukraine’s disease, and performed ‘surgery’ at the initial stage. It becomes more and more difficult, as years fly by, because the politicians and journalists nursed by the Kuchma family have fallen hostage to the system and are trying to hush up or justify the crimes of the ex-president and his clique. They are excusing themselves, for they find it difficult to explain what they are doing at the events organized by the Kuchma family and in the programs of its TV channels and why they are not ashamed to shake hands with the ex-president or his son-in-law Viktor Pinchuk. The natural reaction of ‘neo-Kuchmists’ is to find an excuses for themselves, arguing that spotlighting falsifications in high-profile cases is a matter of business clashes. These young people with eye-catching labels, such as Euro Optimists, are a very dangerous recurrence of Kuchmism at present.”
Oleksandr, could you say what caused you to go in for politics at the very outset?
“I first came to parliament in 1994, when I had turned 28 and I was one of the youngest members of that parliament. I think the year 1994 saw the most democratic parliamentary elections in the history of independent Ukraine. Unfortunately, the assumption of the presidential office by Kuchma put an end to this. This in fact triggered the first Maidan in 2004, which, first of all, came out against the presidential election rigging. As I was the head of a monitoring commission in the 1999 presidential elections, I must say that the elections were much ‘cleaner’ in 2004 than in 1999. ‘The Kuchma system’ put on a lot of obstacles to the advent of new political forces and moral politicians. For example, there are very few people in the current parliament, who really deserve to occupy their seat. In 1994, it was much easier for an active citizen to realize themselves. At the time, material resources played a lesser role than now, and there were more developed democratic procedures.
“The question is why I decided to go from business to politics. I thought I would be able to realize my potential better. I had always been quite an active and well-known person in both Kherson and Kyiv, so I was always associated, albeit indirectly, with the political process. It was clear that I could do something useful to my country as an MP. But the trouble was that Kuchma and his team actively hindered me. In the very first months of being in parliament, I began to show initiative, only to see that we had absolutely different visions. Kuchma’s power-wielding team was building state monopoly capitalism and causing parliament to pass certain laws to this effect, whereas my few colleagues and I wanted to create a social-market model of the economy, as was written in the Constitution. This conceptual contradiction resulted in very serious conflicts between Kuchma’s team and his opponents. A lot of people opposed Kuchma, but I did not share the ideas of some of them, for they were associated with communism and other things I do not accept. My parliamentary colleagues and I were striving to put into practice the ideology of building a society in which the entrepreneur and the wage-earner feel comfortable, where there is a competitive economy and politics, as well as social uplifts. But the forces were perhaps unequal from the very beginning. And, owing to serious economic problems and the post-Soviet confusion, society paid very little attention to economic issues. The way privatization, smartly dubbed ‘grabatization,’ was carried out and the fact that Kuchma managed to form a clan monopoly model, made it impossible for this country to change its vector of development by political and legal methods, which doomed Ukraine to serious shocks.”
Which of the brightest pages of your political career would you emphasize?
“The brightest impression is, undoubtedly, the adoption of the Constitution in 1996. It was written by very many people and experts in constitutional law and state-formation. I would like to emphasize a major role of such people as Viktor Musiiaka, Viktor Shyshkin, Mykhailo Syrota, and Yevhen Marchuk in drawing up and passing the Constitution. I must also remind you that Oleksandr Moroz performed a mini-exploit at the last moment, dropping the Socialist Party’s dogmas: to have the document adopted, he persuaded his party comrades and some Communists to vote for it. One third of the Communist faction approved the adoption of the Constitution, for which many of them were expelled from the party. This vote was, for many MPs, a manifestation of civic courage because they were sacrificing their political career and old ideas of state-formation in favor of Ukraine.
“It was a very significant process – the document was not born overnight, as Kuchma and his followers falsely claim. They do so to justify a shameless and cynical resistance to the passage of the Constitution in the version it was passed. The president needed a different version of the Fundamental Law along the Russian pattern, which would allow establishing an authoritarian model. Kuchma in fact did so by violating the Constitution. And what we did in late June 1996 not only had a considerable effect on me as a politician. What we laid down into the Fundamental Law cemented the country and prevented it from rocking the boat, as is the case now. The trouble is that the life of this Constitution could not be long enough because this country’s topmost officials were not exactly willing to obey the law. Our chief problem is not legislation but the fact that presidents and premiers – supposedly, role models in this case – do not observe it. Our authorities have always followed General Franco’s principle ‘for my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.’
“The passage of the 1996 Constitution was a bright flare-up of Ukrainian parliamentarianism, as was the proclamation of the Act of Independence on August 24, 1991. It is a very bright reminiscence for me – it bolstered my opinion that my position was right and we should take the situation into our own hands. I saw that more experienced and better-known politicians failed to show the key features of a statesman when it came to the crunch. This allowed me to go on taking the initiatives even when I seemed to be lacking the necessary support. But if you are convinced that you are right, it is very important and gives you the right to take actions which may look, at first glance, absolutely crazy and adventurous.
“Those who are going to change the Constitution today and ostensibly trying to implement the amoral Minsk agreements are flouting the law. This harbors a great risk for President Poroshenko. Following the road of Constitutional changes, we will not only violate the Constitutional ways and principles – we will be walking down a conflict-prone and extremely erroneous path which may eventually lead to still greater tragedies in Ukraine.”
