Commenting on the ongoing attempts to establish his level of education, Minister of Justice Roman Zvarych said this “well- conceived, wide-scale campaign,” aimed at discrediting his “honest name,” was mounted by “national, patriotic circles in the Diaspora to settle old scores and by certain no less mysterious forces that are trying to warn the new team: this fate awaits every recalcitrant.”
Issuing this statement at a press conference last Tuesday, Mr. Zvarych still failed to put the record straight, leaving many questions unanswered. The minister recounted his trip to the US, where he managed — with the greatest difficulty — to dig up documented evidence of his education. He brought the documents to Ukraine’s capital and is now going to hand them over to the Cabinet and the President’s Secretariat for examination. Among them is a certificate from Manhattan College, where the minister says he obtained a higher education, and a similar document from Columbia University, where Mr. Zvarych did an additional course of lectures, as well as a letter of recommendation and explanation from New York University academic Ronald Rainey. Yet Mr. Zvarych did not show the journalists these documents and refused pointblank to name the exact day of his visit to the US, claiming the “right to a private life.” “This will not change anything,” he said. “Whatever I show here and wherever I hand it over, the calumnies will continue.” He noted that he has “exposed” all the “falsifiers,” because one can obtain what is known as an education certificate only in person, never by proxy.
Then the honorable minister gave a detailed account of “his universities” and the career he carved out under direct guidance of Yaroslav Stetsko for whom Mr. Zvarych happened to write speeches. He does not think he needed to justify himself. “I have never ascribed the rank of professor to myself or claimed that I had a law degree, so there can be no question of admitting a ‘sudden lack’ of it. ‘Professor’ is just a title, a term used to address a lecturer,” the minister said.
It is extremely difficult to express American scholarly degrees in Ukrainian terms, which, Mr. Zvarych claims, has led to many ticklish situations. “But does this mean I am uneducated?” the minister asked in despair. In his opinion, the best confirmation of being educated is the very fact that he taught at institutions of higher education. “It would be interesting to see if those who are persecuting me today, who have at best a Higher [Communist] Party School diploma under their belt, could teach in a secondary school, let alone at an American university?” he queried. Mr. Zvarych explained that what really matters when you apply for a job is not so much the degree as your background knowledge, which is painstakingly checked in the course of endless interviews. “The West needs real knowledge, not formal papers, like the USSR did.”
“Although I don’t have a law education, I still consider myself a lawyer. There are very few cases in Ukraine that I have lost,” he added. Mr. Zvarych thinks that his only fault is insouciance and insufficient attention to his own person or, to be more exact, to the way his biographical data are being presented in various official reference sources and the Cabinet’s Web site.
Mr. Zvarych is not surprised by the attempts to tarnish his reputation. “I have already been called a CIA, FSB (Russia’s secret service — Ed.) and Taliban agent; I’ve also been accused of bigamy,” he quipped. The minister warned threateningly and mysteriously in the same context, “While I am here, the Ministry of Justice will not be the instrument of solving the property problems of clans or redistributing property under the guise of ‘protecting state interests.’”
As for the matter of registering Pora as a party, the minister thinks Pora will only be considered legitimate once it draws up all the documents properly. “No privileges for participants in the Orange Revolution,” Mr. Zvarych emphasized. As it turns out, his ministry was even more exacting when it was verifying the registration documents of the Our Ukraine National Union.
Incidentally, Mr. Zvarych has yet to discuss his quandary with the head of state. “I am always ready to resign — not voluntarily (what’s the good of it?) but at the request of the premier or the president. I am not clinging to my position or fighting for power. My destiny is in the hands of God and Viktor Yushchenko,” Mr. Zvarych said in conclusion.
