Saturday, July 08, 2006

Voices from the past..

Today Yanukovych was asked by a TV journalist if it was true that PoR had bribed the Socialist deputies with $83M to dump their orange coalition colleagues, and join PoR and the Communists in a new coalition.

He gave a long, rather strange and meaningless reply. "I'll put it this way - those who have done nothing worthwhile in their life, apart from this dirt which is poured on the body of the country, have no future. Evil, provides nothing, apart from [further] evil, and does nothing for people."

When asked to clarify his remark - whether this meant that PoR had not paid any bribes, he repeated the same phrases.

Maybe secret recordings made 1999 and 2000 in the then President Kuchma's office flashed through his mind. Yanukovych is clearly heard* reporting, in a matter-of-fact manner, how political opponents [including Oleksandr Moroz's Socialist and Petro Symonenko's Communist deputies] are being bribed.

In other recordings former President Kuchma and Mykola Azarov, who was head of the Tax inspectorate at the time, discuss pressurizing collective farm heads in the areas where support for Moroz was strongest, in order to reduce his votes in the 1999 Presidential elections.

It is the same Moroz and Symonenko who have now joined forces with Yanukovych in the new parliamentary coalition. And it was Moroz that brought the recordings into the public domain.

Azarov will probably get one of the top ministerial positions in any Yanukovych cabinet.

What leaders, what a country..

*Details in Andrew Wilson's excellent 'Ukraine's Orange Revolution', [Yale University Press], and elsewhere.

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