#9 - JRL 6600
The Globe and Mail (Canada)
December 14, 2002
'You can't really degrade his reputation'
Ukraine's Leonid Kuchma has been struck by scandals that would topple most leaders. But he continues to hold power, partly because he always has a scapegoat and partly because the citizens have stopped caring. MARK MacKINNON reports from Kiev
By MARK MACKINNON

Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets this fall, demanding his ouster and imprisonment. The West treats him as an international pariah and his name is tied again and again to the grisly murder of an opposition journalist, as well as banned weapons sales to Iraq.

In another country, any of these things would surely be enough to stagger, if not topple, the leader. But not in Ukraine. Not President Leonid Kuchma. Eight years of power and innumerable scandals behind him, he still firmly controls the Ukrainian political scene.

According to some polls, more than 70 per cent of Ukrainians want him to resign. But few expect he is going anywhere any time soon. "In Ukraine, only two things are eternal: Kuchma and peroxide," sighed one patron of a Kiev basement café packed with suspiciously blond blondes.

Indeed, Mr. Kuchma's regime has skipped almost undamaged from one seemingly massive crisis to another. Since he was first elected in 1994, his government has been dogged both by its reputation for corruption and its related inability to propel the country out of its deep economic recession.

But public anger never fully focused on Mr. Kuchma, largely because he always had a scapegoat ready. Using his presidential discretion, he has hired and fired six prime ministers during his tenure.

Two years ago, pundits thought that he was doomed when an audio recording surfaced that appeared to catch Mr. Kuchma ordering the "silencing" of a feisty opposition journalist, Georgiy Gongadze, whose headless corpse had been found outside the capital. Thousands took to the streets in protest, but despite a lingering perception here that the President had something to do with the killing, Mr. Kuchma emerged with his political power undiminished.

The same recordings, made by a former bodyguard, led to further accusations this fall that Mr. Kuchma personally authorized the $100-million (U.S.) sale of four advanced radar systems to Iraq, in contravention of United Nations sanctions against the Iraqi regime. Again, people took to the streets to protest. Again, Mr. Kuchma's post was never really threatened.

"President Kuchma has actually not been seriously challenged by the events of the past couple of years," one Western diplomat in Kiev said. "The crises, I think, seem larger from the outside."

The latest charges -- supported by an FBI analysis of the recording that authenticated at least the crucial 90 seconds where Mr. Kuchma supposedly approved the sale of four Kolchuga radars to Iraq -- prompted the United States to suspend $54-million (U.S.) in aid to the country, and prompted North Atlantic Treaty Organization leaders to suggest that Mr. Kuchma would not be welcome at last month's Prague summit. Pretending to miss the hint, the President went anyway.

The 63-year-old former missile-factory boss has rolled away from more, and far bigger, scandals than Bill Clinton and Brian Mulroney put together. And while six months ago many were predicting that Mr. Kuchma would be forced into resigning, the smart money is now betting that he will survive until the end of his second term in 2004. Though some fear that he will find a way to stay on, he is prevented by the Ukrainian constitution from running for a third five-year term.

Part of the reason for his resilience is that Ukrainians -- after 75 years of Soviet rule and 11 slipshod years of independence -- don't seem to have high expectations of their leaders. Corruption and influence-peddling are almost an expected part of political life here, and polls show that while Mr. Kuchma is unpopular, the majority say they don't really care who the president is or what he does. Most people are far more interested in their own declining fortunes.

"Why should I care what Kuchma does?" one idle Kiev taxi driver said as he waited for a customer. "The economic situation in Ukraine is always the same. Always bad."

Among those who do follow the political games, Mr. Kuchma's reputation is considered to be so sullied that no one is surprised any more by new allegations of impropriety.

"Considering the relatively low poll ratings of Kuchma, this [Iraq] issue couldn't really shake him," said Mikhailo Pogrebinsky, director of the Kiev Centre of Political Studies and Conflictology. "You can't really degrade his reputation."

However, the President is also acknowledged as a skilled politician and back-room dealer. Most recently, he rallied from March parliamentary elections that saw pro-presidential parties place a distant third, with just 12 per cent of the popular vote. It seemed a clear-cut repudiation of Mr. Kuchma's time in office.

The veteran politician immediately went to work, and cobbled together an improbable coalition that has signalled its willingness to take direction from the executive branch. Parliament recently accepted Mr. Kuchma's nominee for Prime Minister, Viktor Yanukovich, and the powerful governor of the coal-producing Donetsk region -- Mr. Kuchma's seventh second-in-command in eight years -- is now seen as a potential successor to the president's chair.

Mr. Kuchma also has some accomplishments to boast about. Though industrial production remains a shadow of what it was in the Soviet era, the country has seen strong economic growth the past two years. Chernobyl has been forever closed, and the country secured international aid by getting rid of its nuclear weapons stockpile left behind by the former Soviet Union.

But Mr. Kuchma's future, some say, was determined not by last spring's elections or the subsequent jostling, but two years before at a low-profile conference of the country's oligarchs -- the rich businessmen who control much of the country's industry. Many are simply the old Soviet regional bosses draped in new business suits.

Despite often rocky relations with the President, the oligarchs knew that he was stronger politically than any one of them who might challenge him. Unable to decide on an alternative they all could support, they decided to once more cast their lot with Mr. Kuchma.

It wasn't quite Western-style democracy, but observers say those pundits who have lately been putting Mr. Kuchma into the same group as Alexander Lukashenko, the autocratic leader of neighbouring Belarus, misunderstand both the man and the way of politics in this nation of 49 million people.

Rather than being the authoritarian head of a weak state, one analyst said, Mr. Kuchma is simply the head of a massive state apparatus and a bureaucracy that has barely changed its colours since the Soviet era.

"Kuchma's not an authoritarian. He's weak, he's whimsical, he's vindictive, but he's not Lukashenko or [Zimbabwean President Robert] Mugabe," said Markian Bilynskyj, director of the Pylyp Orlyk Institute for Democracy. "We don't have a Kuchmastan here in Ukraine. It's not like [other ex-Soviet republics] in Central Asia."

But many here also say one reason popular dissent against Mr. Kuchma has never coalesced is that the media are kept on a tight leash. While the government doesn't actually suppress criticism itself, critics say, press censorship happens anyway because most of the country's media outlets are controlled by the oligarchs, whose interests often coincide with Mr. Kuchma's.

"There are people here who have a fairly limited understanding of what democracy is," Mr. Bilynskyj said. "The level of political culture here is very low."

The general weakness of the opposition parties also helps to keep Mr. Kuchma in power. While Mr. Kuchma has many fierce enemies -- more than a few of them one-time allies and deputies -- they are split among themselves and agree on little, other than the President must go. It's hardly a vision that has inspired the masses.

"The opposition lacked policy and vision during its fall demonstrations as to what should be done. Their slogans were really quite shallow," said Sergei Maksymenko, director of the Kiev office of the independent East-West Institute. This fall's rallies featured protesters who denounced the regime's cozying up to Russia walking alongside hard-core Communists calling for a restoration of the Soviet Union. "They were talking about Ukraine without Kuchma, but not much about what next," Mr. Maksymenko said.

In many ways, the main political opposition to Kiev now is the U.S. administration, which the Kuchma government blames for creating the radars-to-Iraq affair.

The Kolchuga system is a passive radar, meaning that it can track aircraft without giving out the telltale "ping" that tells pilots they have been spotted. American and British officials worry that if Iraq possesses the Kolchugas, it could put the lives of pilots patrolling the northern and southern "no-fly" zones at greater risk.

Presidential aide Sergei Vasiliev said the administration considers the Kolchuga tapes to be forgeries concocted by elements within the U.S. government that would like to see Mr. Kuchma ousted and replaced with the pro-Western opposition leader, former prime minister Viktor Yuschenko.

The recordings, Mr. Vasiliev points out, were not made on a simple dictaphone, but were done with high-tech digital equipment over hundreds of hours. If they're legitimate, he suggested, they were done by someone much more skilled than the president's ex-bodyguard.

Mr. Vasiliev played down the scandals that have hit the President, and said Mr. Kuchma is now looking ahead to what happens after 2004, though he has yet to decide which potential successor to throw his considerable political weight behind.

Many believe that Mr. Kuchma is now plotting his endgame, trying to arrange for a Boris Yeltsin-like finish to his presidency, whereby he effectively gets to anoint his own successor -- as Mr. Yeltsin did with Vladimir Putin -- and ensure himself immunity to any future criminal prosecution. In a perfect situation, he would also assume the unofficial position of Ukraine's eminence gris, continuing to wield power from behind the scenes.

"It's absolutely certain that he will do his best to provide for his quiet life after he retires," said Mikhaylo Pogrebinsky, director of the Kiev Centre of Political Studies and Conflictology.

But he's not yet giving Mr. Yanukovich the room to impress that Mr. Yeltsin gave Mr. Putin at the end of his presidency.

"In Russia, the president kind of phased himself out and allowed room for [Mr. Putin] to take decisions. Here, that's not the case. Kuchma retains all the key leverage in his hands," Mr. Pogrebinsky said. "Kuchma still retains his power."

Mark MacKinnon is The Globe and Mail's Moscow correspondent