A Deal with the
Devil
By Walter Kish
The political events of this past week in Ukraine have left me both dumbfounded and more than a little disillusioned. Following
a narrow failed vote to get his candidate Yuri Yekhanurov confirmed as
interim Prime Minister, President Yushchenko did what many people here
consider unthinkable – he made a deal with the devil in the
person of his political archenemy Victor Yanukovych.
The
price Yushchenko paid was steep – an amnesty for all those
accused of election fraud and vote-rigging, an end to “political
persecution of the opposition” (read: the investigation and
prosecution of any of the oligarchs, crooks and bandits who have
pillaged Ukraine for the past decade), immunity from prosecution of any
member of local, regional or oblast council, and granting the
opposition political forces the chairmanship of a number of key
Parliamentary committees including the committee for freedom of
expression and information, and the committee for combating organized
crime and corruption. The foxes have once again been granted the key to the chicken coop.
All
those promises made during the revolution about routing out corruption
and bringing to justice those who have so abused the law and the people
of Ukraine are now just empty words. As
one political commentator here put it, you can now forget about those
responsible for Gongadze’s murder or Yushchenko’s poisoning
ever being prosecuted, all those oligarchs who got rich by stealing the
country’s assets can now rest easy that their ill-gotten gains
are safe, and the business of politics in Ukraine can now revert back
to being the cynical, corrupt, power-game it has been since Ukraine
became independent.
I find this turn of events almost incomprehensible. Why
is it that Yushchenko was not able to find a compromise with the
Tymoshenko bloc which shares virtually all his political and reformist
ideals and principles, but was able to strike a deal with the very
forces that cheated him of his election victory, were likely
responsible for his poisoning, and whose policies and ideology are
completely antagonistic to his own? Has his
personal animosity for Yulia Tymoshenko so clouded his judgment that he
prefers the company of Yanukovych, Kuchma and his gang? Was confirming
a caretaker government for six months worth sacrificing all the most
fundamental principles and ideals that brought all those hundreds of
thousands of people to the Maidan last November and December? The
irony of the situation is that most political experts say that
Yushchenko could have gotten Yekhanurov confirmed as PM, albeit
narrowly, without the support of Yanukovych and his Regions party.
It
has become abundantly clear that whereas Yushchenko may have succeeded
brilliantly in staging a revolution, he clearly lacks the skills that
it takes to govern effectively and to manage the political processes in
this country. To me, it is personally saddening, because I believe in
his personal integrity and commitment. Nonetheless, he has fallen significantly short of being the leader everyone expected.
So now it seems to be business as usual in the running of the country, and neither I nor anyone in Ukraine should take comfort in that statement. The only winner in all that has transpired is Yulia Tymoshenko. Going
into the Parliamentary elections next March she can effectively claim
to be the only true inheritor of the Orange Revolutionary mantle. You
can rest assured that she will campaign aggressively claiming that
Yushchenko and his bloc have sold out the revolution and are no better
than their predecessors. Whether she can win a majority remains to be seen.
The
big losers, of course, are all those millions of people who believed
those inspiring ideals and promises that were so eloquently proclaimed
on the Maidan.
Whom are they to believe and trust now?