Free speech under assault
By Myroslava Gongazde Posted Oct 1 2004
EPA/Sergei Supinsky
Myroslava Gongadze, widow of killed journalist Georly Gongadze, places leaflets reading “Criminals to the prison!” on a fence in downtown Kiev, during the so-called “Ukrainians without Kuchma” protests on Feb. 13, 2001.
The July 9 murder in the streets of Moscow of Paul Klebnikov, the editor of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine, carried an ominous meaning for the journalistic community. Until Klebnikov’s gang-style execution, authorities and criminals used intimidation, harassment and murder to silence homegrown journalists; now they seem confident that even foreign journalists could be muzzled with impunity. Granted, hard-hitting journalists have always been the targets of revenge by those who receive unwanted exposure. However, in Russia and other former Soviet-bloc countries, which have largely failed to establish an independent judicial system, such revenge is often also a death sentence. Thus, Klebnikov’s murder is not an isolated incident, but only the latest – and perhaps the most visible – link in a gruesome string of journalistic deaths. My husband, Ukrainian journalist Georgiy Gongadze, is one of the many casualties of the assault on free speech in the post-Soviet Union.
During the past four years, I have been trying to bring Georgiy’s murderers to justice. This experience that has convinced me that without creating instruments of international accountability many more crimes against journalists will be committed and will be likely to go unpunished.
Georgiy was the editor in chief of Ukrains’ka Pravda (Ukrainian Truth), an independent online newspaper that openly criticized the authorities. In June 2000, two months after the founding of the newspaper, one of Georgiy’s sponsors withdrew because of the site’s critical style. Georgiy refused to back down. In the next month, he was warned that his life might be in danger, and he noticed that he was being followed. However,
When Georgiy disappeared Sept. 16, 2000, my first thought was that he had been kidnapped. The journalistic community in Ukraine launched a highly publicized campaign to find him, but the authorities showed little enthusiasm in investigating my husband’s disappearance. To many of us, this lack of involvement came as no surprise since none of the previous crimes against journalists and other dissidents was fully investigated. But even I did not suspect that the highest-ranking government officials, including Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, were behind Georgiy’s murder.
Two months after my husband’s disappearance, I learned how seriously his work had been taken at the highest levels of power in Ukraine. I learned it from recordings, secretly made in the president’s office by the president’s security guard Mykola Mel’nychenko and authenticated by a U.S. forensic expert Bruce Koenig, who once worked for the FBI. These recordings reveal that President Kuchma made repeated complaints about Georgiy to his former interior minister, Yuri Kravchenko.
In one, Kuchma suggests that “this Georgian” be “give[n] to the Chechens” for ransom, or taken somewhere.
“Undress him, the [expletive], leave him without his trousers, and let him sit there. He’s simply a [expletive].” In a conversation with Kravchenko two months later, Kuchma tells Kravchenko: “So I don’t forget: Gongadze is continuing to mouth off.”
“I will take care of him, Leonid,” Kravchenko responds. “I will do it. He will be sorry.”
The recordings were made public during a special session of the parliament in November 2000. These and other recordings of conversations between Kuchma and key power ministers, politicians and businessmen, paint the full picture of how the authoritarian power was built and practiced in Ukraine. They also point to other attempts by Kuchma at persecuting a number of independent journalists.
Following Georgiy’s disappearance, Prosecutor General Mykhaylo Potebenko and his office organized the sabotage of the investigation and concocted a cover-up for the top state officials implicated in it. Georgiy’s decapitated body was found in November 2000, only a month after he disappeared, but his head was never found. A DNA test confirmed the body was my husband’s, but to date the state prosecution has refused to acknowledge it. No corpse, no crime, seems to be their reasoning.
Some recently leaked documents indicate that a number of police officers confessed they were ordered to follow Georgiy and then to destroy all documentation of their activities. A critical witness in the case, who claimed to know who the perpetrators of the crime were, was murdered with a toxic chemical injection while in custody, according to evidence leaked by an anonymous government source to The Independent newspaper. Instead of acting on this evidence, the state prosecution continues to ignore it.
After months of fruitless struggle with the General Prosecutor’s office I came to realize that my husband’s disappearance would not be fully investigated as long as the current president remained in power.
My husband’s case has attracted the world’s attention, but it was not the last murder of a journalist in Ukraine. Since the dissolution of the Communist regime in 1991, at least 11 journalists have disappeared or been murdered in Ukraine alone.
Journalists who expose the corruption of the former Communist elite – today’s capitalist oligarchs – are beaten, kidnapped or openly murdered, while the apparent instigators and perpetrators of these crimes remain untouchable. Sadly, this virtual obliteration of the journalistic profession in the post-Soviet region occurs amidst deafening silence on the part of society. Having effortlessly gained the right to free speech after the fall of Communism, people in the former Soviet republics have yet to learn to value it. Meanwhile, the international community has no real mechanisms to demand investigation of crimes against journalists aside from the perfunctory declarations sent out to the indifferent authorities.
The journalistic profession has become one of the most dangerous in the post-Communist sections of Europe. Impending murders of journalists have been often heralded by repeated harassment and intimidation. Perhaps it will take the high-profile death of an international journalist like Klebnikov to shake the world community into action.