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Moscow Times
January 31, 2005
Ukraine's President Takes the Stage
By Lynn Berry
Staff Writer
DAVOS, Switzerland -- The comparisons are inevitable. A year ago, it was the newly elected Mikheil Saakashvili who came to Davos to announce ambitious plans for transforming his country. Bursting with boyish energy, he seemed almost giddy from suddenly finding himself among world leaders curious to meet the young Georgian president.
This year it was Viktor Yushchenko in Davos holding out the promise of a new democratic country on former Soviet soil where corruption would no longer be tolerated.
When the new Ukrainian president rose to speak Friday before about 1,000 of the political and business elite gathered at the World Economic Forum, the well-heeled audience honored his bravery with a standing ovation.
His bruised and bumpy face enlarged on a giant video screen behind him, Yushchenko said Ukrainians had shown that they belong in Europe, and he laid out his plans for a future Ukraine worthy of membership in the continent's ultimate club, the European Union. He asked for the foreign investment necessary to help make these hopes a reality.
Some Davos participants said they found him too soft, lacking in charisma. Others saw, instead, a gentleness, perhaps a wiseness, which touched a chord. All saw a once-handsome face disfigured by dioxin poisoning that nearly took his life.
At a lunch with journalists Saturday, Yushchenko said it would soon be clear who had poisoned him during last fall's presidential election campaign. "I don't think it's a complicated case," he told a half-dozen journalists sitting at his table. "The circumstances are very specific, very obvious. The prosecutor general said yesterday that they are narrowing the scope of the investigation."
He refused to identify the suspects. "This will have to be answered by the prosecutors," he said. He also refused to respond to a question on whether the trail will lead back to Moscow. "Can I refrain from answering this?" he said.
If the evidence points to Russian involvement, it could complicate Yushchenko's efforts to patch things up with President Vladimir Putin, who backed his opponent in the disputed election. Both leaders, who met in Moscow on Jan. 24, have given assurances that they are ready to turn the page and will work together.
Yushchenko said he would seek treatment for his disfigured face, though he would not say where. "I still cannot get used to the face of Yushchenko that you see today," he said at a news conference earlier Saturday.
In addition to his own poisoning, he promised progress in another painful case, the 2000 murder of journalist Heorhiy Gongadze. "I hope that by May we can submit the case to court," Yushchenko said at the lunch. He said he planned to meet this week with Gongadze's mother and will honor her wishes for her son's burial.
Gongadze was abducted in central Kiev in September 2000, and his decapitated body was later found buried in a forest outside the capital. His murder triggered months of violent protests against then-President Leonid Kuchma, whom the opposition accused of being involved in the killing. Recordings later surfaced of alleged conversations between Kuchma and his subordinates in which he vented his anger at Gongadze's writings. Kuchma has denied any involvement in the murder.
During Kuchma's presidency, he was also accused of approving the sale of radar systems to Saddam Hussein's Iraq and of steering wealth to relatives, supporters and east Ukrainian clans during privatizations.
The new Ukrainian leadership will have to address the question of Kuchma's fate, specifically whether to hold him accountable for any crimes he may have committed. Yushchenko said Saturday that he had not cut any deal with Kuchma that would protect him from prosecution.
Immediately after meeting Putin in Moscow, a trip he made the day after his inauguration, Yushchenko set out to push his main agenda, eventual EU membership for Ukraine. His first stop was the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France. At Davos, it became clear how serious and personal an issue this is for him.
"I don't feel comfortable striving to join Europe," he told journalists at the lunch. "I feel like I am a European. I live in a European country and possess European values."
He said he has no illusions about Ukraine entering the EU any time soon, but said the steps Ukraine needs to take to reform its government and economy are necessary regardless of EU membership.
"We will make Ukraine a European country in terms of values and standards, and then we will see Europe knocking on our door," he said.
Yushchenko met with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso on the sidelines of Davos on Saturday, and Barroso said afterward that Ukraine should concentrate for now on building closer ties with the EU through political and economic reform, Reuters reported. Yushchenko expressed satisfaction with the meeting and said he will visit Brussels in late February to discuss Ukraine's quest for market-based economy trade status.
Those who spoke with Yushchenko and his advisers here said they were impressed with how aggressively he has moved to formulate a program. On Thursday, he plans to submit his strategy for European integration to the EU. At the top of his list is fighting corruption, specifically within government and law enforcement.
"What my friend Mikheil Saakashvili has done to this end is very illustrative," Yushchenko said at the news conference.
Saakashvili, who was at Davos again this year, claims to now have the smallest civil service and lowest corruption in the CIS. He completely abolished the traffic police and fired 80 percent of the police force. "The only thing that happened was that they stopped extorting money on the roads," Saakashvili said at a private lunch that was also attended by some of his ministers.
With help from the United Nations, philanthropist George Soros and others, Saakashvili has significantly increased salaries for the police, judges and government officials. The increases were introduced first in the tax service, and it brought an immediate jump in tax collection, he said. Georgia also introduced a tax amnesty for previous years, Saakashvili said.
Annual tax revenues increased 48 percent in 2004, and revenue from customs duties increased five times, said his minister for economic development, Aleksi Aleksishvili. Gross domestic product was up 8.5 percent, with inflation at 7.4 percent. Aleksishvili pointed to estimates from the Economist Intelligence Unit of 12 percent GDP growth in 2005.
Kakha Bendukidze, a former Russian industrialist who is now Georgia's minister for coordinating reform, said the government is working on further privatizations. "Not having state property means not having corruption," he said.
Bendukidze said Georgia also is working on "how to prevent the Yukos-ization of the economy" as governments change.
Yushchenko spoke passionately about the need to bring the shadow economy into the light, reduce taxes but enforce tax collection, form an honest and professional civil service, establish an independent judiciary, and guarantee a free press. He said his plans will be spelled out in more detail in the strategy he will present to the EU later this week.
He said his key objective in coming to Davos was "to stretch out his hand to business."
"It was important that this hand does not hang in the air unshaken. This is why we spoke on every possible occasion about what we want to change," he said. "We want to convince business that we have a new government, one that will not steal and will not accept bribes."
In his speech to the forum, he ended with a simple plea. "Please help Ukraine and quite shortly you'll see a beautiful, European country."
- Yushchenko, still in the process of putting together a government, defended his choice of Yulia Tymoshenko as prime minister, though he did so in an unusual and indirect fashion. "Tymoshenko has been my partner. I have certain political obligations to her, and I want to meet them," he said at the news conference. He added that polls show more than 34 percent of Ukrainians want her to be his prime minister.
-One of the more pleasant problems facing the new Ukrainian leadership is what to do with unspent funds donated to support the Orange Revolution.
Yushchenko said his team had opened a bank account to support those camping out near Independence Square. In one day, 16,000 transfers were made into the account, which eventually grew to 25 million hryvnas ($4.9 million.) Of that amount, only 5 million hryvnas was spent, because so many people brought food, warm clothes and other supplies to the square. Now the government is trying to decide how to spend the remaining 20 million, he said.