Dozens of journalists, academics and government figures attend a Munich conference devoted to the Melnychenko tapes scandal
Dozens of journalists, academicians and emissaries on Aug. 6 attended a conference in Munich devoted to the tragicomic hero of Ukraine’s endless “Tapegate” scandal.
The event was nominally dedicated to the publication of a book entitled “In the Center of the Tape Scandal,” by Volodymyr Tsvil, the entrepreneur tasked in early 2000 with secreting Mykola Melnychenko and his family to the Czech Republic to sit out anti-presidential protests in Ukraine.
Melnychenko, the former presidential guard who claims to have bugged the office of President Leonid Kuchma in 1999 and 2000, produced an audio recording allegedly implicating Kuchma and other officials in misdeeds, including the murder of opposition journalist Georgy Gongadze.
Tsvil takes the reader throughout Europe and to the United States, chronicling the exploits of the whistleblowing Melnychenko, from hideaways in the Czech Republic to the ski slopes of the Tyrolean Alps and Munich sushi bars. The effect is to throw a skeptical light on Melnychenko and the politicians who have used him to further their own – and not Ukraine’s – interests.
Contributing editors of the book include former State Security Service (SBU) General Valery Kravchenko and independent journalist Oleksiy Stepura. Two chapters of the 300-page book involve the recollections of Tsvil’s wife, Ivanka, who spent three months hiding with Melnychenko in the Czech Republic before the U.S. granted him and his family refugee status in 2001.
Melnychenko is credited by leaders of Ukraine’s opposition parties with making up to 700 hours of recordings using a palm-sized digital recorder placed underneath a couch in Kuchma’s office.
Supposedly fearing for his life after he went public with recordings, the ex-guard fled Ukraine with Tsvil’s help in the fall of 2000. Little gratitude remains.
Melnychenko on Aug. 2 notified Tsvil in writing of his intention to abrogate a $250,000 agreement with him to co-author another book about the scandal.
He sent Oleksandr Yelyashkevich, his confidant and unofficial spokesman, to deliver the message in person.
“Kuchma shouldn’t be asked to repent for his crimes, he should be punished for committing them,” Yelyashkevich cried, stomping out of the conference in rage.
In 2000 Yelyashkevich was attacked outside his hotel in downtown Kyiv. An audio file made before the incident contains a voice resembling Kuchma’s referring to Yelyashkevich’s attempts in 2000 to block a referendum designed to expand presidential powers.
“Someone is going to hit that fucking Jew so hard that he never gets up,” the voice says.
Anti-presidential protests in late 2000 and early 2001 were triggered after Socialist leader Oleksandr Moroz released excerpts of recordings provided by Melnychenko implicating Kuchma in the murder of the muckraking Gongadze.
Sept. 16 marks the fourth anniversary of Gongadze’s disappearance. His headless corpse was found on Nov. 2, 2000 in a village outside Kyiv.
To date no one has been held to account for the crime.
