The SBU – Ukraine's secret service – on June 24 ordered Vadim Rabinovich to leave the country and not come back for five years. Rabinovich, a former Ukrainian citizen and now Israeli, has been for years a controversial wealthy businessman. He has been involved intimately in politics as a supporter of the president and been dubbed an oligarch. Then why did SBU suddenly deport him?
Officially, the SBU accused Rabinovich of causing serious economic losses for Ukraine with another Israeli citizen, Leonid Wolf. The latter was barred from Ukraine last December, according to the SBU, on suspicion of being involved in numerous assassinations in Ukraine.
Rabinovich's exclusion from Ukraine raises many serious questions of law and fairness. What economic losses did Rabinovich cause to the state? If he caused such serious economic losses, then why didn't the SBU charge him with a crime instead of kicking him out of the country? And who is Leonid Wolf?
If Wolf is responsible for gangland killings and assassinations, why didn't SBU attempt to arrest him instead of barring him from Ukraine? Is there an arrest warrant for Wolf? Is Interpol looking for him on behalf of Ukraine?
Ukraine is not the only country that excludes Rabinovich. The United States revoked Rabinovich's visa in 1995, citing his links to a company accused of trading in arms and nuclear materials with North Korea and Iran. But the U.S. State Department also did not specify the charges against Rabinovich.
Is it fair that Rabinovich has become an international pariah, though charges against him have not been tested in court? Everyone should be presumed innocent until proven guilty. That is a standard that the American and Ukrainian governments are not applying to Rabinovich.
Ukraine for its part must invite Rabinovich as well as Wolf to stand trial. But first the government must specify the charges against them.
In search of a fair election
The president's speech on Constitution Day was a missed opportunity to emphasize fairness and the rule of law during the October presidential election in which he will be a candidate.
Instead, President Leonid Kuchma took the opportunity to issue 32 new economic decrees in a two-day period ending on Constitution Day, June 28 – the last day legally possible for him to do so.
When the Constitution was adopted in 1996, the president was allowed three years to issue economic decrees subject to parliament's approval. During this time, the President has issued more than 150 decrees in all. Most (except for the latest batch) have been approved by parliament; most have had little effect on the economy.
The era of the presidential decree is now over. It is replaced with the more conventional – and hopefully more productive – parliamentary approach to lawmaking, in which legislation is subject to presidential signature or veto. The apparent acceptance of the new rules by Kuchma and parliament is a sign of progress. But it is no cause for celebration.
In this budding democracy, unfortunately, elections are regularly manipulated at all levels. Locally elected government officials in Odessa and Yalta have been removed by force. The upcoming presidential election could be the strongest test yet of the strength of the democracy and the Constitution.
If the outcome is viewed as having been manipulated by the mass media and fixed at the ballot box, then a major constitutional crisis will develop. Already, serious charges of interference by pro-Kuchma forces have surfaced. It is disturbing, for instance, when the ostensibly independent Central Election Commission ignores a Supreme Court ruling, as it did in a recent dispute over allocation of forms for candidate petitions.
Some the worst outrages, however, are committed by the news media. Newscasters on Ukraine's first TV channel unabashadly spend the first half of the program praising the president and the second half attacking his rivals.
The President's recent dismissal of the charge that he controls the media falls flat amid the daily outpouring of propaganda from UT-1. His claim that he doesn't have any television stations or newspapers, made in a June 22 radio interview with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, is nonsense. The great bulk of the broadcast media roots for him because his administration doles out licenses to his favorite oligarchs, who also own stables of newspapers.
The president should take his role as guarantor of the constitution more seriously than he does. Voters may well choose Kuchma to lead them for four more years. But his re-election would mean little if it came after a process viewed as unfair, illegal and opaque.
He must act as a statesman, and not as an accomplice of supporters wanting to stack the deck in his favor.
