Having created an unlikely heroine, and reduced European Union integration from the hypothetical to the impossible, it is in Yanukovych’s best interests to ensure his rival is released swiftly.
A show trial that shames Europe has been taking place in Kyiv, ending with the Oct. 11 conviction of Tymoshenko and a seve-prison sentence.
Yanukovych, Ukraine’s democratically elected president who took office on Feb. 25, 2010, is allowing rival Tymoshenko to go on trial for decisions she took when in office. Tymoshenko is going to prison after a verdict after one of the more squalid abuses of justice seen — and this in a country that claims to be a democracy knocking on the doors of Europe.
All politicians newly arrived in power blame their predecessors.
In Britain, Conservatives attack Gordon Brown, blaming him, the laws or decisions he made, or the agreements he signed for every problem Britain faces.
In Russia, Vladimir Putin still blames Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin for Russia’s contemporary problems.
United States politics is bitterly polarized. To read the liberals on ex-President George W. Bush or the right on President Barack Obama, one would get an impression the country’s political leadership had been corrupted by malign, quasi-criminal forces.
But this is why democratic politics is a great safety valve. It allows all the hate and dislike and accusations of those in power to be diverted into the ballot box.
You don’t like Tymoshenko, think she is a disaster for Ukraine and sold the store with her gas deals with Russia? Fine. Go and vote for Yanukovych. That’s just what Ukrainians did as they pushed Tymoshenko into the political dustbin of history.
But now Yanukovych has done the impossible. He had turned a controversial, divisive politician into a European Joan of Arc placed on trial in what the world sees as an act of vindictive revenge by Ukraine’s new rulers.
Of course politicians who can be accused of taking money from business for personal or party enrichment have to face legal processes.
Jacques Chirac of France now has to answer allegations that he took money to pay for party campaigns. Germany’s Helmut Kohl faced similar accusations. In Spain, more than 800 politicians, civil servants and business leaders have been arrested this century for taking bribes in exchange for giving permission for housing or business development.
And the interface between money and politics, between oligarchs and political leaders, is certainly not unknown in Ukraine.
All of Ukraine’s main oligarchs own TV stations. Even Valery Khoroshkovsky, who heads the SBU, Ukraine’s State Security Service, owns the Inter chain of TV stations. It is like the head of MI6 running Channel 5 or the Director of the CIA having a second job as a media tycoon.
Khoroshkovky, it should be noted, was appointed by the former president, Viktor Yushchenko, and was endorsed by a majority in the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament.
Like France General de Gaulle in the 1960s, whoever is in power in Ukraine wants to make sure the TV news supports his position. The oligarchs adapted to Yushchenko and now make sure Yanukovych has an easy ride.
Viktor Pinchuk, a top Ukrainian oligarch, has gone a step further. Every summer he organizes a fiesta at Yalta for European political grandees where they can discuss the affairs of the world and enjoy his generous hospitality. Tony Blair, Carl Bildt and Radek Sikorski attended this summer’s Yalta gabfest. Yanukovych was there as well and had to cope with some in-his-face criticism.
So this is clearly not Stalinism, not even Putinism. Indeed, are Ukrainian oligarchs any different from American or European business leaders who run big oil, or big media, or big banks, dispensing largesse to the political class by the way of well-remunerated speaking engagements or sponsorship of conferences, travel, and think tanks?
Yet Ukraine is the only country in Europe where a former prime minister has been convicted for acts she publicly undertook while in office.
Next year, Ukraine and Poland will host Euro 2012, the football championship that will get as many headlines as the London Olympics. It is extremely embarrassing for Ukraine’s Euro 2012 partner, Poland, to have to send its president, Bronislaw Komorowski, to his opposite number in Kyiv to beg for an end to this show trial. Can Euro 2012 take place without considerable political and diplomatic disturbance if the show trial against Tymoshenko results in her imprisonment?
It is also hard to see how any agreement with the EU can be signed as long as Kyiv rejects a core value of European democracy – namely that elections, not courts, are where politicians settle their differences. Ukraine is looking at changing its criminal code which would remove the articles used to prosecute Tymoshenko. This should happen quickly and Tymoshenko should be released so that Ukraine can be seen as a European nation where democratic culture is sinking permanent roots.
The EU recently held its Eastern Partnership conference in Warsaw. The results were nugatory, underlining the points made by Spain’s foreign policy thinker, Jose Ignacio Torreblanca in his new book,which deserves an English publisher, La Fragmentacion délPoder Europeo(‘The fragmentation of European power‘).
Torreblanca’s argument is that the EUs’ power to influence its neighbors’ politics and policies crumbled when EU leaders began renationalizing their foreign policy and lost the will and willingness to take risks in allowing countries like Ukraine or Georgia to start on the road – long as it may be – to EU membership.
Many other post-communist nations cleaned up their act — however much it appeared to be against national or natural traditions — in other to make the EU grade. And even if they did not fully clean up their act, significant steps were initiated in the direction of living by rule of law and democratic norms.
Now EU enlargement has run out of steam. While the economic crisis grips Europe, Eurozone and non-Euro economies alike, it is hard to see much that can encourage Ukrainian modernizers and European-style democrats to show commitment and energy. Ukraine does not need to shoot itself in the foot with this Kafkaesque trial. It is at the ballot box that revenge can be taken upon politicians, not in the courtroom once they have left office.
Denis MacShane is a Labor Party member of the British parliament and former minister for Europe in Tony Blair’s government. He was a member of the Party of European Socialists executive committee for several years.
