Some of us try to overcome this melancholy by getting together on Maidan Nezalezhnosti to bolster each other’s spirits. We honor the victim with a crowd more and more populated by people who never knew him personally, but who know that solving his murder remains a significant test that the nation’s leaders have thus far failed.
We come together to remind the world that the person who ordered Gongadze’s murder – and those persons complicit in the cover-up – are still walking the same streets as free men.
Most reasonable assessments of the evidence lead to ex-President Leonid Kuchma’s doorstep – from the Mykola Melnychenko recordings to the cover-ups and the prosecutorial misconduct and misdirection of the early years, when the murder suspect was the boss of those in charge of investigating the crime.
But persistence wins out sometimes, even if not fully.
The evidence leading to Kuchma became even stronger under successors Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych. While they deserve no medals for bringing the case to a close, the investigation did move forward enough to convict a former police general and three of his subordinates in carrying out the kidnapping and murder. They took orders, in turn, from Interior Minister Yuriy Kravchenko, a Kuchma confidante killed by two gunshot wounds to the head in a 2005 death ruled as a suicide.
On Dec. 7, 2010, prosecutors alleged a conspiracy to kill Gongadze involving Kravchenko “and other officials.” By March 24, 2011, prosecutors became more explicit and charged Kuchma with “exceeding authority” by giving a presidential order that led to Gongadze’s murder.
Since then, judges, prosecutors and politicians have concocted one flimsy excuse after another for why Ukraine’s second president has never been brought to trial. In an April interview with the Kyiv Post, First Deputy Chief Prosecutor Renat Kuzmin declared – as Yushchenko did – that “the establishment of the men who ordered this crime is a matter of honor for the prosecution service and of all Ukrainian authorities.”
In that interview five months ago, he suggested that Kuchma would face justice soon, but that the case was being delayed until investigators determined whether the ex-president had any involvement in the 1996 murder of parliamentarian Yevhen Shcherban, a wealthy businessman from Donetsk.
Given the passage of 13 years, the inescapable conclusion is this: there is plenty of evidence but no political will to take Kuchma to trial, a venue that could help him clear his name or that could, once and for all, establish whether he gave the order to kill.
At this year’s commemoration, politicians were in short supply. The multi-millionaire businessman Petro Poroshenko, a non-partisan member of parliament, stood out in a crowd of a couple hundred or so people. The owner of Channel 5 has every reason to care about a free press, the fate of journalists and the much larger issue of his nation’s destiny.
Noting the progress made, Poroshenko said that he still views solving the case as a test of whether Ukraine belongs in the family of civilized European, democratic nations. He didn’t pass judgment on Kuchma, saying that’s something a court should do.
We agree. Until murderers are caught, no matter how long it takes or how rich and powerful they are, no one is safe.
