Leading Journalist Goes Missing

A well-known journalist was missing for the fourth day on Sept. 20 as police continued to investigate his sudden disappearance. 

Georgy Gongadze did not return home late on Sept. 16 where his wife, Myroslava, and twin 3-year-old daughters were waiting for him to unlock the door to their apartment, Myroslava Gongadze said. 

And the day Gongadze disappeared, a veteran freelance reporter went into hiding after being threatened for posting articles about high-level corruption in Ukraine on the Internet. 

Gongadze’s disappearance followed the publication of several reports detailing alleged shady deals of Ukrainian powerbrokers on his Internet news site, Ukrainska Pravda, which features daily news, opinion, and political analysis. 

Police were investigating premeditated murder along with several other versions of Gongadze’s disappearance. Although the search for Gongadze is being overseen personally by President Leonid Kuchma and Interior Minister Yury Kravchenko, police seem to have no clues so far as to what might have happened to the 31-year-old journalist 

“As of today, it’s not clear if he was killed or is still alive,” Kyiv police chief Yury Smirnov said on Sept. 20, according to the Interfax news agency. 

Myroslava Gongadze and journalists who knew him insisted the incident with Gongadze had to with his job and articles posted on Ukrainska Pravda rather than his personal life. 

“He is a responsible man, especially where the children are concerned. They are very special to him, and it is inconceivable that he would leave us waiting outside on the street,” Myroslava Gongadze said.

Gongadze case highlights press freedom issues in Ukraine

About 80 leading Ukrainian journalists appealed to Kuchma on Sept. 19 to fully investigate the disappearance of Gongadze and expressed concern over the woeful state of independent media in Ukraine. 

“During the years of Ukrainian independence, not a single high-profile crime against journalists was fully solved,” the journalists said in an open letter to Kuchma. 

“The lack of results gives us grounds to state that nobody is interested in the fate of our colleagues except for journalists,” the letter said. 

Ukrainska Pravda, along with several other Internet publications, are viewed by many as the only media outlets in Ukraine that are not afraid of criticizing domestic officialdom. 

Other print and electronic independent media have largely changed their critical stance to neutral over the past years either for fear of reprisals by state controlling bodies or because they became owned by business groups close to the government. 

Two days before Gongadze vanished, lawmaker Oleksandr Volkov, one of the most powerful Ukrainian politicians, prevented the journalist from attending his press conference. 

Gongadze editorialized the same day that the reason he was barred from the briefing was because Ukrainska Pravda had published an investigative article detailing previously unreported and unappealing facts from Volkov’s biography, including his alleged ties to organized crime and shady business deals. 

Volkov has been one of Kuchma’s closest and most influential advisers since 1993. He said on Sept. 20 motives behind Gongadze’s disappearance were likely political. 

“I think it had to do with his professional activity,” Volkov told reporters. 

When asked about critical articles about him on Ukrainska Pravda, Volkov said: “So what? [Gongadze] did not criticize me, he simply reprinted the garbage about me that had been published over the past five years. What difference does it make what Web site to reprint [information] from?” 

Two months before the latest incident, all five of the Ukrainska Pravda employees said they had been approached by plainclothes sleuths who identified themselves as police agents and quizzed about trade in narcotics, Chechen killings and possible involvement in other illegal activities. 

“They even interviewed my mother in Lviv,” Gongadze wrote at the time, speculating that officials were looking for a pretext to close down his site. 

The inquiries by unknown agents stopped after Ukrainska Pravda complained to the Prosecutor-General’s Office. 

Meanwhile, Oleh Yeltsov, a veteran investigative reporter formerly employed by the local news agency UNIAN and Radio Free Europe, left his home in Kyiv for undisclosed whereabouts, citing threats from unknown individuals. 

Before leaving Yeltsov said in a statement sent to local media he began receiving threatening phone calls after three articles detailing shady deals involving Kuchma and Volkov appeared on the Russian-based Web site Federal Investigative Bureau. 

Two of the articles were signed under the name of Ivan Stepanov and a third by Yeltsov, who had previously written under the name of Ivan Stepanov. Yeltsov did not say if the first two articles were also written by him. 

Ukrainska Pravda editor Olena Pritula said it was one of those reports, signed by Stepanov, that mentioned Volkov and was republished in abridged form by Ukrainska Pravda on Sept. 5. 

Pritula said Gongadze and Yeltsov were neither personally nor professionally acquainted, adding that decisions to run unflattering articles about Ukrainian politicians on Ukrainska Pravda were never planned in advance. 

Meanwhile, Gongadze’s mysterious disappearance has begun to draw attention from abroad. 

The French media watchdog Reporters sans Frontieres (Reporters without borders) said the “reputation and responsibility of the Ukrainian state will depend on how Georgy Gongadze’s case is resolved.” 

The U.S. embassy in Kyiv said it was concerned about the incident. 

Ukrainian lawmakers also expressed interest in the case, voting overwhelmingly in favor of a motion requiring that the Interior Ministry, the State Security Service and the Prosecutor-General’s Office provide them with timely information about the investigation of Gongadze’s disappearance. 

“Journalists are being killed and beaten; media outlets are being destroyed; journalists go missing under mysterious circumstances, but law-enforcement bodies pretend that nothing is happening,” opposition lawmaker Hryhory Omelchenko said.

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