Est europeo: Ucraina - "democratizzazione" ed opposizione

[Coordinamento Romano per la Jugoslavia <crj at sigmasrl.it>]

UCRAINA

* IAC - Colpo di stato del Presidente filooccidentale Kuchma.
Truppe circondano il Parlamento: Kuchma vuole emulare Eltsin
incominciando a bombardare "per la democrazia"? 
Assoluto silenzio stampa sui media occidentali.
* Daily Telegraph - L'Ucraina sempre piu' inserita nella NATO in vista
di future "missioni umanitarie".

* SESSIONE A KIEV DEL TRIBUNALE INTERNAZIONALE PER I CRIMINI DELLA NATO
Una relazione a cura dell'IAC.


---

From: iacenter at iacenter.org
Reply-To: "activist -- key" <iacenter at iacenter.org>
To: "actvist -- key" <iacenter at iacenter.org>
Subject: 2/4/00: Emergency alert on pro-NATO coup in Ukraine
Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 12:16:14 -0500

EMERGENCY ALERT!

PRO-NATO COUP D'ETAT IN UKRAINE;
US-BACKED PRESIDENT SURROUNDS PARLIAMENT WITH TROOPS;
OPPOSITION LAWMAKERS ON HUNGER STRIKE

IAC Delegation Back from Kiev Charges US Gov't Role, Calls for Protests to
Break US Media Information Blockade

Feb. 4, 2000 - Troops have surrounded Ukraine's parliament. Inside the main
hall are nearly 200 opposition deputies, some of them on hunger strike.
They oppose rightwing president Kuchma's plan to abolish Ukraine's elected
legislature (Verkhovnye Rada) and replace it with a body more compliant to
his wishes. Those include bringing Ukraine into NATO as well as privatizing
land and other measures demanded by the International Monetary Fund. On
Feb. 1, protesters gathered to defend parliament were attacked by rightwing
groups organized by the regime.

US ROLE Before moving against his country's parliament, Kuchma held a
private meeting with US vice president Al Gore in Washington, D.C. Kuchma
was first elected in 1996 with considerable financial aid from the Soros
Foundation. He was reelected last November in a vote the opposition charges
was plagued with fraud. European Union electoral observers confirm many of
their charges.

The current confrontation began Jan. 21, when pro-NATO, pro-IMF deputies
and their allies held an extralegal gathering in a non- government building
at the same time as an official Rada session was in progress. The
unconstitutional meeting voted to oust elected Rada speaker Oleksandr
Tkachenko and deputy speaker Adam Martynyuk and replace them with Kuchma
supporters. Attempts to remove Tkachenko and Martynyuk by constitutional
procedures had failed in the Rada. Today armed guards escorting Ivan
Plyush, the pro- Kuchma grouping's choice for speaker, forcibly seized the
speaker's office from Tkachenko, who had refused to leave.

OPPOSITION LEADERS SPEAK TO IAC International Action Center representatives
Larissa Kritskaya and Bill Doares were in Kiev last week, where they
visited the Rada and met with Tkachenko and other opposition leaders. "This
crisis comes not from the deputies but from the president," Kuchma told the
IAC representatives. "There is an attempt to forcibly Westernize Ukraine.
The presidential election was determined by force, and now the president is
using force against parliament. Kuchma's rule has brought ruin to our
people. Now he is staging a coup d'etat to concentrate absolute power in
his hands. Our constitution has been violated at every step."

"Kuchma is trying to make a coup to gain absolute power," said Ukraine
Socialist Party leader Oleksandr Moroz. "He is acting on behalf of powerful
private groups that support him. Since Kuchma came to office, Ukraine has
gotten poorer but his friends have gotten rich. They now want to get even
richer by selling shares in land and grabbing control of basic industries
like steel, petrochemicals and even oil and gas, which is now forbidden to
be privatized."

"It is obvious that the United States has designed the Ukraine's political
landscape," Oleg Grachev, Kiev regional secretary of the Communist Party of
Ukraine (KPU), told Kritskaya and Doares. "You cannot speak about injustice
and electoral falsification in this country without speaking of the
domination of the International Monetary Fund."

INTERNATIONAL ACTION CENTER CONDEMNS US ROLE "The US-backed presidential
coup in Ukraine is of a piece with the bloody war against Yugoslavia and
the occupation of Kosovo," the International Action Center charged in a
statement issued today. "It is part of NATO's drive to the east. The White
House and Pentagon want to bring Ukraine into NATO, which is a dangerous
step toward a new and larger war. This must be seen in the context of the
revival of Star Wars and the plans to base nuclear weapons in Hungary.
Washington also wants to crush any opposition in to the dictates of the
International Monetary Fund in Ukraine and the other former Soviet
republics. We must not allow a repeat of the events in Chile in 1973, with
Kuchma as Pinochet."

WALL STREET RULES With nearly 50 million people, Ukraine is the
second-largest former Soviet republic. It was one of the USSR's most
productive agricultural and industrial regions. Today, like other former
Soviet republics, it has been devastated by "economic restructuring"
dictated by the International Monetary Fund. Since the fall of the USSR,
Ukraine's industrial production has dropped 70 percent. Its population has
fallen by 2 million in just the past two years. The old-age pension is $13
a month and millions of workers are not being paid. While hunger stalks
many regions, one-third of the state budget goes in interest payments to
Western banks. The country's debt has risen 30 times since Kuchma took
office in 1996.

The Kuchma regime has tried to create a fascist-like atmosphere by
exploiting divisions similar to those used to break up Yugoslavia. It has
tried to whip up bigotry against the large Russian minority (one quarter of
the population) among the Ukrainian majority. Soviet-era books have been
burned in public squares and opposition activists attacked by fascist
gangs. The regime's nationalist pose does not stop Wall Street from
dictating its economic policy. It has agreed to raise food and fuel prices,
rents and gas and electricity rates on a schedule dictated by the
International Monetary Fund.

MARKED BALLOTS AND HAND GRENADES KPU general secretary Petro Simonenko, who
calls for Ukraine to withdraw from the IMF, was the runner-up in November's
presidential election. He got an official 38 percent of the vote. The KPU
brought evidence of marked ballots, ballot-box stuffing and vote buying to
Ukraine's criminal court but was told such matters were outside the court's
jurisdiction. In the first round of the presidential election, Progressive
Socialist Party candidate Natalia Vitorienko, who also condemns the IMF,
was injured by a hand grenade tossed into a rally she was addressing.

IAC CALLS FOR INTERNATIONAL PROTESTS "The US corporate media, which so
obediently repeated Pentagon- State Department lies about Kosovo, appears
to have imposed an information blockade on the events in Ukraine and US
involvement there" the IAC statement concluded. "We must break that
blockade. The democratic forces in Ukraine deserve the support of antiwar
and justice-loving people in this country and around the world."

The IAC called for protests to be sent to President Kuchma via the embassy
of Ukraine in Washington at telephone 202-333-0606 or fax 202-333-0817.


International Action Center
39 West 14th Street, Room 206
New York, NY 10011
email: iacenter at iacenter.org
http://www.iacenter.org
phone: 212 633-6646
fax:   212 633-2889

---

Daily Telegraph (UK) ISSUE 1709
Saturday 29 January 2000 Nato to help Ukraine train armed forces

NATO will help Ukraine modernise its armed forces, its Secretary-General
announced yesterday at the end of his two-day visit to the former Soviet
republic. George Robertson told leaders in a speech in Kiev, the capital:
"Such a reform will be painful. Nato can assist Ukraine. A military that is
transparent, democratically controlled and fully accountable is part and
parcel of a mature democracy. And a military that adopts modern management
techniques will spend scarce resources more efficiently." Lord Robertson
met President Leonid Kutchma and Prime Minister Viktor Yushenko during his
visit. Kiev signed a partnership agreement with Nato in 1997 but is not an
official candidate for membership. Russia has opposed Nato's expansion to
the east and has warned against inviting republics from the former Soviet
Union to join the defence alliance. Lord Robertson said: "We need to
exploit more fully our military co-operation in Partnership for Peace. By
preparing partner countries to be able to deploy forces alongside Allied
ones in possible peace support or humanitarian operations, we expand the
pool of trained forces for effective crisis management in Europe."



Subject:        Ukraine war crimes tribunal condemns U.S., NATO
  Date:        Mon, 31 Jan 2000 14:22:00 -0500
  From:        iacenter at iacenter.org
    To:        "International"<iacenter at iacenter.org>


UKRAINE WAR CRIMES TRIBUNAL CONDEMNS 
WASHINGTON, NATO

KIEV, Ukraine--President Clinton and other NATO leaders were 
found guilty of crimes against peace by an International Peoples 
Tribunal on NATO War Crimes Against Yugoslavia (English 
translation) that met Jan. 23 in the parliament building of this
beautiful 
ancient capital. The hearing was held in defiance of the U.S.-backed 
regime of President Leonid Kuchma, who wants to bring Ukraine into 
NATO.

Delegates from Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Yugoslavia, the Czech 
Republic, Poland, Germany and the United States took part in the 
hearing. The U.S. was represented by Larissa Kritskaya and Bill 
Doares of the International Action Center. Kritskaya and Doares 
were shown on the front page of the major daily Kievsky Vedomosty 
under the headline "Americans Who Dream of Destroying NATO."

The Kiev tribunal was the second in a series of hearings organized by 
the International Peoples Tribunal, which was initiated in Russia by
All-
Slavic Assembly. The first was held in the Russian city of Yaroslavl 
Dec. 14. Others are planned for Belgrade (March 27), Warsaw and 
Minsk. The Kiev tribunal focused on charges of crimes against peace-
conspiracy to cause a war. IPT organizers plan to coordinate their 
efforts with the Commission of Inquiry on U.S./NATO War Crimes 
Against Yugoslavia organized by the International Action Center and 
former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark.

The Ukraine hearing, which was chaired by Prof. Mikhail Kuznetsov 
of Moscow, got considerable support from the Socialist, Communist 
and other Ukrainian opposition parties. Socialist Party deputy Vil 
Nikolayich Romashenko was vice president of the tribunal.

The judges and participants heard eyewitness testimony from 
Yugoslav delegates who told of the death and destruction inflicted by 
NATO bombs and missiles, which took 2,000 civilian lives. They also 
heard several parliamentarians who had visited Yugoslavia during the 
war.

Deputy Sergei Kaszian of the Belarus parliament told of his meetings 
with ethnic Albanian Kosovar leaders who condemned the NATO 
bombing and held the U.S. responsible for the destruction of their 
country. Kaszian said that NATO forces used had brutalized Kosovar 
refugees, separating children from mothers and sending them to 
different countries. He also testified to the large number of children 
killed or wounded by NATO bombs and missiles.

Ukrainian Communist deputy Vladimir Moiseenko represents the 
Donbass coal-mining region and chairs the Ukraine Association to 
Restore the Soviet Union. He pointed out that NATO was from its 
inception an aggressive alliance aimed against East Europe and the 
Soviet Union and compared the U.S.-NATO strategy used to break 
up Yugoslavia with its current strategy toward Ukraine. He quoted 
U.S. strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski's description of Ukraine as a 
"military platform" for NATO's expansion to the east. A NATO 
Ukraine would become a base to invade Belarus and later Russia, 
Moiseenko said. He condemned Ukraine's U.S.-backed president 
Leonid Kuchma for facilitating NATO's expansion but said, "The 
Ukrainian people are waking up to resist Ukraine's colonization." He 
also called on the rest of the world to apply economic sanctions 
against the U.S. and other NATO states if NATO is not dissolved. 
"But the world is not insane yet and has the strength to stop NATO 
and its 'spiritual leader' the United States."

Retired Soviet admiral Anatoli Yurkovsky, now a member of 
Ukrainian parliament, testified that NATO was also aimed at the 
Albanian people. He told of the 1996 mass uprising in southern 
Albania against the U.S.-backed Berisha regime. The insurgents 
"formed committees of national salvation that were like the workers' 
councils in Russia in 1917. But they were smothered by the massive 
intervention of NATO troops."

Larissa Kritskaya, a member of the International Action Center, said 
that "corporate America has dominated Ukraine long enough to 
deliver the country to the point of total destruction. But there is 
another America inside the land of giant corporations, and that is 
conscious people in the U.S. We are happy to be here today 
representing these people as your friends and supporters in your 
struggle against the coming colonization planned by U.S.-led NATO."

IAC spokesperson Bill Doares condemned the war against 
Yugoslavia "as a cynical maneuver carried out to enrich giant U.S. 
corporations that profit off death and destruction." He said that 
"bombs and missiles are not the only agency of destruction. When the 
International Monetary Fund orders Ukraine to close down its coal 
mines and steel plants, reducing workers to starvation, is that not an 
act of war?" He denounced NATO as "the strike force of the 
International Monetary Fund."

Yugoslav ambassador to Ukraine Goiko Dapcevic said, "the fact that 
the war crimes tribunal took place here in Ukraine and the fact that 
there were many representatives of your country willing to testify in
the 
name of truth about the horrible crimes committed during this unlawful 
war that brought a human tragedy to Yugoslavia speaks to our unity. 
Yet the war in Yugoslavia is still far from its end," he continued. 
"Though there are no missiles and bombs falling from the sky right 
now, there is also no peace for us at this time. And the most difficult 
thing now is our incapacity to break the blockade on information. 
Therefore an event like the war crimes tribunal has special value in our 
struggle to tell the world the truth about this war and the present 
condition of my country."



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