Many Ukrainians blame the killing of Georgy Gongadze on former president Leonid Kuchma, writes DANIEL McLAUGHLIN.
UKRAINIANS HOPE the capture this week and apparent confession of a fugitive former general will help close arguably the country’s most notorious criminal case, the murder of journalist Georgy Gongadze.
Olexiy Pukach was arrested on Tuesday in a village in northern Ukraine some five years after he disappeared during an investigation into the killing in 2000 of Gongadze, whose articles on crime and corruption in high places angered some of the country’s most powerful people.
Gongadze’s decapitated body was discovered in a forest outside Kiev, but his head was never found – a macabre detail that helped fuel public outrage at a crime that many Ukrainians immediately blamed on the regime of then president Leonid Kuchma.
Suspicion focused squarely on the president when one of his former bodyguards fled Ukraine and aired secret tape recordings of someone who sounded like Kuchma complaining about Gongadze’s articles and ordering subordinates to “deal with” him.
For several years, nothing came of Kuchma’s pledge to solve the murder. Commissions were formed and swiftly dissolved in failure. Investigators blamed mysterious gangsters who were never charged and were quickly forgotten about. The public smelled a cover-up.
Despite Kuchma’s denial of any involvement in the murder, the fate of Gongadze and the failure to find those responsible fanned a desire for major change in Ukraine that grew into the 2004 Orange Revolution and the election as president of Viktor Yushchenko, who vowed to hunt down the killers.
Within weeks of Yushchenko’s inauguration, three senior policemen were arrested and charged with murdering Gongadze, who was 31 years old when he died. But the case ran into trouble days later.
As the net appeared to close around former interior minister Yuriy Kravchenko – the man widely suspected of giving the order to kill Gongadze – he was found dead at his house near Kiev. The official verdict was suicide, but reports swirled that he had somehow suffered two gunshot wounds to the head.
After a trial lasting more than three years, the three former policemen were finally found guilty in 2008 of involvement in the murder, and jailed for a combined total of 37 years.
Despite the length of the court case, no details emerged of who ordered the killing; over time, potentially crucial witnesses died and disappeared, some in strange circumstances, and as Yushchenko and his former allies squabbled and scrapped for power, the trail again went cold.
Ukrainians were stunned, then, by Wednesday’s television pictures of a burly and bearded Pukach face down in the dirt outside his ramshackle country cottage, handcuffed and admitting to playing a “direct” role in the death of Gongadze.
Within hours of the news of his arrest, came word from the police that Pukach had not only admitted his own guilt, but agreed to reveal who ordered the murder and to take investigators to the place where the journalist’s head is buried.
Ukrainian media report that police believe Pukach strangled Gongadze on the orders of Kravchenko. But what Ukrainians most want to know is whether he will testify that Kuchma gave the initial order.
Few believe, however, that the real instigators of Gongadze’s murder will be caught.
Kravchenko, the curious suicide who was the possible link between Pukach and Kuchma, is long dead; rumours abound that Kuchma was secretly promised immunity from prosecution when he stepped down quietly after the Orange Revolution. A question being asked is why has Pukach been arrested now, after apparently living happily for years with no problem from his supposed pursuers? Most see politics at work, and note that Pukach was seized on the day when US vice-president Joe Biden was visiting Ukraine – and barely six months before Yushchenko is up for re-election.
Sceptics suggest Yushchenko pulled Pukach out of the hat to revive his reputation as a crime-fighter and boost his abysmal ratings. Whether his arrest has that effect will be known after elections in January.
It is still not clear when, if ever, Ukrainians will know who decided that Georgy Gongadze must die.