Kiev Fights Uphill Battle Against Culture of Graft

KIEV, Ukraine -- Soon after taking office as Ukraine's new justice minister last month, Roman Zvarych placed a call to the governor of Zakarpatye region. Customs officers had reported confiscating 43 luxury cars, but Zvarych had a sneaking suspicion that local authorities were illegally using them -- or had even sold some.

"I said: 'How many cars can you actually see?'" Zvarych recalled during a recent interview in his austere office. "Out of 43, they saw seven."

Zvarych, 52, a chain-smoking former philosophy professor born into New York's Ukrainian diaspora, said that Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko had asked him to be the "legal conscience of the government."

That's a tall order in a country where corruption has seeped into virtually every layer of public life.

President Viktor Yushchenko was swept into office last year on a wave of popular discontent with the graft and cronyism that characterized former President Leonid Kuchma's rule.

Yushchenko has called fighting corruption his top priority, on which a number of key policy objectives depend --attracting foreign investment, boosting economic growth and integrating the country into the European Union.

"Corruption is challenge No. 1, everything is linked to this problem," Deputy Prime Minister Oleh Rybachuk said in an interview. "It's like having a ... disease. Nobody wants to get near you."

But corruption, like a powerful narcotic, is tough to kick. Despite good intentions, the government is scrambling just to determine the extent of the problem, let alone fix it. Zvarych himself was recently dragged into a public scandal in which he said unnamed interests were trying to taint him with the scourge of corruption.

Transparency International, which monitors corruption worldwide, has criticized the Yushchenko government for taking a piecemeal approach rather than attempting systemic change.

"Ukraine is a country of quiet, shadowy corruption, nontransparent government decisions, illegal lobbying and conflicts of interest," said Larysa Denysenko, director of Transparency International's Kiev office. "Unfortunately, so far I don't see that the government has a clear-cut plan."

Transparency International ranks Ukraine No. 122 out of 146 countries in its "corruption perceptions" index, putting it on the same level as Sudan and Niger. Russia ranks No. 90, alongside India and Nepal.

"Corruption is a fundamental organizing principle of Ukrainian society," said Vadim Karasyov, head of the Institute of Global Studies, a Kiev think tank. "I see a lot of movement in the new government. But so far, it isn't clear that this is movement forward."

Rybachuk said that the personal assets of top members of the government would be thoroughly audited.

"Yushchenko's message to his ministers is: God forbid you even think about taking a bribe," Rybachuk said. "Not only you, but your family, your distant relatives and your retired grandmother cannot have $1 million cottages."

Zvarych, who is in the midst of drawing up a "clean hands" campaign to root out corruption in government ministries, said he was ready to rattle some bones.

"I'm sure this is going to raise a lot of hell," he said of his campaign. "I'm sure that I'm not going to be very well liked. To put it frankly, I don't give a damn. I'm not running for beauty queen."

Though he speaks Ukrainian with a slight American accent, Zvarych is no stranger to the hurly-burly of Ukrainian politics. After teaching intellectual history and philosophy at New York University, he moved to Ukraine just after independence and became a citizen in 1993. He was first elected to parliament in 1998 and joined Yushchenko's Our Ukraine party in 2002.

Zvarych said he planned to make it easier for outside panels to review judge's decisions and to remove judges whose performance is based in anything other than the law.

Many business operations -- from registering a company to re-exporting oil -- require approval from different government agencies. Such requirements are "open holes for corruption," Zvarych said.

Most countries, including Russia, have guidelines governing how officials should deal with gifts. In the United States, for example, officials must turn in gifts valued more than $285; in Ukraine, there are no such rules.

Tymoshenko has tasked Zvarych with drawing up a new civil code for government employees.

Another source of corruption has been the lucrative re-export of oil, which required special licenses and was eligible for juicy refunds of value-added tax.

When the government announced a plan to halt the re-export of oil in February, Zvarych was briefly pulled into an intrigue of his own. Media linked Zvarych's opposition to the plans to his wife's oil re-export business. The minister denied the charge on national television and said he would resign.

Yushchenko did not accept Zvarych's resignation, and the government went ahead and blocked the re-export of oil. A justice ministry spokeswoman declined to comment on the matter when asked and said the case was closed.

While the has storm subsided, it demonstrated the deep suspicions Ukrainians harbor about their elected officials.

Under Kuchma, four out of five Ukrainians said that most or all public servants were on the take, according to a 2003 survey by Ukraine's Social Monitoring Center and the Institute of Social Studies.

About half of respondents admitted to paying bribes in the previous year.

Some observers see parallels between Ukraine and Georgia, where peaceful protests also swept Mikheil Saakashvili to the presidency on an anti-corruption ticket.

"I think Georgia has made pretty impressive progress," said Miklos Marschall, Transparency International's director for Europe and Central Asia. "They fired half of the police, tripled police salaries, and there is a very visible improvement."

The lesson from Georgia is that Kiev must move quickly with tough measures, Marschall said. "They have a very short window of opportunity. There are high expectations, and now they have to deliver."

Transparency International's Denysenko said the fracas over the oil re-export issue did not bode well.

"In my view, the president should have accepted the resignation of the justice minister at the slightest hint of a conflict of interests," she said. "But he didn't."

But Hryhoriy Nemyria, director of the Center for European and International Studies, said the simple fact that the dispute took place in public marked a step forward from the Kuchma presidency.

"This dispute was not hidden. That's radically different from previous practices, when ministers were removed without explanation," Nemyria said.

No one says the system can be turned upside down overnight.

In the case of Zakarpatye's 36 missing automobiles, Zvarych chose one car on the list at random -- a BMW X5 -- and told local officials he expected to see the vehicle parked outside his office immediately.

Five days later, he was still waiting.

"They simply can't find it," he said.