What Has Happened After The Orange Revolution?

KIEV, Ukraine -- The biggest change seen in Ukraine over the year following the Orange Revolution is the move from illusions to disillusionment. The overwhelming majority of promises made to the people on Maidan by political leaders have not been kept.


Obviously in one year it would be impossible to achieve all that was planned. However, unfortunately, the further into the past the Revolution recedes, the further we move from the keeping of these promises. There have even been negative developments in comparison with the first months after the Revolution. I would not say that the country is slipping back into Kuchmism, and most likely there will be no repeat of what it was like then. The situation is more reminiscent of a return to the days of the Presidency under Kravchuk in 1994.

For example, if in the first months after the Revolution, corruption decreased sharply, since then it has returned again, in some instances even on a larger scale than before, and with every day the situation is worsening. Initially corruption began re-emerging in isolated cases when officials took bribes only from certain people if they were absolutely certain that they wouldn’t be found out. They actually demanded much more, supposedly to justify the risk.

This, in their jargon, was the “tax on honesty”. When, however, officials saw that the first attempts to publish offenders through legal avenues had failed as a result of the incompetence and / or corruption of the police, the prosecutor’s office and bodies of the judiciary, with such unsuccessful attempts to punish becoming more frequent, corruption began to thrive. The increased amounts demanded as bribes did not, moreover, decrease. While corruption has still not reached the level it was at under Kuchma, it is steadily on the increase.

There are two main reasons for the non-fulfilment of the promises made on Maidan. The first is the incompetence of the new regime and its inability to carry through its wishes. The second reason is the lack of desire to honour some of these promises. For example, Viktor Yushchenko promised to get rid of the tax police, yet not even the smallest step has been taken in this direction. Despite the promises of the President, in the summer of 2005 there was a new intake of students at the faculty of the tax police in the National Academy of the State Tax Service of Ukraine in Irlen.

And this is already the decision of the new regime, specifically of the State Tax Administration of Ukraine and of the Ministry of Education and Science. The former first aide to the President, Oleksandr Tretyakov, looked us straight in the eye and said that all the promises on Maidan regarding the restoration of justice and lawfulness had been pre-election public relations.

The new team which came to power, although it was initially superior, and indeed remains better than the old guard from the point of view of honesty, loses ground significantly to the old guard when it comes to competence. The new regime has still not summoned up the will to carry out staff changes on a competitive basis. Instead the change of over 20 thousand offices was carried out on the principles of personal loyalty and common interests (including business interests) and as a result of nepotism. Having failed in its staff policy, instead of choosing officials through competition and attracting honest specialists from the private sector, business management hired services, including those working in the West, the new regime hurtled to another extreme.

At the beginning officials began re-emerging in the regime who had been dismissed under Kuchma in the mid 1990s (these dismissals had not in any way been for political reasons, but were due to the victory of one criminal clan over its rivals), and then actual Kuchma-era officials themselves. In exchange for this they were not only forgiven their previously committed offences and allowed to hold on to the money and property they had stolen, but were also enabled to continue breaking the Law. In the end they began using their know-how in order to once again engage in exactly the same things they had been involved in under Kuchma. An example would be the highest posts in the Police to which the new regime appointed people whom they themselves, while in opposition, had fiercely criticized for howling violations of basis human rights.

Regrettably, the new regime even in its first steps did not always observe the norms of the Constitution and Ukrainian legislation. For example, some new ministers and high-ranking officials did not tender their resignation as deputies despite this being required by the Constitution and Ukrainian Law. The practice has continued of unlawfully classifying as secret normative acts, particularly Decrees of the President of Ukraine.

Within the new guard a battle began for spheres of influence. It was accompanied by mutual recriminations among which there were many which were fair criticisms of all participants in the struggle without exception. Politics again began to be used for ensuring private business interests. Orange clans began emerging in the country. Nor did these disappear after major scandals, but rather began regrouping, now involving many members of blue-white clans, or making deals with them about cooperation and / or division of spheres of influence.

Ukraine’s perennial problem is not so much its legislation as the fact that the laws are not implemented. This is due to the fact that the responsibility set down in the legislation does not include a real mechanism of punishment, nor for an objective assessment of the activities of an official or judge. Even if one succeeds in lodging a complaint with the courts about an official’s unlawful actions, it remains virtually impossible to punish the person responsible.

Since the new regime came to power, the problem has also emerged that current legislation is applied in selective fashion and in their favour. Corrupt individuals, having the power, money and possibility to hire good lawyers, are able to make 100% use of the rights and freedoms stipulated in laws, and officials of local self-government have turned the territories under their jurisdiction into local criminal fiefdoms. The rights, on the other hand, of normal citizens are violated by officials on an everyday basis. And the State regime can do nothing to stop this.

All positive initiatives are sabotaged at the local level. Professionals who have remained from the old regime (including those in bodies of local self-government) use their knowledge for corrupt activities; the court system uses its independence in order to issue overtly unlawful rulings; the prosecutor’s office protects corrupt individuals from the Police, while honest officials and law enforcement officers either lack sufficient knowledge, or do not have enough support from above. Therefore it is often they who are punished for attempting to establish order, with highly-paid and experienced lawyers searching out the tiniest mistakes.

The holding of elections on the basis of proportional representation has led to a situation where the orange parties are being inundated with corrupt businessmen and officials from the old regime. This is occurring at all levels with the consent and the encouragement of the top leadership of these parties. It is especially noticeable at the local level where party centres have proved almost everywhere to have been taken over by such individuals who are buying themselves party posts and places on the candidate lists.

At the local level this process has taken on such proportions that it has even slipped beyond the control of the top leadership of the particular parties. The influx of corrupt individuals and overtly criminal elements has also been fostered by the introduction of immunity of deputies of local councils.

If in 2002 payment for a place on the candidate list guaranteed to get a person into the Verkhovna Rada was around 1 million US dollars, these days the price has shot up to 5-7 million dollars. Even for the Kyiv Regional Council in which deputies are not even paid, the price for such a guaranteed place can reach 500 thousand dollars. When I spoke with Mrs Severinsen in 2002 during her visit on a monitoring mission concerning the pre-election situation in polling station No. 95 for the suburb of Kyiv, the town of Irlen, where I live, the fight for a mandate to the local councils at the low level was waged with minimum financial outlay.

Today however a place in the district or local authorities in the provinces can cost 25, or even 50 thousand dollars, with the minimum price being 5-10 thousands. Unfortunately, the orange parties are trading in these mandates no less than their blue-white opponents. We thus have a situation where all party lists without exception have too many businesspeople, including those with a criminal reputation, who either worked for the old regime, or at best, had no connection to Yushchenko’s victory at the elections. These people are clearly not paying such amounts of money in order to selflessly work for the good of the people.

The amendments to the Constitution which were forced by the old regime have increased the influence of the Verkhovna Rada and bodies of local self-government. And the deputies are using this influence in order to maintain the existing situation.

An example of this is the flagrant violation of the Constitution by the Verkhovna Rada with this body not only not appointing its share of the judges of the Constitutional Court, but also refusing to swear in the judges already appointed by the President and those elected by the Congress of Judges. As a result of this brazen sabotage, the Constitutional Court cannot fulfil its duties with this paralysing the entire legal system in Ukraine.

The majority of notorious criminal cases (the poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko, the vote-rigging violations during the 2004 elections) have not been investigated and those responsible have not been brought to justice. One should make a special mention of the Gongadze case where the investigation is making only lethargic moves forward, and where only those who directly committed the crime are on trial, and not those who ordered the killing. And in addition, the trial itself has been closed to journalists and to the public.

Positive changes are perhaps taking place in those spheres where the regime does not need to do anything. For example the level of personal freedom has increased as a result of the fact that the regime is not applying repressions; the elections will be relatively honest since the regime will not make use of the administrative resource; freedom of expression is being safeguarded since the regime is not putting pressure on the mass media.

The vast majority, however, of positive changes remain on the level of attempts, intentions, declarations and hopes, and do not find any practical implementation (for example, court reform, the strengthening of contacts with Europe and the USA, the declaration of a European vector of development, where Ukraine is proclaiming its will to move towards Europe, while at the same time European standards are not introduced into everyday life).

The increase in income of the population was the result not so much of the growth in GNP, but of the bringing of a part of money flows from the shadow economy, which is itself a positive factor. However the improvement in the living standard of pensioners and State sector employees was virtually cancelled out by the rise in prices.

The number of regulatory acts has not decreased sufficiently to significantly improve the business climate, with the introduction of a “single window” for registration procedures in some places having only further complicated the lives of businesspeople. Unemployment has decreased by a million mainly due to the fact that it has taken on a masked form, or on the contrary, it has become possible to legalize shadow economy working places.

There are not so many real achievements: the increase in the extent of foreign investment (with the absolute figure remaining exceptionally low), the decrease in the direct foreign debt, the increase in State gold and currency reserves, a significant increase in the amount of financial assistance during childbirth, and help for single mothers, the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from Iraq and the shortening of military service to 1 year.

Source: Maidan