Scuffles Block Ukraine State-Of-Union

KIEV, Ukraine -- Few issues are as divisive as NATO membership here, but the acrimony in high-tempered Ukrainian politics reached new heights when lawmakers tried to punch each other and colleagues scrambled to draw them apart.

Members of pro-President Viktor Yushchenko and Premier Yulia Tymoshenko parties, top, surround the parliamentary speaker's rostrum, to stop members of the opposition Party of Region from blocking the session in Kiev, Ukraine, Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2008. Ukraine's President Viktor Yushchenko delivers his annual address to Parliament later in the day.
The scuffle on Tuesday prompted the president to cancel his state of the union speech.

The work of the country's deeply divided parliament, known as the Verkhnovna Rada, has been virtually paralyzed for several weeks since Ukraine's pro-Western leaders took a key step toward seeking NATO membership for the ex-Soviet republic.

On Tuesday, dozens of angry lawmakers swarmed the presidium and a fist fight broke out.

"Anyone who has been to the Rada will no longer laugh at the circus," opposition lawmaker Taras Chornovil said of the day's events.

The Moscow-friendly Party of Regions argues that President Viktor Yushchenko, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and Parliament speaker Arseniy Yatsenyuk had no right to put in an official request to join NATO's Membership Action Plan, or MAP - a key step toward joining the alliance.

More than half the country opposes NATO membership, according to opinion polls, and the country's leaders have pledged that the issue would be decided only in a nationwide referendum.

But the opposition on Tuesday also was demanding to officially discuss a recent brawl between the interior minister and the mayor of Kiev.

Mayor Leonid Chernovetsky accuses his longtime foe Yuriy Lutsenko of kicking him in the face and the groin after a government agency meeting on Jan. 18.

Lutsenko acknowledges having slapped Chernovetsky, but says it was his opponent that started the fight and deserved the "manly slap" for defaming him.

Chernovetsky says Lutsenko's behavior disgraces Ukraine, while Lutsenko, who is under investigation for the scuffle, insists he will not apologize in front of a "scoundrel."

Political tempers run high in Ukraine's new democracy, which was ushered in by the 2004 Orange revolution.

Lawmakers here often resort to angry words and then their fists when arguing with opponents, but the disputes rarely get so intense as to ignore the president.

Source: Daily Comet