Eight years after, journalists’ murderers sentenced

Michael Hedges March 16, 2008

After a trial that began in January 2007, three former Ukraine Interior Ministry officers were sentenced for the murder of young journalist Georgiy Gongadze. It’s a gristly tale. Just as ugly is that it’s unfinished.

The 31 year old reporter and publisher of a small but well read website died sometime in September 2000, probably in the forest where his headless body was found. He had written about corruption. He was killed for it.

Gongadze investigated and wrote about the rampant, and typical, post-Soviet corruption of Ukraine’s President at the time, Leonid Kuchma. His murder fueled the discontent in Ukraine that manifest in the Orange Revolution ending Kuchma’s reign. Current president Viktor Yushchenko, who came to power during those heady days, vowed to solve the crime.

Time dragged on and it became clear that this cruel and brutish crime reached to the very heart of money and power in Ukraine. A tape recording was discovered of a conversation in which ‘getting rid’ of Gongadze was discussed. The speaker was identified as then President Kuchma. “Send him to the Chechens,” he said.

The trail judge ruled the tape inadmissible, impossible to confirm the identities of those heard. A month ago (February 11) representatives of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) met with Ukraine’s Prosecutor General. They had analyzed the tapes.

Three of the four named in the original indictment were sentenced March 15th, on a Saturday. Valeri Kostenko, Olexander Popovich and Mykola Protasov received 12 to 13 year prison sentences. Interior Ministry General Olexiy Pukach, the fourth person named, fled, reportedly to Israel.

The former Kuchma bodyguard who revealed the mysterious tape recordings was granted asylum in the United States, though he returned to Kiev to testify at the trial. Gongadze’s widow Myroslava and her two children also fled to America. She was repeatedly denied visas to visit Reporters San Frontiers Secretary General Robert Menard in Paris.

Others tied to the crime haven’t fared so well. Former Interior Minister Yury Kravchenko, whose voice was also heard on the tape recordings, put two bullets in his head last March. Kuchma aid and colleague of General Pukach died in 2003 at age 53 by “strange circumstances.” Another Interior Ministry General, Eduard Fere, slipped into a coma shortly after Gongadze’s body was discovered. Fere had been implicated in other political murders.

“Justice has not yet been fully rendered in the Gongadze case, which shook the entire nation,” said RSF in a statement after the sentences were announced. “The instigators of this murder have still to be identified and punished.” Several news outlets have reported official harassment while investigating the Gongadze murder.

News coverage in Ukraine of the sentencing was scant. It’s an episode official Ukraine would like to see fade away – not unlike the murders of journalists Anna Politkovskaya in Moscow and Hrant Dink in Istanbul.