Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-03-11-Speech-4-180"
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"en.20040311.10.4-180"2
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"Mr President, the day before yesterday, an estimated 5 000 to 7 000 Ukrainian citizens demonstrated in Kiev, their country’s capital, calling for ‘freedom for the word’. This demonstration was in response to President Kuchma's regime’s increasingly repressive policy on the media. Last Saturday, the
had some justification for writing on its front page that opposition media in Ukraine had to fear for their continued existence. The situation reflects this. Exactly a week ago, Nikola Tomenko, chairman of the Ukrainian parliament’s committee on media freedom – note its name! – delivered a devastating indictment in the parliament, the Verkhovna Rada; presidential elections are to be held this year, and President Kuchma is attempting to use all possible means to suppress dissident opinions. In this connection, there is currently a great deal of controversy surrounding the death of Yuri Chechyk, the director of the private radio station, last Wednesday. Chechyk lost his life in a traffic accident on the way from his home in Poltava to Kiev for a meeting with Radio Svoboda, the Ukrainian branch of Radio Liberty. This fact alone has aroused suspicion about Chechyk’s unexpected death. Only a few hours after his death, the Ukrainian security services stormed the Kiev station Radio Continent and seized all its broadcasting equipment. This station had evidently incurred the displeasure of the Ukrainian powers-that-be by transmitting programmes from Radio Liberty. Radio Continent’s director has, in the meantime, left the country post-haste, himself stating that he has done so in fear of his life. It was Radio Continent, too, that employed the journalist Georgi Gongadze, who went missing in the year 2000 and was later found decapitated. The campaign that President Kuchma and his associates are evidently waging, at the present time, against independent media contradicts Kiev’s official claim to be promoting democracy in Ukraine and to be seeking to draw closer to Europe.
At the beginning of this week, the former US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, writing in the New York Times, called for action on both sides of the Atlantic to defend political and personal freedom in Ukraine. I hope that Washington and Brussels will indeed close ranks, as Albright puts it, in order to defend freedom’s borders and set them wider."@en1
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