Journalist missing
H.E. Leonid Kuchma
President
11 Bankova St.
Office of the President
252005 Kiev
Ukraine
Vienna, 20 September 2000
Your Excellency,
The International Press Institute (IPI), the global network of editors and media executives, is deeply worried about the fate of Ukrainian editor Hryhoriy Gongadze.
According to IPI's sources, on 16 September, Gongadze failed to return to his home in Kiev, where his wife and children were waiting for him. Gongadze is the editor of the Internet newsletter Pravda Ukrayiny. The newsletter has acquired a reputation for being critical of Ukraine's incumbent government, with reports of alleged corruption among senior officials. Gongadze has also expressed similar views in radio programmes on the independent Radio Kontinent.
Prior to his disappearance, Gongadze had complained that police were harassing him and his colleagues about possible complicity in a murder. Gongadze has denied any involvement and accused police of trying to intimidate him.
Aside from the above-mentioned criticisms of the government, Pravda Ukrayiny has often reprinted material from a website called "The Agency of Federal Investigations", a media outlet that has received threats for its reporting on government officials. Among the material recently published both on the website and in Pravda Ukrayiny was an article on Oleksandr Volkov, leader of the Vidrodzhenya Rehioniv (Regional Rebirth) parliamentary group.
Oleh Yeltsov, a reporter with the website, claimed that he received threats after the Volkov article was published. Yeltsov said that on 15 September, an unknown person telephoned him at his home and threatened him, demanding that the journalist "shut up and listen." The unidentified caller said that Yeltsov's publications "are disturbing some quite influential people". Yeltsov did not know if the threats were directly related to that article or other articles published on the website.
Several Ukrainian journalists and lawmakers released a statement commenting Gongadze's disappearance: "During the years of Ukrainian independence, not a single high-profile crime against journalists was fully resolved," the statement read. "The lack of results ... gives us grounds to state that nobody is interested in the fate of our colleagues except for journalists". These views seem to correspond to the past history of attacks against the Ukrainian press.
While acknowledging that Your Excellency has expressed concern and ordered that police pay special attention to Gongadze's disappearance, the case is especially troubling when placed in the context of recent attacks against the media in Ukraine.
On 14 August, Valentina Vasilchenko, a freelance journalist from the city of Cherkassy was assaulted in the stairwell of her apartment building. The beating is believed to be connected to a series of articles on police corruption that she published in the local independent weekly Antenna.
On 31 March, Oleg Liachko, editor-in-chief of the weekly newspaper Svoboda, was beaten for refusing to reveal his sources by a public official. The official had been mentioned in articles by Liachko on links between Ukrainian politicians, state security agencies and local criminal organisations. In addition, several newspapers have been fined by the authorities and libel laws have been used to effectively shut down investigative reporting and silence criticism.
These are merely a few incidents among many that have created a climate in which physical attacks and threats are used to prevent unwanted reporting. Attacks like these are in direct violation of everyone's right to "seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers" as guaranteed by Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
In the light of these developments, we urge Your Excellency to take appropriate action to ensure a full and swift investigation into Gongadze's disappearance. Furthermore, we urge Your Excellency to take the necessary measures to guarantee the safety of journalists reporting on developments in Ukraine.
We thank you for your attention
Yours sincerely,
Johann P. Fritz
Director