UCRAINA

* IAC - Colpo di stato del Presidente filooccidentale Kuchma.
Truppe circondano il Parlamento: Kuchma vuole emulare Eltsin
incominciando a bombardare "per la democrazia"?
Assoluto silenzio stampa sui media occidentali.
* Daily Telegraph - L'Ucraina sempre piu' inserita nella NATO in vista
di future "missioni umanitarie".

* SESSIONE A KIEV DEL TRIBUNALE INTERNAZIONALE PER I CRIMINI DELLA NATO
Una relazione a cura dell'IAC.


---

>From: iacenter@...
>Reply-To: "activist -- key" <iacenter@...>
>To: "actvist -- key" <iacenter@...>
>Subject: 2/4/00: Emergency alert on pro-NATO coup in Ukraine
>Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 12:16:14 -0500
>
>EMERGENCY ALERT!
>
>PRO-NATO COUP D'ETAT IN UKRAINE; US-BACKED
>PRESIDENT SURROUNDS PARLIAMENT WITH TROOPS;
>OPPOSITION LAWMAKERS ON HUNGER STRIKE
>
>IAC Delegation Back from Kiev Charges US Gov't Role, Calls for
>Protests to Break US Media Information Blockade
>
>Feb. 4, 2000—Troops have surrounded Ukraine's parliament. Inside
>the main hall are nearly 200 opposition deputies, some of them on
>hunger strike. They oppose rightwing president Kuchma's plan to
>abolish Ukraine's elected legislature (Verkhovnye Rada) and replace it
>with a body more compliant to his wishes. Those include bringing
>Ukraine into NATO as well as privatizing land and other measures
>demanded by the International Monetary Fund. On Feb. 1, protesters
>gathered to defend parliament were attacked by rightwing groups
>organized by the regime.
>
>US ROLE
>Before moving against his country's parliament, Kuchma held a private
>meeting with US vice president Al Gore in Washington, D.C. Kuchma
>was first elected in 1996 with considerable financial aid from the
>Soros Foundation. He was reelected last November in a vote the
>opposition charges was plagued with fraud. European Union electoral
>observers confirm many of their charges.
>
>The current confrontation began Jan. 21, when pro-NATO, pro-IMF
>deputies and their allies held an extralegal gathering in a non-
>government building at the same time as an official Rada session was
>in progress. The unconstitutional meeting voted to oust elected Rada
>speaker Oleksandr Tkachenko and deputy speaker Adam Martynyuk
>and replace them with Kuchma supporters. Attempts to remove
>Tkachenko and Martynyuk by constitutional procedures had failed in
>the Rada. Today armed guards escorting Ivan Plyush, the pro-
>Kuchma grouping's choice for speaker, forcibly seized the speaker's
>office from Tkachenko, who had refused to leave.
>
>OPPOSITION LEADERS SPEAK TO IAC
>International Action Center representatives Larissa Kritskaya and Bill
>Doares were in Kiev last week, where they visited the Rada and met
>with Tkachenko and other opposition leaders. "This crisis comes not
>from the deputies but from the president," Kuchma told the IAC
>representatives. "There is an attempt to forcibly Westernize Ukraine.
>The presidential election was determined by force, and now the
>president is using force against parliament. Kuchma's rule has brought
>ruin to our people. Now he is staging a coup d'etat to concentrate
>absolute power in his hands. Our constitution has been violated at
>every step."
>
>"Kuchma is trying to make a coup to gain absolute power," said
>Ukraine Socialist Party leader Oleksandr Moroz. "He is acting on
>behalf of powerful private groups that support him. Since Kuchma
>came to office, Ukraine has gotten poorer but his friends have gotten
>rich. They now want to get even richer by selling shares in land and
>grabbing control of basic industries like steel, petrochemicals and even
>oil and gas, which is now forbidden to be privatized."
>
>"It is obvious that the United States has designed the Ukraine's
>political landscape," Oleg Grachev, Kiev regional secretary of the
>Communist Party of Ukraine (KPU), told Kritskaya and Doares.
>"You cannot speak about injustice and electoral falsification in this
>country without speaking of the domination of the International
>Monetary Fund."
>
>INTERNATIONAL ACTION CENTER CONDEMNS US ROLE
>"The US-backed presidential coup in Ukraine is of a piece with the
>bloody war against Yugoslavia and the occupation of Kosovo," the
>International Action Center charged in a statement issued today. "It is
>part of NATO's drive to the east. The White House and Pentagon
>want to bring Ukraine into NATO, which is a dangerous step toward
>a new and larger war. This must be seen in the context of the revival
>of Star Wars and the plans to base nuclear weapons in Hungary.
>Washington also wants to crush any opposition in to the dictates of the
>International Monetary Fund in Ukraine and the other former Soviet
>republics. We must not allow a repeat of the events in Chile in 1973,
>with Kuchma as Pinochet."
>
> WALL STREET RULES
>With nearly 50 million people, Ukraine is the second-largest former
>Soviet republic. It was one of the USSR's most productive agricultural
>and industrial regions. Today, like other former Soviet republics, it has
>been devastated by "economic restructuring" dictated by the
>International Monetary Fund. Since the fall of the USSR, Ukraine's
>industrial production has dropped 70 percent. Its population has fallen
>by 2 million in just the past two years. The old-age pension is $13 a
>month and millions of workers are not being paid. While hunger stalks
>many regions, one-third of the state budget goes in interest payments
>to Western banks. The country's debt has risen 30 times since
>Kuchma took office in 1996.
>
>The Kuchma regime has tried to create a fascist-like atmosphere by
>exploiting divisions similar to those used to break up Yugoslavia. It
>has tried to whip up bigotry against the large Russian minority (one
>quarter of the population) among the Ukrainian majority. Soviet-era
>books have been burned in public squares and opposition activists
>attacked by fascist gangs. The regime's nationalist pose does not stop
>Wall Street from dictating its economic policy. It has agreed to raise
>food and fuel prices, rents and gas and electricity rates on a schedule
>dictated by the International Monetary Fund.
>
>MARKED BALLOTS AND HAND GRENADES
>KPU general secretary Petro Simonenko, who calls for Ukraine to
>withdraw from the IMF, was the runner-up in November's
>presidential election. He got an official 38 percent of the vote. The
>KPU brought evidence of marked ballots, ballot-box stuffing and vote
>buying to Ukraine's criminal court but was told such matters were
>outside the court's jurisdiction. In the first round of the presidential
>election, Progressive Socialist Party candidate Natalia Vitorienko,
>who also condemns the IMF, was injured by a hand grenade tossed
>into a rally she was addressing.
>
>IAC CALLS FOR INTERNATIONAL PROTESTS
>"The US corporate media, which so obediently repeated Pentagon-
>State Department lies about Kosovo, appears to have imposed an
>information blockade on the events in Ukraine and US involvement
>there" the IAC statement concluded. "We must break that blockade.
>The democratic forces in Ukraine deserve the support of antiwar and
>justice-loving people in this country and around the world."
>
>The IAC called for protests to be sent to President Kuchma via the
>embassy of Ukraine in Washington at telephone 202-333-0606 or fax
>202-333-0817.
>
>International Action Center
>39 West 14th Street, Room 206
>New York, NY 10011
>email: iacenter@...
>http://www.iacenter.org
>phone: 212 633-6646
>fax: 212 633-2889

---

> Daily Telegraph (UK)
> ISSUE 1709Saturday 29 January 2000
> Nato to help Ukraine train armed forces
>
> NATO will help Ukraine modernise its armed forces, its Secretary-General
> announced yesterday at the end of his two-day visit to the former Soviet
> republic.
> George Robertson told leaders in a speech in Kiev, the capital: "Such a
> reform will be painful. Nato can assist Ukraine. A military that is
> transparent, democratically controlled and fully accountable is part and
> parcel of a mature democracy. And a military that adopts modern
> management techniques will spend scarce resources more efficiently."
> Lord Robertson met President Leonid Kutchma and Prime Minister Viktor
> Yushenko during his visit. Kiev signed a partnership agreement with Nato
> in 1997 but is not an official candidate for membership. Russia has
> opposed Nato's expansion to the east and has warned against inviting
> republics from the former Soviet Union to join the defence alliance.
> Lord Robertson said: "We need to exploit more fully our military
> co-operation in Partnership for Peace. By preparing partner countries to
> be able to deploy forces alongside Allied ones in possible peace support
> or humanitarian operations, we expand the pool of trained forces for
> effective crisis management in Europe."
>
>

Subject: Ukraine war crimes tribunal condemns U.S., NATO
Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 14:22:00 -0500
From: iacenter@...
To: "International"<iacenter@...>


UKRAINE WAR CRIMES TRIBUNAL CONDEMNS
WASHINGTON, NATO

KIEV, Ukraine--President Clinton and other NATO leaders were
found guilty of crimes against peace by an International Peoples
Tribunal on NATO War Crimes Against Yugoslavia (English
translation) that met Jan. 23 in the parliament building of this
beautiful
ancient capital. The hearing was held in defiance of the U.S.-backed
regime of President Leonid Kuchma, who wants to bring Ukraine into
NATO.

Delegates from Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Yugoslavia, the Czech
Republic, Poland, Germany and the United States took part in the
hearing. The U.S. was represented by Larissa Kritskaya and Bill
Doares of the International Action Center. Kritskaya and Doares
were shown on the front page of the major daily Kievsky Vedomosty
under the headline "Americans Who Dream of Destroying NATO."

The Kiev tribunal was the second in a series of hearings organized by
the International Peoples Tribunal, which was initiated in Russia by
All-
Slavic Assembly. The first was held in the Russian city of Yaroslavl
Dec. 14. Others are planned for Belgrade (March 27), Warsaw and
Minsk. The Kiev tribunal focused on charges of crimes against peace-
conspiracy to cause a war. IPT organizers plan to coordinate their
efforts with the Commission of Inquiry on U.S./NATO War Crimes
Against Yugoslavia organized by the International Action Center and
former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark.

The Ukraine hearing, which was chaired by Prof. Mikhail Kuznetsov
of Moscow, got considerable support from the Socialist, Communist
and other Ukrainian opposition parties. Socialist Party deputy Vil
Nikolayich Romashenko was vice president of the tribunal.

The judges and participants heard eyewitness testimony from
Yugoslav delegates who told of the death and destruction inflicted by
NATO bombs and missiles, which took 2,000 civilian lives. They also
heard several parliamentarians who had visited Yugoslavia during the
war.

Deputy Sergei Kaszian of the Belarus parliament told of his meetings
with ethnic Albanian Kosovar leaders who condemned the NATO
bombing and held the U.S. responsible for the destruction of their
country. Kaszian said that NATO forces used had brutalized Kosovar
refugees, separating children from mothers and sending them to
different countries. He also testified to the large number of children
killed or wounded by NATO bombs and missiles.

Ukrainian Communist deputy Vladimir Moiseenko represents the
Donbass coal-mining region and chairs the Ukraine Association to
Restore the Soviet Union. He pointed out that NATO was from its
inception an aggressive alliance aimed against East Europe and the
Soviet Union and compared the U.S.-NATO strategy used to break
up Yugoslavia with its current strategy toward Ukraine. He quoted
U.S. strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski's description of Ukraine as a
"military platform" for NATO's expansion to the east. A NATO
Ukraine would become a base to invade Belarus and later Russia,
Moiseenko said. He condemned Ukraine's U.S.-backed president
Leonid Kuchma for facilitating NATO's expansion but said, "The
Ukrainian people are waking up to resist Ukraine's colonization." He
also called on the rest of the world to apply economic sanctions
against the U.S. and other NATO states if NATO is not dissolved.
"But the world is not insane yet and has the strength to stop NATO
and its 'spiritual leader' the United States."

Retired Soviet admiral Anatoli Yurkovsky, now a member of
Ukrainian parliament, testified that NATO was also aimed at the
Albanian people. He told of the 1996 mass uprising in southern
Albania against the U.S.-backed Berisha regime. The insurgents
"formed committees of national salvation that were like the workers'
councils in Russia in 1917. But they were smothered by the massive
intervention of NATO troops."

Larissa Kritskaya, a member of the International Action Center, said
that "corporate America has dominated Ukraine long enough to
deliver the country to the point of total destruction. But there is
another America inside the land of giant corporations, and that is
conscious people in the U.S. We are happy to be here today
representing these people as your friends and supporters in your
struggle against the coming colonization planned by U.S.-led NATO."

IAC spokesperson Bill Doares condemned the war against
Yugoslavia "as a cynical maneuver carried out to enrich giant U.S.
corporations that profit off death and destruction." He said that
"bombs and missiles are not the only agency of destruction. When the
International Monetary Fund orders Ukraine to close down its coal
mines and steel plants, reducing workers to starvation, is that not an
act of war?" He denounced NATO as "the strike force of the
International Monetary Fund."

Yugoslav ambassador to Ukraine Goiko Dapcevic said, "the fact that
the war crimes tribunal took place here in Ukraine and the fact that
there were many representatives of your country willing to testify in
the
name of truth about the horrible crimes committed during this unlawful
war that brought a human tragedy to Yugoslavia speaks to our unity.
Yet the war in Yugoslavia is still far from its end," he continued.
"Though there are no missiles and bombs falling from the sky right
now, there is also no peace for us at this time. And the most difficult
thing now is our incapacity to break the blockade on information.
Therefore an event like the war crimes tribunal has special value in our
struggle to tell the world the truth about this war and the present
condition of my country."



--------- COORDINAMENTO ROMANO PER LA JUGOSLAVIA -----------
RIMSKI SAVEZ ZA JUGOSLAVIJU
e-mail: crj@... - URL: http://marx2001.org/crj
http://www.egroups.com/group/crj-mailinglist/
------------------------------------------------------------