April 1, 2016 (The New York Times)
The Ukrainian Parliament finally voted to oust Ukraine’s odious prosecutor general,
Viktor Shokin, on Tuesday. The United States and European countries that have provided
aid to Ukraine had long pressed for his dismissal; in his year in office, Mr. Shokin
became a symbol of Ukraine’s deeply ingrained culture of corruption, failing to
prosecute a single member of the deposed Yanukovych regime or of the current government
while blocking the efforts of reform-minded deputies. Alas, nothing is likely to
change unless President Petro Poroshenko and Parliament agree to install some real
corruption fighters and approve serious judicial reform.
Corruption has been pervasive in Ukraine
since independence, fed by close-knit ties between politicians and oligarchs and
a weak justice system. The protests in 2014 that led to the removal of President
Viktor Yanukovych were largely fueled by popular fury at his monumental corruption
and abuse of power. Yet his overthrow has yet to show results.
In a speech in Odessa last September,
the United States ambassador, Geoffrey Pyatt, said corruption was as dangerous for
Ukraine as was the Russian support for a military insurgency in eastern Ukraine.
And on a visit last December, Vice
President Joseph Biden Jr. said corruption was eating Ukraine “like a cancer.” Among
the examples Mr. Pyatt cited was the seizure in Britain of $23 million in illicit
assets from the former Ukrainian ecology minister, Mykola Zlochevsky; Mr. Shokin’s
office, however, declared that there was no case against the minister, and the money
was released.
In his last hours in office, Mr. Shokin
dismissed the deputy prosecutor general, David Sakvarelidze, a former prosecutor
in Georgia brought in by President Poroshenko to fight corruption. And before that,
Mr. Shokin had systematically cleansed his office of reform-minded prosecutors.
The acting prosecutor general now is Yuriy Sevruk, a crony who can be trusted to
continue Mr. Shokin’s practices.
Mr. Poroshenko, himself a product
of the old system, has had his hands full with the Moscow-backed separatists in
the east and unceasing political turmoil in Kiev, where Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s
government is hanging by a thread.
Ukrainians protested government
corruption in Kiev on Monday.
The full artile is available at http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/01/opinion/ukraines-unyielding-corruption.html?_r=0
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