Ukraine is broken, but its civic activists are trying to build a new country
IT is easy to
despair of Ukraine. The war-torn country has been engulfed by political crisis
for nearly two months. The “Revolution of Dignity” that overthrew the corrupt,
authoritarian government of President Viktor Yanukovych two years ago brought
no revolutionary change.
Corruption is still rampant. Key reforms are
incomplete. The separation of powers between the president and prime minister
remains vague. The oligarchs are still entrenched and the old political faces
are having a makeover. The government is paralysed. Foreign aid is frozen. And
the shenanigans around the formation of the new government seem painfully
familiar.
On April 10th,
after weeks of vacillation, the prime minister, Arseniy Yatseniuk, whose
popularity had plummeted along with Ukrainians’ living standards, offered to
resign. His two-year term produced mixed results. His government managed to
raise the absurdly low price Ukrainians are charged for gas, and reduce the
country’s dependence on Russian supplies. Public procurement—a big source of
corruption—became more transparent. But his administration was tarred by
corruption scandals and stalled reforms.
Mr Yatseniuk’s
offer of resignation was followed by dissension and backroom horse-trading. The
squabbling exemplified Ukraine’s lack of a responsible political elite. On
April 14th the Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, voted in a new government led by
Volodymyr Groisman, the speaker of parliament and a close ally of President
Petro Poroshenko. Oleksandr Danyliuk, a former consultant at McKinsey, is to be
finance minister. The new administration is backed by a thin coalition between
Mr Poroshenko’s bloc and Mr Yatseniuk’s party, which despite its miserable
ratings will retain key cabinet posts, including the Ministry of the Interior.
Ukraine-watchers could not escape a feeling of déjà vu. Twelve years ago
the Orange Revolution was followed by a period of misrule by then-President
Viktor Yushchenko. At the time Mr Poroshenko, who was one of Mr Yushchenko’s lyubi druzi (“dear friends”), epitomised the
betrayal of the revolution’s hopes.
Yet in at least
one respect the current situation is different: the energy of the Revolution of
Dignity has not dissipated. Instead it has carried over into civil society.
With international support, Ukrainian civic groups are trying to force the
government to follow through on the promises of the Maidan uprising to reform a
corrupt, oligarchic post-Soviet system.
On a Kiev street
parallel to the presidential administration building, dozens of young activists
are shaping a new European-style state, building parallel institutions and
drafting laws that are pushed through parliament. Some 50 of the leading
non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have formed a coalition, oddly styled the
“Reanimation Package of Reforms” (RPR) in English, that is pushing bills,
staging protests, monitoring reforms and holding weekly meetings with MPs.
RPR includes two
dozen groups with expertise on reforms such as decentralisation and the fight
against corruption. “We have real sway,” says Vadym Miskyi, a 26-year-old RPR
organiser who was on Maidan two years ago. The network also includes
independent media organs and some 40 young members of parliament who call
themselves Euro-optimists. Many of the young activists, encouraged by the
success of Georgia’s reforms in the mid-2000s, are rallying behind Mikheil
Saakashvili, a former Georgian president and now the governor of Odessa, who is
spearheading a national anti-corruption movement.
Unlike the Georgian reforms, which were zealously enforced from the top,
the changes in Ukraine are less visible. Yet they have broader support. Daria
Kaleniuk, the head of Anti-Corruption Action Centre, one of the RPR’s member
groups, says one reason corruption may seem to be getting worse is that it
receives more media exposure than it did under Mr Yanukovych. “We have created
a toxic environment for Ukraine’s corrupt officials, who have been stealing for
the past quarter-century,” says Sevgil Musaieva-Borovyk, the editor of Ukrainska Pravda, an online newspaper.
But although
civil society has scored important victories in the information war, the main
battle is over law enforcement. Unable to break up corrupt structures such as
the prosecutor’s office (which is even less trusted by Ukrainians than Russia’s
propaganda-spewing TV stations, according to polls), Ukrainian civil society is
helping to build parallel institutions.
A number of
cities have established new police forces to bypass the old corrupt ones. There
is a National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) empowered to investigate high-level
graft, a new anti-corruption prosecution service and a National Agency for the
Prevention of Corruption to monitor the income declarations of government
officials. Civic activists are trying to change election rules to limit the
private funding of election campaigns and prevent political parties from
serving as the oligarchs’ poodles.
The victory of
Ukraine’s civil-society movement is far from guaranteed. It will depend partly
on the efforts of Western donors to enforce strict conditions for the funds
they disburse in Ukraine. Establishing NABU was one of the main conditions the
IMF attached to its $17 billion loan programme, which has been frozen over
concerns about corruption. Desperately reliant on foreign aid, the Ukrainian
government had limited wiggle room.
Inevitably, the
civil activists and NABU investigators—rigorously selected, trained by Western
anti-fraud services and well paid—are provoking resistance from the old system.
The General Prosecutor’s office, headed until recently by Viktor Shokin, a
protégé of Mr Poroshenko, has refused to pass information to NABU and attacked
the Anti-Corruption Action Centre. “In a country where officials steal by
percentage points of GDP, it was always going to be a struggle,” says Ms
Kaleniuk. “We were ready for it.”
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