[Ohio UZO News] Ukraine: KP/Reuters; NYT (2)

[Deychak, Orest]

Kyiv Post

 

Ukraine court rules against presidential poll date  

May 13, 2009

 

KIEV, May 13 (Reuters) - A top Ukrainian court on Wednesday struck down
as unconstitutional the October date set by parliament for the next
presidential election, plunging the former Soviet republic into a new
bout of political uncertainty.

 

President Viktor Yushchenko, swept to power by mass "Orange Revolution"
rallies but now highly unpopular, had challenged the Oct. 25 date in the
Constitutional Court, saying the election should not take place until
early next year.

The parliament, in a rare moment of unity, voted overwhelmingly to hold
the election more than three months earlier than anticipated.

The vote appeared to be a defensive move to prevent the president from
dissolving the chamber -- illegal in the last six months before an
election. Yushchenko attempted last year to dissolve the chamber and
hold a snap parliamentary poll.

In its ruling, announced by its chairman, the court offered no new
possible date for a presidential contest.

But it appeared to back the president's position, saying that under the
constitution, amended during the turmoil of the "orange" rallies in 2004
against vote-rigging, the poll should take place in the last month of
the fifth year of his mandate.

Yushchenko took office on Jan. 23, 2005 and most officials, including
parliament speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn, had suggested the poll be held on
Jan. 17. Parliament must name a date.

In weeks of debate that followed the parliamentary ruling, Yushchenko
offered a concession, saying he would agree to the October date provided
an early parliamentary election was held at the same time.

In the more than four years since Yushchenko took office, irreparable
splits have opened among the pro-Western activists that stood behind the
Revolution.

Yushchenko appointed Yulia Tymoshenko, his close ally in the protests,
prime minister twice but has been constantly at odds with her on
virtually all policy issues.

Opposition leader Viktor Yanukovich, the man Yushchenko defeated in the
re-run of the rigged 2004 election, stands atop opinion polls with more
than 20 percent backing, followed closely behind by Tymoshenko, with
more than 15.

Yushchenko's dwindling support stands in single figures.

 

The New York Times

WORLD BRIEFING EUROPE

Ukraine: Minister Resigns After Airport Incident 

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY 

13 May 2009

Interior Minister Yuri Lutsenko resigned Tuesday after being accused of
drunken behavior last week at an airport in Germany. He denied that he
had been intoxicated, and said in a statement that he was the victim of
a ''dirty campaign'' to discredit him and his ministry.

A Lufthansa plane crew in Frankfurt had refused to allow Mr. Lutsenko
and his 19-year-old son to board a flight to Seoul because they were
drunk and disorderly, the German police said. Mr. Lutsenko was accused
of physically attacking and insulting police officers.

He maintained in the statement that the police had apologized for the
officers' conduct.

The New York Times

Accused Nazi Arrives in Munich 

By NICHOLAS KULISH 

13 May 2009

BERLIN -- John Demjanjuk of Seven Hills, Ohio, born Ivan Demjanjuk in
Ukraine in 1920, arrived in Munich Tuesday morning to face accusations
of crimes committed as a Nazi death-camp guard. Mr. Demjanjuk was
deported for the second time by the United States on Monday. The first
time was 23 years ago, and he was bound for worldwide notoriety, accused
of being the unfathomably cruel ''Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka,'' one
of the Holocaust's most infamous sadists. He was convicted and sentenced
to death in Israel, before new evidence won him a reprieve and
eventually a trip back to the United States and the return of his
stripped citizenship.

But the wheels of justice began to grind again, and the whole process
has repeated itself step by step. Monday night, a frailer Mr. Demjanjuk,
now 89 and once again stateless, boarded a special medically equipped
airplane bound for Germany, where he is accused of being an accessory in
the murder of 29,000 Jews while working as a guard at the Sobibor death
camp in eastern Poland.

Investigators say that the documentary evidence is strong and that they
will be able to prove that Mr. Demjanjuk was a living cog in a killing
factory, where some 250,000 people were put to death in just one and a
half years of operation. His son, John Demjanjuk Jr., says that his
father, who has bone-marrow and kidney diseases, is being hounded by the
United States Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations and
German prosecutors in an inhumane fashion.

Mr. Demjanjuk's guilt will be decided in a Munich courtroom, assuming he
lives long enough and is deemed fit to stand trial. But throughout the
recent months of courtroom battles over appeals and stays of
deportation, the gulf between the enormity of the crimes Mr. Demjanjuk
is accused of and the frail old man he is now has grown more apparent.

Ultimately Mr. Demjanjuk's advanced age and poor health serve as
reminders, regardless of the outcome in court, of how the living memory
of the crimes committed during World War II is on the verge of
disappearing. Mr. Demjanjuk's case might well be the last major war
crimes trial in Germany, marking the end of an era that began in
Nuremberg in 1945.

Thomas Blatt, 82, who was a prisoner at Sobibor at the same time Mr.
Demjanjuk has been accused of having worked there as a guard, said the
trial itself was more important than meting out any punishment. ''I
don't care if he is released; I do care about his testimony,'' said Mr.
Blatt, who now lives in California and has written two books about his
experiences. ''There's many people right now who say the Holocaust never
happened.''

Mr. Blatt said he did not remember Mr. Demjanjuk from Sobibor, but he
pointed out that he also could not recall the faces of his parents who
were killed at the death camp along with his younger brother. Mr. Blatt
was one of the few prisoners to escape Sobibor, in an uprising there in
October 1943.

Mr. Demjanjuk was a soldier in the Soviet Army, fighting against the
Germans, until he was captured in the Crimea in 1942. Mr. Demjanjuk says
he spent most of the remainder of the war as a prisoner. But according
to prosecutors, he went to an SS training camp in Trawniki, Poland,
where foreign nationals were trained to take part in the Holocaust.

After the war, Mr. Demjanjuk moved to the United States, where he became
an autoworker and raised a family. But in 1977, several Holocaust
survivors identified him as Ivan the Terrible.

Mr. Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to death by an Israeli court
in 1988.

But the conviction was overturned in 1993, and he was freed by Israel's
Supreme Court after evidence surfaced suggesting that another man was
most likely Ivan the Terrible. An identity card from Trawniki indicates
that Mr. Demjanjuk was sent to serve at Sobibor.

His family has maintained his innocence throughout the three-decade
legal odyssey. ''Now at the age of 89, when alleged witnesses are now
dead, he's faced with having to defend himself again, when with the pain
and suffering he's no longer capable,'' his son said on Monday in a
telephone interview. ''You would have thought that after the mistake
they made in nearly sending him to the gallows, they would have just let
this go.''

The United States Supreme Court declined to hear Mr. Demjanjuk's latest
appeal last week, and a Berlin court declined an appeal on Monday.

''The only reason not to put someone like Demjanjuk on trial is if he is
not capable to stand trial,'' said Cornelius Nestler, a professor of
criminal law at the University of Cologne, who is advising possible
co-plaintiffs in the case. ''I think in the same way that the grief of
the people who left their parents, very often their whole family, in
Sobibor will not be over until their death, the responsibility of the
people who did it will not be over until they're dead.''

 

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