Site Presented By
Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Her partner was kidnapped and beheaded. Now, charges Ukrainian journalist Olena Prytula, the government is using the courts to shut down her crusading Web site.
Jul 15, 2004 | The beheading of Georgi Gongadze, a crusading journalist who uncovered corruption and cronyism in the Ukrainian government, couldn't silence Ukrayinska Pravda, the muckraking Web site he founded.
But almost four years after the 31-year-old's headless body was discovered in a ditch in a suburb of Kiev, a libel lawsuit threatens to do what murder couldn't achieve: shut Ukrayinska Pravda down. The plaintiffs are contesting articles that allege their involvement in a coverup of who was really behind the murder of Gongadze.
The details are murky, as the plaintiffs were unavailable for comment to elaborate on the details of their lawsuit. But the key point, according to Olena Prytula, the editor in chief and co-founder of the Web site, is that the lawsuit isn't just demanding a retraction but is also aiming to close down the publication. And the timing for that couldn't be better for the very same politicians against whom the Web site has been on the warpath: A national election in October will determine the successor to President Leonid Kuchma, who is accused by a former bodyguard of personally ordering Gongadze's killing.
For now, Ukrayinska Pravda, powered by a half-dozen journalists and led by Prytula, is still publishing articles that rip into Kuchma's loyalists with headlines like "Who Really Wears Pampers in Ukrainian Politics?" and "10 Ways Ukraine Is a Neo-Soviet Country." The notoriety of the Gongadze case has been a protection of sorts -- any further heavy-handedness would spur more worldwide attention to an already controversial case. Still, Ukrayinska Pravda's breed of outspoken opposition journalism is unusual in the post-Soviet Ukraine, which suffers from state censorship of its broadcast and print media.
"Internet was and still is the only place without censorship," explains Prytula, sipping coffee in a Starbucks in San Francisco. Overseeing the site remotely while on a John S. Knight fellowship at Stanford University, Prytula is an athletic-looking, fair-skinned blonde who recently hiked the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu and enjoyed the strenuous trek so much she wants to do it again. But instead, she will return to Ukraine at the end of July to fight the lawsuit and continue covering the run-up to the election.
The tale of Gongadze, Prytula, Kuchma and Ukrayinska Pravda reads like a 1950s film noir plot transplanted into a 21st century post-Soviet morass. Parts of the story have been well reported, but the twists just keep on coming. In the years since Gongadze's death, as his lurid murder remained unsolved, secret tapes made by a former presidential bodyguard, who now has asylum in the United States, surfaced suggesting that Kuchma himself ordered the killing. The government argued that the tapes had been doctored to put words in Kuchma's mouth. Then, a key witness in the case mysteriously died in police custody, and his body was quickly cremated. Now, the government claims to have a confession, although they refuse to name the killer, calling him only "K."
"They said nothing about him, just that he is in prison, and he will be there for the rest of his life because he murdered several people," says Prytula. "Nobody believes it."
