Yushchenko lists Ukraine's failings

DAVOS - Courts that run to the whim of the president, an economy mired in graft and the beheading of journalists are some of the things Viktor Yushchenko dislikes about the Ukraine he has inherited.

The new President, inaugurated a week ago, laid bare the failings of Ukraine in a bleak assessment of the challenges he faces in reforming his country of 47 million people into a modern, democratic, free-market European state.

"It's a summary of what we dislike about Ukraine and what we want to change in the legacy I have taken over from my predecessor," Yushchenko said at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss ski resort of Davos.

"Ukraine must end criminal behaviour by local and central government officials whose extortions have driven more than half of the economy underground and who offer protection and favours to powerful businessmen in exchange for bribes," he said. "There is no rule of law in Ukraine."

Yushchenko pledged to create an honest, incorruptible bureaucracy and slash obstructive regulation that hinders business and gives corrupt, poorly paid officials an incentive to demand bribes.

Justice depended on the wishes of the state, he said. "Sometimes a telephone call from the presidential Administration to a court can matter much more than a handful of laws," said the 50-year-old former central banker, brought to power by popular revolts that overturned a fraudulent election.

Yushchenko said there would be no repeat of the disappearance and killing of anti-government reporters, in a cutting reference to the most prominent human rights abuses committed under the rule of his predecessor, Leonid Kuchma.

"We will not tolerate journalists with different opinions being beheaded for this deviation," he said.

The headless corpse of investigative reporter Georgiy Gongadze was found in Ukraine in 2000. Kuchma denied any link to the murder.

Yushchenko is finishing a week of high-level diplomacy that took him to Moscow to persuade Russia that his pro-Western tilt would not damage ties and then across Europe to press his case that Ukraine deserves eventual membership of the European Union.

At the World Economic Forum, he tried to convince business it would be safe to invest in Ukraine in future.

He said Ukraine would begin a national debate on corruption, a blight that previous Governments had pretended did not exist. Employing fewer officials but paying them better was one road to a more efficient, less corrupt Administration.

A major challenge is to reduce the strength of vested interests, many of them close to Kuchma and his family. Yushchenko said the law would be applied without favour.

He said there was one other thing he disliked - his pockmarked face.

He asked reporters to respect his privacy when questioned on the treatment for dioxin poisoning that left his previously youthful face bloated and disfigured. "I still can't get used to the face of Yushchenko that you can see today."

- REUTERS