'Trash bucket challenge' spreads
across Ukraine
as activists throw politicians into rubbish bins to 'punish corruption'
By Roland Oliphant
It’s a bad time to be a Ukrainian
politician.
The war in the east refuses to
end, despite a “ceasefire”. Winter is approaching, and with it all the worries
of another “gas-war” with Russia .
And with parliamentary elections just weeks away, pre-revolutionary MPs are
getting nervous about hanging on to their jobs.
To make things worse, there is a growing chance of ending up in a wheelie bin.
Since early September up to a
dozen MPs, city councillors and other officials accused of wrong doing have
been hauled from their offices by masked gangs in what has become know as the
“Trash Bucket Challenge.”
The perpetrators - often members of
the radical right-wing group Right Sector - say the public humiliations are to
punish the corruption and criminality that characterised the previous regime.
But critics warn the attacks are
just one step away from mob justice and public lynchings.
“The main thing in our country
now is that the criminals are all still there,” said Yury Mindiuk, the head of
Right Sector’s central executive. “No one wants to implement the ideas of
Maidan.”
Right Sector emerged as an
alliance of far right groups during the revolution, and earned a fearsome
reputation as one of the most militant elements in the street fighting that led
to Mr Yanukovych’s overthrow. Since then some members of the group have fought
in the war in eastern Ukraine ,
but they have struggled to find political relevance in post-revolutionary
politics.
It was the group’s Odessa
branch that came up with the idea last month, when they dumped Oleg Rudenko, a
city insurance official accused of taking a £28,000 bribe, in a trash can.
The stunt hit a chord. Soon Right
Sector groups across the country were doing the same thing to anyone from MPs
with links to the previous regime through to local municipal officials accused
of taking bribes.
On September 16 a mob grabbed and
“binned” Vitaly Zhuravsky, an MP formerly of Mr Yanukovych’s now defunct Party
of the Regions. On September 25 it was the turn of Viktor Pylypyshyn, another
Party of the Regions man.
In both cases activists seemed
most upset about their support for repressive package of laws Mr Yanukovych
rushed through parliament in a doomed bid to crush the anti-government protests
in December.
But it is not just MPs linked to
Mr Yanukoych who are in danger. In the most recent incident on Right Sector’s
website features a doctor from a municipal hospital in the small town of Terebolvya .
The group says he was convicted of bribery three months ago.
Others have taken up the “trash
bucket challenge.” Oleh Lyashko, a controversial MP who has earned notoriety
for his DIY “arrests” of suspected separatists in the east of the country, frog-marched
a municipal official in Kirovograd
into a wheelie bin for “lying.”
The tensions underlying the
practice go back to last winter’s revolution.
When protesters swept over the 18ft
high walls of Viktor Yanukovych’s out of town residence after he fled on
February 22, they found an estate half the size of Monaco
replete with private zoo, classic car collection, and a now infamous mock-galleon
restaurant moored on the river. The clubs at the private golf course were
embossed with Mr Yanukovych’s initials.
It was a jaw-dropping
demonstration of the scale and depth of the corruption that had angered so many
protesters.
Seven months on, Mr Yanukovych is
long gone, and the estate has been returned to public ownership.
But many feel the deep rooted
political culture of personal enrichment and corruption it represents - and
which the revolution was meant to put an end to - endures.
A so-called “lustration law,”
which would subject national and local officials to screening for corruption of
other wrong doing, was passed by the Ukrainian parliament in August. But no one
has yet been subjected to the checks, let along lost their job under it.
To make matters worse, the
Prosecutor General last week warned that the law is unconstitutional and
violates international law.
As Mr Mindiuk puts it, “we
wouldn’t have to do this if the authorities were doing their job: prosecute
these people in a court of law.”
“Put them in jail, legally. Clean
up this so-called establishment. Because we’re not ready to wait around until
the children of the Party of the Regions grow up in the hope they’ll be better
than their parents,” said Mr Mindiuk.
It is meant to be a political
street theatre, a public humiliation rather than a lynching. But the stunts can
get frighteningly out of hand.
Nestor Shufrych, another MP of Mr
Yanukovych’s now disbanded Party of the Regions, ended up in hospital after his
campaign stop in Odessa was
interrupted by protesters.
Police and body guards managed to
get the MP to his campaign bus before the mob could dump him in a bin. But a
video shows him taking a nasty beating before he made his escape. He later said
he received a concussion during the violence.
Mr Mindiuk later admitted the
group had gone too far, and the incident prompted Arsen Avakov, the Interior
Minister, issued a plea via his Facebook page for the radicals to desist.
“Just a couple more broken faces
like Shufrich’s or lynchings like Pylypyshin, and Europe
will turn away from our victorious revolution,” he said. “Don’t be marginal
morons, follow stupid instincts and provoke crowds to mob justice,” he wrote.
That got short thrift from the
radicals, however.
“Avakov is the Moron ,”
Mr Lyashko wrote in his reply, “for not understanding that people act in such a
radical way because there is no law.”
“Today we’ll lustrate the Party
of the Regions through the trash, and tomorrow we’ll throw Avakov on the landfill.”
Both Right Sector and Mr Lyashko
revel in their respective reputations for direct action - and, indeed, violence.
But public backing for their tactics appears to be lukewarm.
Although polling puts Mr
Lyashko’s Radical party in second place at the up coming parliamentary
elections on October 26, it is set to take little more than 10 percent of the
vote.
Right Sector’s leader Dmytro
Yarosh took less than 1 percent of the vote at the presidential election in
June, and the group does not look likely to make gains.
@ The Telegraph
@ The Telegraph
