Opinion: High anxiety

Most voters who dropped a ballot for President Viktor Yushchenko probably wanted things shaken up in Ukraine. That’s exactly what they’re getting.

Yushchenko’s activist government is upsetting one card table after another, to what appears to be consternation among a Ukrainian elite that has had it easy – scandalously easy – for a long time. What remains to be seen is how long the new government can continue to make its enemies uncomfortable without shooting itself in the foot, and damaging the country in the process.

In these fast-moving days, it’s difficult to figure out exactly what’s going on in the government. The privatization controversy is a good indication of that. In the early days of his tenure, Yushchenko announced that the government planned to restrict review of possibly crooked privatizations carried out under former President Leonid Kuchma’s watch to a mere 30 state properties. Then, last week, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko stunningly revised that number upward to 3,000, generating panic among certain members of Ukraine’s tycoon class. Soon after that, word seeped out from the government that the revised number was wildly inflated. The number of privatizations to be reviewed was closer to 30 after all.

If such gestures are meant to keep off-balance the crooked Kuchma-era elites who form a significant percentage of the opposition to the new government, they’re working. It’s been interesting to see the charm offensive that’s been launched by certain powerful Ukrainians recently: after years of remaining silent and in the shadows, confident of their power, they’re now rushing to the press, eager to justify themselves and trumpet their virtue and patriotism. In short, they’re scared.

The trouble is that the government’s gestures might keep off balance people who aren’t members of the rapacious Kuchma-era robber elite. There are early signs that foreign money is starting to become impatient with the turmoil: no one wants to invest in a country in the midst of permanent low-grade revolution, and the economic life of which is in uproar thanks to the fact that thousands of properties are reverting to state ownership. Thanks, also, to the shenanigans of rich, powerful and rattled Yushchenko enemies who are running to the courts to fight out their privatization battles, and who are making as big a mess as possible.

Nor is it even clear whether the government is masterfully toying with its enemies like a cat toys with a mouse, or whether the confusion is an expression of internal disagreements. Last week, new Justice Minister Roman Zvarych either tried to quit his new post, or noisily staged a resignation. His actions seemed to be in response to a murky situation involving possible illegality and corruption in the oil-export business. The details remain unclear. What is clear is that the new administration is, like any administration, a patchwork of conflicting factions. Some of them have different visions than the others; some of them are possibly more honest than others.

Whatever the situation, Ukraine needs stability. By that we don’t mean the corrupt “stability” of the Kuchma years, which losing presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovych promised to maintain. We mean the stability of a democratic country in which citizens know they can expect official adherence to the rule of law, and in which is tolerated neither a thieving elite nor perpetual government crusades against its enemies and their property. It’s the stability of a balanced, healthy society. We hope things calm down, and that Yushchenko leads Ukraine to that type of stability soon.