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Political shortsightedness of Lugansk militia

07.12.2004   
Oleksiy Svetikov, Severodonetsk
 On 21 October officers of the Stanichno-Luganskiy district militia precinct detained the group of agitators for Viktor Yushchenko and seized agitation materials from them. This was not the first time, when Lugansk law-enforcers impeded the conduction of agitation campaign by the candidates to President’s post.

The agitation campaign “Grad”, carried out by Viktor Yushchenko’s headquarters, is one of the most efficient actions of this candidate in this Eastern region of Ukraine. Mobile groups of agitators visit villages and settlements, they go from house to house and distribute the sets of materials: agitation materials published in compliance with the Law “On election of the President of Ukraine” and elucidative materials (extracts from the Ukrainian Constitution and the laws of Ukraine connected with election rights, which do not contain any agitation information).

According to the words of the law-enforcers, an unknown person phoned to them with the complaint against the actions of agitators, so the militiamen proposed the agitators to go with them to the district precinct. The militia officers looked through the materials and confiscated them under the pretext that the elucidative materials did not satisfy the requirements of the Law “On election of the President of Ukraine” because of absence of dateline envisaged by this Law. However, the properly designed materials were seized too.

Andriy Zuz, the empowered person of Viktor Yushchenko in the 114th electoral district, met with the head of the district precinct and tried to convince him of illegality of the actions of militiamen, but unsuccessfully. The position of the officer was categorical – everything would be passed to the territorial commission and it would consider the problem. The empowered person directed the complaint to the Lugansk oblast prosecutor’s office with the demand to bring the guilty to responsibility in accordance with Article 157 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.

We do not want to estimate the actions of law-enforcers, but we cannot ignore their “political shortsightedness”. For example, we do not believe that the commanders of Lugansk militia never traveled by train No. 20 “Lugansk-Kyiv”, which is “decorated” with anti-Yushchenko leaflets without dateline. Yet, these leaflets do not interest the militiamen.

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