Awarding the Guilty, Punishing the Innocent?
Eugeniy Zakharov (co-head of the Kharkov Human Rights Protection Group)
Kharkov confrontation was caused by the unlawful felling of age-old trees in the Central Park named after M.Gorky. These trees were planted 117 years ago by schoolchildren, students and their teachers. By every tree there was a sign with the planter’s name. This part of the park remained untouched even during the German occupation of 1941—1943, when trees were sawn up for firewood.
The felling is aimed at laying a four-lane roadway through the park, thus connecting Sumskaya and Novgorodskaya streets. Built this way, it will cross the Children’s Railway, loved by so many Kharkov children. Once the roadway is put into service, the Children’s Railway will have to stop functioning.
The decision to allocate a plot of land (9.9218 hectares) “in order to build a roadway, a hotel complex and elite housing” was taken by the Kharkov City Council on February 27, 2008. At that time people managed to save the green zone. This year, on May 19, The Executive Committee of Kharkov City Council took the decision to “remove the vegetation in the area intended for the construction of the roadway from Sumskaya street to Novgorodskaya street (in the area of Beloy Akatsii street)”, that is, 503 trees were to be removed.
On May 20 the destruction of the park began. It turned out that of all the documents necessary for felling, the wood-cutters had the Executive Committee decision only. The felling area was not marked, safety measures were neglected. During the first day more than 100 trees were cut down. The members of “Pechenegi” ecological group called for the police. Policemen stopped the felling, as it was necessary to find out whether all the necessary permissions had been received. “Pechenegi” started a protest action. They set up a 24-hour tent camp in the park, and soon other park defenders began to join them. There were students, professors, schoolchildren, pensioners, employees who combined their work with keeping vigil in the “Green Fort” (that’s how they called their camp). All in all, several thousand people visited the camp, but the number of those staying in the camp at the same time varied from several dozen to several hundred people. The confrontation lasted from May 20 till June 2.
On May 21, at 4 a.m., police tried to disperse the park defenders by force (undue force sometimes), so that they could not hinder the felling. But the activists did not obey. Later they blocked the wood-cutters’ work by shielding the trees with their bodies; they put themselves in the path of machinery, preventing it from driving up. Activists from local mountaineering clubs climbed the trees so that they could not be cut down.
Tree defenders clamped down on every attempt to politicize the action, turning out the representatives of various political parties with their symbols. Everybody was wearing green ribbons, their only banner was the flag of Ukraine. In the “Green Fort” there were several deputies who represented the City Council and the Region Council, yet they all were there as private persons. The acting city mayor G.Kernes and the Kharkov region governor M.Dobkin claimed that this protest action had been paid by A.Avakov, the ex-governor of Kharkov and the head of the regional branch of YTB (Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc). These statements have nothing to do with reality. Among the park defenders there were people of different political views, many of them voted for Party of Regions in 2006 and for Viktor Yanukovych during the presidential election of 2010.
Kharkovians’ attempts to protect the trees were met with overt violence of the wood-cutters and previously unknown “municipal security guard” – a group of athletically built men. These did not have any IDs, some of them wore “Municipal security” badges and were later identified as employees of a security agency that belongs to the acting mayor G.Kernes. Internal Affairs officers, having obviously got an unlawful instruction, did not interfere into the conflict. They passively watched the “guards” beating up innocent people. Several activists were hospitalized with rib fractures, brain concussion etc.
Destruction of the vegetation was illegal. Kharkov city authorities ignored the requirement of the Planning and Development Act, which thoroughly describes the procedure of submitting land-use plans to the approval of the local community by means of conducting a public hearing (Art.30.2 – 30.7). Later it turned out that the city authorities had not received the necessary permissions from the Ministry of Natural Resources and other organizations.
The Kharkov General Plan of City Development, approved in the beginning of 2008, did not contain this roadway. Instead, there was another highway that did not touch the old part of the park and the Children’s Railway. Subsequently the graphic part of the General Plan was unlawfully labelled as “restricted”, which renders impossible any public discussion of the city development and deforestation.
From May 20 up to May 27 more than 500 trees were cut down and about 200 more trees were marked for felling.
On May 28, about 6 a.m., “municipal security guards” in black uniforms attacked the “Green fort” camp. They pushed people aside to prevent them from blocking the machinery. Nine persons whom the guard did not manage to push aside were detained by police. On June 1, at 4 a.m., the camp was attacked again. The deputy chief of Dzerzhinsky district police department ordered police officers to form a chain between the attackers and the park defenders to avoid a fight. For doing this, he received disciplinary punishment and a “service incompetence note” although his actions were lawful and just. On June 2 the camp was attacked by people in black, now without any badges. The police did not interfere into the conflict at all. Yet they detained four “Green Fort” activists. Wood-cutters advanced on the defenders with their chainsaws switched on. They sawed down a tree in such a way that it could not but fall on a mountaineer sitting on a nearby tree. He had a narrow escape, having hidden behind the tree-trunk.
The wood-cutters sawed down the remaining trees, so the park defenders packed up their camp, as everything intended for the felling was already destroyed. The defenders took away the garbage and went along Sumskaya street towards the Region Council and the Regional State Administration buildings on foot. Arsen Avakov, the deputy of the Region Council, tried to hold a meeting with them as with his voters in the Region Council building, but they were not allowed to do this. Meanwhile, policemen detained two more Green Front participants for “holding an unapproved meeting”.
Administrative offense reports were filed against the people detained on May 28 and June 2, according to Art.185 of Administrative Violations Code of Ukraine (“malicious insubordination to the police”), though none of the detained offered resistance to the police officers. Denis Chernega and Andrey Yevarnitskiy, detained on May 28, were sentenced to 15 days of administrative arrest, another man was sentenced to 3 days of administrative arrest, four persons were discharged, the rest were charged with fines varying from 140 to 300 UAH. After 8 days of sentence Chernega and Yevarnitskiy were declared prisoners of conscience by Amnesty International. Later on the same day they were released upon the decision of the court of appeal.
The tree defenders united into a non-governmental organization they called Green Front. During the whole month of June they held protest actions against unlawful behaviour of the local authorities.
On June 19 there was a public hearing on the future of Kharkov green zones. The city authorities falsified the results of the proceedings. A few thousand people gathered near the Kievsky district executive committee building where the hearing was held, yet they could not enter the hall. The registration of participants was conducted at one spot (there were 2341 persons on record), while a considerable number of participants received their voting cards at some other place. These people were easy to discern, as they did not have the hearing scenario, most of them did not even know the topic of the hearing. Those were mostly employees of schools, kindergartens and hospitals, who were forced to vote for the “right” decision under threat of being fired. Oleg Peregon, the spokesperson of “Pechenegi”, noted that “the votes of those who were against felling were not taken into account at all. Nobody counted the votes properly. There were twenty people in the hall, of about 300 overall, who voted for preservation of vegetation, but they were counted as only one vote.”
Social research conducted by means of telephone survey showed that 70% of Kharkovians are against the building of the roadway through the park, 15% are for it and 15% are indifferent.
Meanwhile, illegal clear-cutting is going on. Park defendants found human bones at the construction site. These are the remains of German soldiers buried there during WWII. Yet neither this fact nor the decision of a special parliamentary committee on termination of the felling operations have stopped the activity of Kharkov municipal authorities. Construction works are continued, park defenders trying to oppose it are detained by policemen who then make administrative offence reports and hand them over to the court. Furthermore, on June 23 the City Executive Council took decision on felling of over 32 hectares of forest in the quarter 32 of the forest park zone near Pyatikhatki, a big city district built after World War II.
All in all, it may be stated that a big non-political protest group has appeared, that calls for the resignation of acting mayor Kernes and opposes lawless decisions of the local authorities. Nevertheless, both the protests and recommendations of central authorities are still being ignored. The story of 2009 seems to be repeating (eight central bodies of power recommended M.Dobkin, who was Kharkov mayor then, not to close down the 675-bed tuberculosis hospital, but he ignored these recommendations and the hospital was closed. Now a tuberculosis epidemic is expected to break out right during Euro 2012 tournament).
The Committee on the Environment, Agriculture and Local and Regional Affairs of the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) has decided to award Kharkov with the 2010 Europe Prize. Considering all of the above, this decision looks like a jeer at Kharkov citizens. The Prize will be presented by PACE President Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu on August 23 (the Day of the City).Volodymyr Litvin, the chairman of the Ukrainian parliament, will be present at the ceremony. It is amazing that PACE Committee did not even take interest in Kharkovians’ attitude towards the city authorities.
Original in Russian: “Zerkalo Nedeli” № 26 (806), June 10 -16, 2010