The British Government has seriously misled both Houses of
Parliament about the removal of
There are 650 MPs in the House of Commons and around 750
peers in the House of Lords. A
considerable number of these 1,400 or so parliamentarians must know that they
were misled, not least because Peter Oborne wrote about it in the Telegraph on 12
March [1]. And, with the internet links he provided,
they could have quickly confirmed to their own satisfaction that they had been
misled, if they had any doubts about the matter.
One must conclude that they were happy to be misled because,
to the best of my knowledge, only one out of these 1400 or so parliamentarians
has queried the matter at the time of writing.
He was Independent Labour peer,
Lord Stoddart, who remains an active member of the House of Lords at the
age of almost 88. He put down the
following question for written answer in the Lords:
“To ask Her Majesty’s
Government what steps they took to satisfy themselves that the removal from
office of President Yanukovych was carried out in accordance with Article 111
of the Ukranian Constitution.” [2]
Foreign Office Minister, Baroness
Warsi, replied as follows on 20 March:
“The Rada (Ukrainian Parliament) is elected to represent the
Ukrainian people. Those people have spoken for a better, more prosperous
future, free from corruption. Clearly, former President Yanukovych lost the
confidence of the Rada and Ukrainian people.
“Mr Yanukovych abandoned his office
and the country before fulfilling his commitments under the 21 February
agreement. The former-President’s departure meant that parliament had to act.
The 21 February agreement provided for a return to the 2004 Constitution. On 22
February the Rada voted to restore the 2004 constitution and to impeach the
former President. The interim government, which was approved by an overwhelming
majority in a free vote in the Rada, including representatives of Mr
Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions, has: restored the 2004 Constitution; begun
the process of constitutional reform; and scheduled Presidential elections.
“We welcome the swift steps to appoint a new government of
national unity which can rule
Reply doesn’t answer question
This reply doesn’t make any attempt
to answer Lord Stoddart’s question, understandably so, since an answer that had
even a passing resemblance to the truth would have to admit that the Rada didn’t
follow the impeachment procedure in
Article 111 of the Ukranian constitution [3]
– and that the Government had misled Parliament in giving the impression that
it did. It follows from this that the new
regime in
Had this
unconstitutional regime change taken place elsewhere in the world, it is easy
to imagine the
Hollow
protestations
Another point: the Government has persistently
criticised the referendum in
“The
referendum was clearly illegal under the Ukrainian constitution, which states
that the Autonomous Republic of Crimea is an integral constituent part of
That is factually
correct. But the Government’s protestations that the
constitution was breached by holding the Crimean referendum ring rather hollow
when it remains silent about the removal from office of a democratically elected president by
unconstitutional means – which is another reason why the Government must
pretend that the proper constitutional procedure was followed on 22 February.
Outright lie
Baroness Warsi’s reply contains the
outright lie that “on 22 February the
Rada voted … to impeach the former President”.
It didn’t – the resolution passed by the Rada on 22 February,
which purported to remove the President from power, doesn’t mention impeachment
or Article 111 of the constitution.
The resolution titled “On
self-withdrawal of the President of
This
fairytale, which is repeated in Baroness Warsi’s reply, has been contradicted
by a senior figure in the new regime, the head of
“The
Russians miscalculated. They did not realise that we would suddenly be
able to hound Yanukovych out of office in a matter of days.”
That gives the lie to the assertion in Rada resolution
(repeated by Baroness Warsi) that the President was guilty of “self-withdrawal
… from performing his constitutional duties”.
21 February
agreement
The
background to these developments was the 21 February agreement for temporary
all-party arrangements for governing
This agreement [7], brokered by the foreign ministers of Germany, France and Poland on
behalf of the EU, provided for the transfer within 48 hours of substantial
presidential powers to the Ukranian parliament by reinstating the 2004
Constitution and for the creation within 10 days of a “national unity
government”. This was to remain in place
until a presidential election was held by December 2014 at the latest.
In other words, the President agreed to surrender a large
measure of his powers to the opposition right away and to bring forward the presidential
election scheduled for February 2015 by a few months, an election which was
unlikely to lead to his re-election if he stood.
(For details of the agreement, see my article EU disavowal of 21 February agreement
responsible for standoff between the West & Russia [8]).
The agreement
was signed by the
leaders of the three main opposition parties, Arseniy Yatsenyuk (Fatherland),
Vitali Klitschko (UDAR) and Oleh Tyahnybok (Freedom) and by the President
himself. And it was supported by the EU
and the
Why wasn’t the agreement implemented?
Why wasn’t the agreement implemented? Baroness Warsi’s reply gives the impression
that it was the president’s fault – she says that he “abandoned his office and the country before fulfilling his commitments
under the 21 February agreement”. This
is not true – there is little doubt that the President would have fulfilled his
commitments had he been in a position to do so.
In reality, the agreement wasn’t implemented because it was unacceptable
to the occupants of
Here’s an extract from an RT report
of 21 February on the reception for the deal in
“Opposition
leader and head of the UDAR party Vitaly Klitschko was booed while speaking on
stage at
“He was
then interrupted by a protester who got on stage and declared: ‘If tomorrow by
10 am you don’t come and tell us that Yanukovych has resigned, we will put up a
storm with weapons, I swear.’
“Klitschko
apologized to protesters who were upset that he shook Yanukovych’s hand. …
“Later,
the leader of far-right group Right Sector, Dmitri Yarosh, took to the stage,
telling protesters that the deal reached between the president and the
opposition is not acceptable. Yarosh
said that his group will not be putting down their arms until Yanukovych
resigns: ‘The Right Sector will not lay down its arms. The Right Sector will
not remove the blockade of one of the government buildings until our most
important requirement is fulfilled – the resignation of Yanukovych.’ ” [9]
(The New York Times report Ukraine Has Deal [10] has
a similar account).
The agreement stated that “both parties will undertake
serious efforts for the normalisation of life in the cities and villages by
withdrawing from administrative and public buildings and unblocking streets,
city parks and squares”. In compliance with
this, Yanukovych ordered police to leave
the government district of Kiev shortly after the agreement was signed. The Guardian reported:
“In Kiev, the lines of riot police
that have stood at key points across the capital disappeared on Saturday [22
February] morning, leaving the city in the hands of the protesters.” [11]
Needless to say, the opposition paramilitary
forces that had fought the police for months in
(President Putin advised
Yanukovych against withdrawing the police from the capital. Here’s what he told a press conference on 4
March [12]:
“[Yanukovych]
called me on the phone and I told him not to do it. I said, ‘You will have
anarchy, you will have chaos in the capital. Think about the people.’ But he
did it anyway. And as soon as he did it, his office was seized, and that of the
government, and the chaos I had warned him about and which continues to this
day, erupted.”)
Widespread
support for ousting of President?
In her reply to Lord Stoddart,
Baroness Warsi said:
“The
interim government, which was approved by an overwhelming majority in a free
vote in the Rada, including representatives of Mr Yanukovych’s Party of the
Regions.”
The Government has repeatedly
emphasised that Rada members from the President’s party, the Party of the
Regions, voted with the opposition on February 22 and have done so since. The name of the game here is to give the impression
that the new regime, and its subsequent actions, has widespread support in the
Rada and, by implication, in
It is certainly true that support
for the President from his party leaked away.
It has been suggested that this was triggered by the
Be that as it
may, it is fairly clear that, once the opposition paramilitary forces took over
the parliament buildings on 22 February, the intimidation against supporters of
the President was such that Rada members of the President’s party had two
options – either vote with the opposition or flee. Dissent was not allowed from then on.
One thing is
certain: when Rada members from the President’s party voted with the
opposition, it wasn’t because the people who elected them were demanding that
they do so.
The end result
is that, instead of a broadly based coalition government as proposed in the 21
February agreement, which had a chance of keeping
Baroness Warsi’s reply to Lord
Stoddart ends by welcoming “the swift steps to appoint a new government of
national unity”. That is highly
misleading: no steps have been taken to create a “government of national unity”
as envisaged in the 21 February agreement.
Physical intimidation of supporters of the president
Physical intimidation
of supporters of the President didn’t begin or end on 22 February. The Party of the Regions had its headquarters
attacked by paramilitaries and set on fire on 18 February (see BBC report [14]). And this was before the police were withdrawn
from the centre of
The Communist Party (which
had 32 out of 450 seats in the Rada) has also suffered because of its support
for the President. Party headquarters in
There have been frequent calls
from the opposition for both the Party of the Regions and the Communist Party
to be banned and bills to do so were proposed in the Rada (see [17]
and [18]),
but were not passed.
On 23 February, the Rada approved
a Bill to abolish the 2012 language law, which allowed
Judging from
the treatment meted out to the leader of the Communist Party, Pyotr Simonenko, on 8
April, the opposition’s intolerance of dissent is still operating in the
Rada. When he pointed out that those who
were occupying state buildings in the east were merely following the example
set by the opposition in Kiev and other parts of the country, he was physically
removed from the podium by opposition members (see RT report and video [20]).
Also, Presidential candidates have
been assaulted in the street. For
example, according to Euronews, on 15 April, Oleg Tsarev, who was opposed to
What Baroness Warsi should have said
Baroness
Warsi’s reply to Lord Stoddart should have been along the following lines:
“Article 111 of the Ukranian
Constitution sets outs the procedure that the Rada (Ukrainian Parliament) must
follow in order to impeach a president and remove him from office.
“This procedure obliges the Rada to
establish a special investigatory commission to formulate charges against the
president, seek evidence to justify the charges and come to conclusions about
the president’s guilt for the Rada to consider.
“To find the president guilty, at
least two-thirds of Rada members must assent.
Prior to a final vote to remove the president from power, the Constitutional
Court of Ukraine must review the case and certify that due process has been
followed, and the Supreme Court of Ukraine must certify that the acts of which
the President is accused are worthy of impeachment. In the final vote to remove
the president from power, at least three-quarters of Rada members must assent.
“Regrettably the Rada didn’t follow
this procedure. No investigatory
commission was established and the Courts were not involved. On 22 February, the Rada simply passed a
resolution removing President Yanukovych from office and this did not receive
the support of three-quarters of Rada members.
“President Yanukovych’s removal from
power was illegal under the Ukranian Constitution and that the new regime in
“President Yanukovych had lost much
of the popular support that he had at the time of his election in 2010, when he
received nearly 50% of the popular vote in what was widely regarded as a free
and fair electoral process. But the
proper way to remove an unpopular president in a democracy is to unelect him by
voting against him in the presidential election at the end of his term, if he
is a candidate.”
Note on Lord Stoddart
Lord Stoddart was a Labour MP,
who was first elected to the House of Commons in 1970 and became a Labour life
peer in 1983, where he was a frontbench spokesman on energy from 1983 to
1988. He was expelled from the Labour
Party in 2002 for backing
a Socialist Alliance candidate in the 2001 general election, an action he took
because he opposed the parachuting of Shaun Woodward, a defector from the
Conservative Party, into the safe Labour seat of St Helens South. He now describes himself as Independent
Labour and remains an active member of the House of Lords at the age of almost
88. He is, and always has been, opposed
to the
David
Morrison
18 April
2014
References:
[1] blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peteroborne/100263469/william-hague-has-been-cavalier-with-the-facts-in-his-support-for-the-ukraine-rebels/
[2] www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201314/ldhansrd/text/140320w0001.htm#14032061000260
[3] www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=5&ved=0CEcQFjAE&url=
http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ccu.gov.ua%2Fdoccatalog%2Fdocument%3Fid%3D12084&ei=Qu4YU7WcGMTmywOq4YGQBA&usg=AFQjCNHKZt4ZFrE9kClMf8np7A-8mX6PBA&sig2=qemkVvKc4z0QE-tEmkQJ_Q
[4] www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmhansrd/cm140318/debtext/140318-0001.htm
[5] iportal.rada.gov.ua/en/news/News/News/88138.html
[6] www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article125905642/Russlands-Ziele-sind-die-Ukraine-und-Kiew.html
[7]
http://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/cae/servlet/contentblob/671350/publicationFile/190045/140221-UKR_Erklaerung.pdf
[8] www.david-morrison.org.uk/ukraine/eu-21-february-agreement.htm
[9] rt.com/news/president-impeachment-bill-parliament-174/
[10] www.nytimes.com/2014/02/22/world/europe/ukraine.html
[11] www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/22/ukraine-president-yanukovych-flees-kiev
[12] eng.kremlin.ru/transcripts/6763
[13] www.internationalpolicydigest.org/2014/02/25/u-s-played-hardball-ukraine/
[14] www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26236860
[15] en.itar-tass.com/world/720807
[16] www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2567388/Stunning-map-reveals-100-statues-Lenin-toppled-Ukraine.html
[17] voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_02_24/Draft-bill-banning-Party-of-Regions-initiated-in-Ukraines-parliament-8293/
[18] zik.ua/en/news/2014/02/26/opposition_tables_bill_to_ban_communist_party_464943
[19] rt.com/news/minority-language-law-ukraine-035/
[20] rt.com/news/scuffle-parliament-ukraine-lawmakers-225/
[21] www.euronews.com/2014/04/15/ukraine-radical-pro-russia-presidential-candidate-oleg-tsarov-beaten-by-angry-/