|
Kuchma sez he'll form a committee...
President Leonid Kuchma bowed to opposition pressure on Wednesday, meeting leaders who spent the night on hunger strike squatting in the corridors of his offices, but he bluntly rejected their demands for him to quit. "I'm a dictator. Dictators don't quit until they're hanging from lamp posts..." Under pressure from Washington over allegations he approved the sale of an early warning radar system to Iraq, the veteran leader told the opposition he would hold an open hearing on the arms sales charges and officials said he did not do it. Do what? Form the committee? Or approve the arms sales? NATO Secretary General George Robertson called on Ukraine on Wednesday to explain allegations of arms sales to Iraq and said relations between the alliance and Kiev had hit a "tricky moment". Even though they're not too closely related, Ukrainian sounds an awful lot like German... "I can tell you that there is a very serious atmosphere on this subject and some very serious questions still remain to be answered," Robertson told a news conference in Warsaw after a two-day meeting of NATO defence ministers. "Ukraine? Aren't they part of Russia? Oh, you mean not yet... I mean, not anymore..." The United States has alleged that Ukraine sold Iraq a sophisticated early warning system that tracks aircraft without giving itself away. Yep. I'd call that an unfriendly act... It has suspended more than $50 million in aid to Ukraine after saying it had authenticated a July 2000 recording of Kuchma giving the chief of his arms export agency the go-ahead to sell the surveillance system to Baghdad. Whoa! Got him on tape, did they? Ukrainian opposition leaders, who this month led some of the biggest anti-Kuchma protests since the country won independence from the Soviet Union more than 10 years ago, said they had won an important victory by forcing him to agree to talk. Kuchma's a bad boy. He had some promise, back when Ukraine was going its own way from the Soviet Union, but he settled into the president-for-life routine pretty quickly. He's a fellow whose time has gone... Posted by: Fred Pruitt 2002-09-25 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=7038 |