Criminal case opened against former Ukrainian Cabinet officials.

KIEV, April 29 (Itar-Tass) - The Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office
(GPU) opened a criminal case against former Cabinet officials over the
violations of budget law.
Prosecutors checked the compliance with the norms of the law on the
use of part of 2009 revenue from the sale of emission quotas, in
accordance with Article 17 of the Kyoto Protocol to the UN framework
convention on climate change.
A pre-investigation check found that former Cabinet officials and the
Finance Ministry had passed regulatory enactments contrary to the
requirements on the law on state budget-2009. The State Treasury then
altered the target purpose of the money in the state budget's special
foundation, which had come from the sale of emission quotas worth 2.3
billion hrivnas (some 300 million dollars).
Criminal proceedings were instituted over "violations of the budget
law and abuse of office position, which resulted in grave consequences for
the interests of the state."
On Wednesday, Ukrainian Prime Minister Nikolai Azarov stated at the
Cabinet meeting that the former Prime Minister, Yulia Timoshenko, "should
face criminal charges for the misuse of budget money in 2009."
"Actions by the previous government caused a 100-bmillion-hrivna (12.5
billion dollars) damage to the state," Azarov said. It is the
law-enforcement bodies who should review the documents on the
implementation of budget 2009 in the first place, he added.
Former First Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Turchinov branded
Azarov's initiative to hold Timoshenko responsible as "reprisals against
the Opposition.
"All these statements are a smoke screen, whose purpose is to launch
reprisals against the political opponents, on the strength of figures that
don't make sense," said Turchinov, one of the leaders of the Bloc of Yulia
Timoshenko (BYuT).


.PACE calls for not politicizing 1930 famine in Soviet Union.

STRASBOURG, April 29 (Itar-Tass) - The Parliamentary Assembly of the
Council of Europe on Thursday called for not politicizing the events of
the 1930s, when a large famine gripped many republics of the former USSR.
In the resolution commemorating the victims of the Great Famine
(Holodomor), the Assembly called upon the politicians in all Council of
Europe member-states to "abstain from any attempts to exert political
influence on historians and prejudge the outcome of independent scientific
research."
The report by PACE chairman Mevlut Causoglu, Turkey, "calls on
historians of all countries of the former Soviet Union, which suffered
during the Great Famine, as well as historians from other countries, to
conduct joint independent research programs in order to establish the
full, un-biased and un-politicized truth about this human tragedy, and to
make it public."
It welcomed "the important work already done in Belarus, Kazakhstan,
the Republic of Moldova, Russia and in particular in Ukraine in order to
ease access to archives, and calls on the competent authorities of these
countries to open up all their archives and facilitate access thereto to
all researchers, including from other states."
"The events of the 1930s were one of the most tragic pages in the
history of the peoples of the former Soviet Union was the mass famine in
grain-growing areas of the country which started in the late 1920s and
culminated in 1932-33.The totalitarian Stalinist regime in the former
Soviet Union led to horrifying human rights violations which deprived
millions of people of their right to life...millions of innocent people in
Belarus, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Russia and Ukraine, which were parts of the
Soviet Union, lost their lives. The mass starvation was caused by cruel
and deliberate actions and policies of the Soviet regime," the Assembly
said.
The resolution acknowledged that Ukraine suffered the most, but in
Kazakhstan and Russia's grain producing regions millions died as well.
"In absolute figures, it is estimated that the population of Russia
paid the heaviest death toll as a result of the Soviet agricultural
policies," the document said.
During the discussion, the Assembly rejected all the amendments
calling to recognize Holodomor the genocide against the Ukrainian people.
Moscow has been opposed to such interpretation.
Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich supported the Russian
delegation. In his speech in Strasbourg earlier this week, he said it was
wrong and unfair to recognize the great famine as the genocide against the
Ukrainian people. "It was a common tragedy of peoples within the Soviet
Union. These were the consequences of Stalin's totalitarian regime,"
Yanukovich stated.
A year ago, the Assembly supported Ukraine's motion to consider the
great famine of the 1930s in Ukraine. It was planned to draw a document
recognizing Holodomor a genocide. Russia criticized the interpretation,
suggesting instead to pool documents and commemorate the memory of all the
victims of the great famine.
The famine of 1931-1933 devastated many districts of the Russian
republic within the former Soviet Union: the Volga region, the Central
Black Earth Region, the North Caucasus, the Ural region, the Crimea, part
of western Siberia, as well as districts in Kazakhstan, Ukraine and
Belarus.
-0-myz