More than a year after Ukraine President Viktor Yushchenko ingested a massive dose of dioxin, mystery still shrouds the poisoning that covered his movie-star handsome face with scars and blisters.
”I am a man like any other. I’d like to wake up with a different face,” Yushchenko told reporters recently. ”But I know that tomorrow and the day after tomorrow it will be the same. Only afterwards will it change. Psychologically, it’s not easy to live because I’m not used to it.”
The poisoning of the popular opposition leader in the middle of last year’s presidential election campaign played a key role during the ”orange revolution” protests that he launched against the entrenched regime after it had rigged the results of the ballot.
To his supporters, Yushchenko’s scarred and bloated face served as a potent symbol of that regime during the protests that captured headlines both at home and abroad.
But nearly 10 months after Yushchenko assumed power, how and by whom he was poisoned still remains unknown.
Yushchenko fell ill a day after having dinner with a former chief of Ukraine’s SBU security service on September 5 2004. His condition steadily deteriorated, and five days later he was rushed in critical condition to a clinic in Austria where he remained for nearly three weeks.
The doctors there were initially baffled at what had caused the swelling of his liver, pancreas and intestines, and only in December announced that Yushchenko had ingested a massive dose of dioxin, a toxin that can cause cancer and death.
Yushchenko had been comfortably leading his election rival, then prime minister Viktor Yanukovich, when he fell sick. His absence from the stump weeks before the first round of voting saw Yanukovich — with the state media’s overt help — make up a double-digit gap in opinion polls and actually pull ahead.
Well before the final diagnosis from the Vienna clinic, Yushchenko accused the former regime of being behind the incident.
”What happened to me was linked to a political regime in Ukraine,” he told Ukrainian lawmakers, who were visibly shocked at his changed appearance, days after returning home from the Austrian clinic.
”I believe now more and more that what happened to me was an act of a settling of political scores,” Yushchenko said in early December. ”The aim was to kill me.”
During and immediately after the ”orange revolution”, speculations regularly appeared in the press about the poisoning, including one that Russian secret services were behind the affair. But although Yushchenko at first hinted that the poison had come from abroad, he later said that the laboratory that produced it was in fact in the Ukraine.
Yushchenko and his allies blame the lack of progress in the case on the former prosecutor general, Svyatoslav Piskun, whom the president fired in mid-October.
”I spoke with the ex-prosecutor general on this topic many times and he assured me that everything was done as it should have been,” Oleg Rybachuk, Yushchenko’s chief of staff, told Agence France Presse. ”He simply lied.”
Piskun has denied such charges.
”That is all lies and gibberish by those who want to remove me,” he told reporters after his firing.
Meanwhile, Yushchenko — who insists that he is in excellent health — continues to undergo regular tests in a Swiss clinic and recently submitted fresh samples for the criminal investigation of the poisoning.
”I hope that with the change of the prosecutor general, the group that is looking into this will be seriously changed,” he said in an interview. ”Wherever the trail leads, the prosecutors should issue their verdict.” ‒ Sapa-AFP