Former deputy says pro-presidential party run by bullies

 “Any attempt to express
an alternative point of view is considered treason,” he told Kyiv
Post in an interview on Sept. 16.

Markov, 40, was elected to
parliament last October through a majority constituency in Odesa, and
struck an agreement to cooperate with the Party of Regions even
before the end of the election campaign. On Sept. 12, the High
Administrative Court of Ukraine ruled that the Central Election
Commission has to cancel his mandate because of falsifications during
the elections and vote count.

Many consider this
decision controversial because the law only allows five days for
appealing election results. This case was the fourth since the last
election when members of parliament, known in Ukraine as deputies of
the Verkhovna Rada, lost their mandates though controversial court
decision.

Markov said he saw it
coming after he started to be approached by party leaders when he
disagreed with its concept of pension reform and refused to support
the law. He says dissidents like himself who disagree with the
official party line are treated ruthlessly.

“One deputy prime
minister attempted to buy me, another top manager of the faction
threatened,” he said. He said Party of Regions deputies receive an
incentive of $5,000 monthly for voting how they are told. He said he
personally received such offers from faction leadership, but refused
to give names.

But Oleksandr Yefremov,
Party of Regions faction leader, refuted the accusations. “I have
never forced him to vote for any bills. I was interested in his point
of view as with any deputy. There was never any talk that someone
must vote for something. I never actually talk to deputies like
this,” Yefremov was quoted by the Party of Regions website as
saying.

Markov insists that most
of the 207 deputies in the Party of Regions faction are unhappy
because the faction is run by force. “Either the business is
squeezed, or the mandate is canceled as in my case,” he says. He
plans to appeal the ruling in the European Court for Human Rights.

Markov said the latest
split in the party is over the official line of European integration
and pressure to vote for laws that would allow Ukraine to sign an
Association Agreement with the European Union this November. Earlier
this month, there was a nasty public spat around this issue in the
Party of Regions, and the president was even forced to preside over
an emergency faction meeting on Sept. 4 to quell dissent.

This was one of the first
visible splits in the ruling party, which consists of many varied
informal political and interest groups.

After the court ruling,
Markov, a right-wing hardliner and businessman who stands for closer
ties with Russia and Customs Union and wants to transform Ukraine
into a parliamentary republic, received a lot of support from the
opposition, including its imprisoned ex-Prime Minister Yulia
Tymoshenko.

In her letter released on
Sept. 14, opposition leader Tymoshenko called Markov “the new
leader of southern and eastern Ukraine” and said that repression
against him are going to keep the Regions faction in fear, subdued
and doing exactly what the president tells them. But Markov himself
disagrees – at least with the second part of her statement. He says
the bullying is a sign of great weakness.

“No regime based on fear
can last for a long time,” he says. “Closer to elections, the
probability of the collapse of the faction is 100 percent.” He said
that an overwhelming majority of the Party of Regions faction members
“are looking for dispersal fields.”

“They understand the
futility of this movement (the Party of Regions), but they do not
talk about it out loud,” Markov said.

Markov said many deputies
in his faction share his sentiment about the need to have alternative
points of view and be able to vote for laws based on these
convictions. In his case, it was joining the Customs Union with
Russia and Belarus that got him into trouble, he believes.

Markov said there was talk
about creation of a group of deputies within the Party of Regions to
promote this idea, and this threat was one of the reasons for
repressions against him personally.

He said what contributed
to his troubles was some of the comments he made in private
conversations over the telephone, which were tapped and quoted back
to him. He claimed all Party of Regions deputies are being tapped by
several secret services.

Asked whether he pursued
any legal actions against the tapping, Markov said he wrote a
parliament member’s inquiry to the Interior Ministry and the State
Security Service, and both denied the tapping.

“But the very mechanism,
the very attitude to the deputies is (appalling),” he says. “What
has it got in common with democracy, with parliamentarianism or even
with common sense?”

Kyiv Post deputy chief
editor Katya Gorchinskaya can be reached at
gorchinskaya@kyivpost.com.