The Taipei Times
Sun, Jan 02, 2005
Ukraine celebrates a new beginning and hope for the future
AFP , KIEV
Sunday, Jan 02, 2005,Page 1
Advertising Ukraine looked with hope to the future yesterday at the onset of
the New Year after Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich resigned and all but
admitted losing last weekend’s historic presidential rerun vote.
In tumultuous scenes on Kiev’s main Independence Square, 100,000 people
packed into the city’s central point to ring in the New Year with victorious
opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko and Georgian President Mikhail
Saakashvili, who led a “rose” revolution in Tbilisi last year.
Speaking before the crowd as fireworks lit the night sky, Saakashvili hailed
Ukraine’s “orange revolution” that brought Yushchenko to power as “a triumph
of good over evil.”
Yushchenko — the declared winner of last Sunday’s presidential poll — took
center stage to reiterate that “Ukrainians had been independent for 13
years, but now they are free.”
Yanukovich resigned from his post and said that his appeals over the Dec. 26
vote were unlikely to be granted, but stopped short of conceding defeat in
the poll, which would have brought Ukraine’s six-week election saga to an
end.
“I have made a decision and am formally submitting my resignation,”
Yanukovich said in a televised address. “I find it impossible to occupy any
post in a government headed by these authorities.”
“Concerning the election results, we are keeping up the fight but I don’t
have much hope for a just decision from the central election commission and
the supreme court,” he said.
Yanukovich repeated his assertion that “external forces” were responsible
for his defeat in the Dec. 26 vote.
But he got no support from Ukraine’s outgoing President Leonid Kuchma, who
called on the nation during his New Year address to “accept the democratic
choice” made in the presidential poll.
“In 2005 Ukraine will have a new president and the whole Ukraine must accept
this democratic choice as its own — because this man will need your
support,” he said without naming the election’s declared winner, Yushchenko.
Kuchma spoke as tens of thousands of people massed in Independence Square,
the epicenter of the “orange revolution” where shortly before midnight,
pro-West Yushchenko and Saa-kashvili basked in the success of their
respective peaceful uprisings against Soviet-era regimes.
Yushchenko’s “orange revolution” marked the second year in a row that
peaceful protests headed by a Western-leaning leader swept out a
Russia-friendly regime in an ex-Soviet nation.
Moscow has accused the US of fomenting the unrest in order to install allies
in its strategic backyard, charges that Washington has denied.
But opposition movements in authoritarian-leaning former Soviet republics
and Russia have hailed the peaceful uprisings and in the heat of the
“orange” demonstrations, Belarussians, Armenians, Azeris and Russians
mingled with Ukrainian protesters in central Kiev.
Yushchenko mounted 17 days of mass protests after he refused to concede
defeat to Yanukovich in a Nov. 21 runoff because of fraud.
The supreme court annulled the election due to massive ballot-rigging and
ordered a historic rerun vote, which Yushchenko won by more than 2.2 million
votes.
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