Friday, February 7, 2014

Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine : Removing advertising videos ,a screen on the Passage mall is used to defy the government. in response to a draconian law against dissent









Launch media viewer
The European Union flag outside the Passage mall in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, a gesture of revolt in a Russian-speaking region. Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times

DNEPROPETROVSK, Ukraine — As violence flared late last month in Kiev after Parliament approved a draconian law against dissent, two of the richest men in this industrial city 300 miles to the east of the Ukrainian capital met in an expensive Italian restaurant that they own and made a fateful decision.
The men, Hennadiy Korban and his partner Borys Filatov, decided to remove advertising videos featuring glamorous models from a large outdoor screen at an upscale shopping mall called Passage and replace them with a live broadcast of raucous anti-government protests at Independence Square in Kiev.
They also ordered their local properties to hoist the flags of the European Union and Ukraine, a gesture of open revolt in a Russian-speaking region where economic and political power have traditionally been united in looking more to Moscow than to Europe for guidance.

Retribution, or at least some extraordinarily bad luck, swiftly followed. Hours after the flags went up on Jan. 25, all three of their company’s shopping malls in Dnepropetrovsk lost their electricity, and panicked shoppers scrambled through the dark for the exits.


Launch media viewer
A screen on the Passage mall in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, is used to defy the government. Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times

The video screen outside went dark, silencing the antigovernment chants from Kiev and, at least on the surface, restoring Dnepropetrovsk as a bastion of calm support for Ukraine’s embattled president, Viktor F. Yanukovych.
Caught in a titanic tug of war for influence between Russia and the West, Ukraine is also being tugged in opposite directions by the forces facing off at the Passage mall in Dnepropetrovsk. In an economy dominated by a relative few wielding enormous wealth, the outcome of the struggle could well hinge on how many other businesspeople make the same switch as Mr. Korban and Mr. Filatov and join the street in rejecting Mr. Yanukovych’s tilt toward Russia.
The defection of two provincial businessmen — motivated as much by resentment of the strong-arm tactics of rivals in league with the government as by lofty ideals — will not tip the balance of power in Kiev or even here in this city of more than a million people, its economy dominated by huge Soviet-era factories like Yuzhmash, a rocket maker still owned by the state.
But it underscores how a protest movement that the government dismisses as the work of nationalist extremists from the country’s west has reached into Mr. Yanukovych’s political power base in the east and is even eroding the loyalties of those who have thrived under him.
And it shows how, for all their differences, the disaffected moguls and the protesters are driven by a deep frustration with what they see as the country’s lawless law-enforcement system and ubiquitous corruption. Both camps call for not just democracy but for a more “normal,” European-style government with transparent institutions, secure property rights and an impartial justice system.
Fearing arrest, Mr. Korban and Mr. Filatov fled Ukraine for Israel last week. A Dnepropetrovsk judge ordered on Jan. 29 that Mr. Korban be detained and interrogated as a witness in connection with a previously dormant investigation of a 2012 murder.
According to the pair’s lawyers, state security officers then raided the premises of their accountant, saying they were looking for bombs or other evidence of terrorism. They found none, said one of the lawyers, Oleksandr Sanzhara.
The businessmen do not regret their decision. “We decided that we had to do something as citizens, to send a signal that not all businessmen are afraid,” said Mr. Korban, an aggressive local tycoon whose interests include a string of hotels, three big shopping centers and stakes in many of Ukraine’s biggest companies.
“We want to live in Europe, not in an outpost of the Russian empire,” added Mr. Korban, 43, speaking by phone from Israel.
The president ignited the current turmoil in November when he abruptly spurned a sweeping trade and political accord with the European Union and instead went to Moscow to secure a $15 billion credit deal, which has since been suspended.
Ukraine’s biggest business moguls, known as oligarchs, have so far mostly hedged their bets, with the exception of Petro Poroshenko, a shipping, confectionery and agriculture magnate whose television station, Channel 5, has been broadcasting around the clock from Independence Square.

Read More Here
Enhanced by Zemanta

No comments:

Post a Comment

Hello and thank you for visiting my blog. Please share your thoughts and leave a comment :)