Ukraine celebrates Orange Revolution

KIEV - Ukraine's dismissed prime minister seized the limelight from President Viktor Yushchenko a year after Orange Revolution protests with an electrifying appeal to join forces in next year's parliamentary election.

Both Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko, the premier he sacked in September, told supporters in Kiev's Independence Square that only a united team of reformers could win the March 2006 election to a parliament led by a prime minister with expanded powers.

But Tymoshenko's impassioned 20-minute address, delivered without notes, clearly won over a crowd of well more than 100,000 marking last year's mass protests which helped propel the president to victory in the re-run of a rigged poll.

As snow fell on the square, Tymoshenko, tears welling in her eyes, told the crowd: "I am certain that just as we supported Viktor Yushchenko in the presidential election, we must now unite to elect a prime minister who will embody everything we fought for.

"I want to dismiss all the rumours that it is Tymoshenko versus Yushchenko. This cannot be so, because this is the president that you and I helped bring to power. We did it together."

Yushchenko looked distinctly uncomfortable, issuing a similar call for unity at the end of an hour-long speech interrupted periodically by hecklers shouting "Yulia, Yulia!"

- REUTERS