Statement from headquarters of Ukrainian Canadian Congress (11/20/94)

CONTINUING REACTION TO "60 MINUTES" REPORT

Statement from headquarters of Ukrainian Canadian Congress

An open letter concerning the CBS "60 Minutes" report "The Ugly Face of Freedom" released by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress on November 12.

Dear Editor/Journalist/Concerned Citizen:

The time is long overdue for people of all cultural backgrounds, racial origins and religious beliefs to let their voices be heard loudly and clearly when they have been victimized by others because of ignorance, stupidity, political expediency, chauvinism or mean spiritedness. It is also time for people to quit accepting as fact that which is presented for our consumption by the media. Too often, the public has been fed misinformation or outright lies and accepted it as truth, believing the source to be credible.

One need look no further than some of the letters that have appeared recently in daily newspapers criticizing Canada's aid to Ukraine, because, as one Toronto writer stated, "Ukraine is gearing up once again to massacre its Jewish population." The letter in question appeared in the Toronto Star, which also featured an editorial page cartoon of a caricature of Adolf Hitler. What was the reliable source for the letter writer's damning allegation? The CBS program "60 Minutes," which on October 23, broadcast a segment called "The Ugly Face of Freedom." The producer was Jeffrey Fager, the reporter was Morley Safer.

What was the essence of the "60 Minutes" report? It depicted Ukrainians, with the focus on western Ukraine, as being extreme anti-Semites who wish to eradicate all Jews from Ukraine. The report alleges that this has come about since the collapse of the Soviet Union in a country with its finger poised on the nuclear button. It also painted a scenario that Ukrainians were willing collaborators and instruments of Nazi efforts to exterminate Jews during World War II.

The "60 Minutes" report will forever stand as a testament to irresponsible, inaccurate and incompetently researched reporting. One of the individuals interviewed on the program was Rabbi Yaakov Bleich of Kyyiv and Ukraine. Rabbi Bleich wrote [October 31] that "the broadcast did not convey the true state of affairs in Ukraine. I would also like to state unequivocally that my words were quoted out of the context that they were said... I must state that 'the beautiful face of freedom' in Ukraine is a lot more predominant than the ugly one. I feel that the CBS broadcast was unbalanced since it focused on a very small minority, ignoring the majority and the positive achievements of Ukraine in its three years of independence."

Rabbi David A. Lincoln of Park Avenue Synagogue in New York also wrote "60 Minutes" [October 25] and said that "Today when Russians send their children to Ukraine for safe keeping in times of danger, no good can come from distortions such as those portrayed in your program."

The tone of the "60 Minutes" program was startlingly vitriolic and some of its rhetoric went far beyond the bounds of responsible journalistic comment. Toward the end of the program, Morley Safer said: "The Church and government of Ukraine have tried to ease people's fears, suggesting that things are not as serious as they might appear; that Ukrainians, despite the allegations, are not genetically anti-Semitic." The function of such a disclaimer is to insinuate its opposite: Ukrainians, one is encouraged to think, are indeed irrational, perhaps genetic anti-Semites.

Such extravagant, even inflammatory rhetoric is inadmissible in professional journalism. The program's producers also indulge in the tendentious manipulation of images in order to present today's western Ukrainians in a negative light, and offer a highly distorted version of the historical record to support their thesis of unremitting Ukrainian hostility toward Jews.

During the Nazi occupation, more than 2 million Ukrainians were taken to Germany as slave laborers, and a total of more than 5,265,000 civilians and prisoners of war were killed by the Germans in Ukraine. Ukrainians, then, were among the foremost victims of Nazi occupation policies in Eastern Europe.

They were also, among the Nazis' most formidable military opponents. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was formed in 1942 and fought the Germans until their retreat from Ukraine, then continued the struggle against the Soviet occupation until the early 1950s. In addition, 4.5 million Ukrainians fought the invading Nazis in the ranks of the Red Army. Thus, the anti-Nazi credentials of the Ukrainian people were firmly established during World War II and have been detailed in many scholarly sources, including the recently completed Encyclopedia of Ukraine published by the University of Toronto Press. Only willful ignorance, inexcusable in journalistic research, can explain the omission of these facts.

"60 Minutes," in a litany that has become all too familiar from decades of Soviet propaganda, slandered past prominent Ukrainian political and military leaders as anti-Semites. Thus, according to Morley Safer, Symon Petliura is known to Jews "as the man who slaughtered 60,000 Jews in 1919." Although such hysterical claims used to be made, it would be difficult to find any Jewish scholar who would support them today. For a scholarly view of Petliura, the producers could have turned to such readily available sources as the Encyclopedia Judaica. Roman Shukhevych, commander of the UPA until his death in combat with Soviet troops in 1950, is also characterized as an anti-Semite, even though he has never been seriously accused of anti-Jewish activity. Nor do the "60 Minutes" producers seem to be aware that Stepan Bandera, whom they also call a murderous anti-Semite, was imprisoned in German prisons and concentration camps for having proclaimed an independent Ukrainian state in Lviv at the end of June 1941. Bandera's two brothers died in Auschwitz, a fact that also escaped the attention of CBS journalists.

The Waffen-SS Division Galizien, which the CBS film repeatedly and simple-mindedly characterizes as "fighting for Hitler," was formed in 1943, following the German defeat at Stalingrad. Ukrainian leaders in Galicia supported the division's formation, realizing that Ukrainians would need an organized military force to resist the Soviet reoccupation of western Ukraine as the Third Reich collapsed. Since the end of the war there have been repeated allegations that the division took part in German atrocities, but no credible evidence has ever been produced to support such charges. Canada's federal Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, formed in 1985 in response to charges that unprosecuted East European war criminals were residing in the country, investigated the division's record thoroughly and dismissed the allegations in its final report.

The program also suggests that the Ukrainian Catholic Church was a pro-Nazi institution. Any objective assessment would have to include the information that the Church's wartime head, Andrey Sheptytsky, sent a letter to Heinrich Himmler in early 1942 protesting Nazi persecution of the Jews. Metropolitan Sheptytsky personally provided refuge to Jews hiding from the Nazis and instructed his monasteries and convents to do the same.

In characterizing contemporary Jewish-Ukrainian relations, the program is at pains to suggest that the social climate is one of extreme hostility. The stabbing of an elderly Jewish couple in Transcarpathia is touted as evidence of general anti-Semitism. The Ukrainian word "Zhyd" (Jew), long established in western Ukrainian usage as a neutral term analogous to the standard Polish "Zyd" and Czech "Zid," is invariably translated in the CBS interviews as "kike." The ultra-nationalist UNA/UNSO is depicted as a party on the rise, although it elected only three of the scores of candidates whom it fielded in the 1994 elections. The Ukrainian government's prominent commemoration in 1991 of the Nazi atrocities 50 years previously at Babyn Yar, and its explicit condemnation of Ukrainian collaborators, are both ignored in the program, whose producers prefer to say that Ukraine "barely acknowledges its part in Hitler's Final Solution."

"60 Minutes" also did not offer any assessment of current Ukrainian government policy toward the Jews and other ethnic minorities in Ukraine. In November 1991, the Ukrainian Parliament unanimously adopted a declaration guaranteeing all citizens equal political, economic, social and cultural rights. In June 1992, it enacted a law "On National Minorities in Ukraine" that granted coequal status with Ukrainian to the languages of ethnic groups residing compactly on particular territories.

Leonid Kravchuk, who visited Israel while he was president of Ukraine and hosted senior Israeli officials in Kyyiv, repeatedly denounced all forms of xenophobia and ethnic chauvinism, including anti-Semitism, in Ukraine. In April 1993, he issued a decree creating a Ministry of Nationality Affairs and Migration. In October 1992, when Ukraine had been independent less than a year, Ilia Levitas, chairman of the Jewish Cultural Society of Ukraine, was able to announce at the first Jewish Congress of Ukraine in Kyyiv that a Jewish/Hebrew department had been established at the Kyyiv Pedagogical University, and that a number of Jewish schools, lyceums, theaters and other institutions had opened.

The CBS camera crew in Lviv although the program used the Russian designation Lvov - did not manage to find the city's monument to the Jewish victims of the Nazi occupation, dedicated in 1992. It failed to take note of the Jewish cultural associations and synagogues that have begun to function in buildings assigned by the Lviv city government since the end of Communist rule. In August 1994, the city government adopted legislation establishing a Jewish day school in the city. Lviv has a Jewish theater; a Jewish newspaper, Shofar, and a street renamed Staroyevreiska (Old Jewish Street). Recently, Lviv's mayor struck a committee to build a monument to the Jews killed at the Yaniv concentration camp.

Contemporary and historical Ukrainian-Jewish relations, as well as the crimes of Ukrainian collaborators with the Nazis, are legitimate objects of journalistic investigation. "The Ugly Face of Freedom" is by no means a professional journalistic examination of these topics, relying as it does on hyperbolie rhetorical devices, tendentious editing and incompetent historical research.

The public deserves to know whether the "60 Minutes" program was purposely broadcast on the same night as the president of Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma, arrived in Canada to begin a state visit which culminated five days later with the G-7 Conference in Winnipeg on Partnership for Economic Transformation in Ukraine. The program certainly harmed Ukraine's image at a time when it sought Western assistance to help reform its economy.

CBS and "60 Minutes" must apologize to the Ukrainian people, retract their story and provide equal time to produce a thoroughly researched and balanced account which is not defamatory or racist.

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