Conference reflects on 20 years of Ukrainian human rights activism (01/05/97)

Conference reflects on 20 years of Ukrainian human rights activism

by Irene Jarosewich

NEW YORK - Twenty years ago, a small group of determined individuals gathered together with a pledge to unveil the hypocrisy of the Soviet system, to reveal its oppressive grip on the lives of its citizens and the brutality with which it treated its opponents. From a modest beginning in the Kyiv apartment of Mykola Rudenko, the Ukrainian Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords became an internationally recognized human rights organization.

Founded on November 9, 1976, the mandate of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group (UHG) was to provide information of human rights abuses by Soviet authorities, in violation of the 1975 Helsinki Accords, a security and cooperation agreement to which the government of the USSR was signatory.

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the founding of the UHG, its External Representation in the United States organized a conference held on December 15, 1996, at the Shevchenko Scientific Society in New York. Speakers included Nina Strokata-Karavanska, one of the founders of UHG; R.L. Chomiak, a journalist who tracked the activities of the Ukrainian human rights movement from the West; Myroslav Marynovych, a co-founder of the UHG and now a professor at the Pedagogical Institute in Drohobych, Ukraine; and Valeriy Pavlov, a Ukrainian cinematographer.

The conference was organized and directed by Nadia Svitlychna, who also introduced Raisa Rudenko, wife of the group's first chairman, as well as Andriy Grigorenko, son of the late Petro Grigorenko, also one of the founders of the UHG and its representative in Moscow. The voice of the late Oksana Meshko, another founding member of the UHG was heard from an archival tape as she read an appeal to the World Congress of Free Ukrainians.

There was consensus among the speakers that the now-popular adage "Ukraine's independence was achieved without bloodshed" is untrue - and even immoral. Ukraine's independence was not obtained over a weekend; it was obtained over many decades with many lives lost and ruined. Intended as a positive statement, "without bloodshed" in fact belittles and obscures the sacrifices of countless people.

Ms. Strokata-Karavanska, who spoke about the importance of historian Mykhailo Melnyk's work on the formation of dissident thought, reminded the audience that nowadays everyone accepts as an obvious truth that the independence of Ukraine was a necessary precondition for the collapse of the Soviet monolith. Yet, as recently as 10 years ago, this was a radical position in the Soviet Union, punishable by incarceration.

For years, the situation in Ukraine, according to Mr. Chomiak, could be compared to trees falling in the woods: with no one to hear, was there sound? Ukrainian human rights activism was reminiscent of trees falling in dense, silent woods.

In particular, the 1960s, the period of "Shestydesiatnyky" activism and subsequent repression was a long silence. Information about arrests, detentions and conditions in the camps rarely made it to the West. Even when information reached Western correspondents based in Moscow, if the correspondents could not confirm information, then it often remained unreported.

However, the determined activism of UHG members and supporters in Ukraine, as well as support from the Ukrainian diaspora worldwide focused attention on human rights abuses in Ukraine in the late 1970s and during the 1980s. Information provided by UHG gave Western governments a base from which to confront Soviet authorities.

Ms. Strokata-Karavanska also reminded the audience that external forces, such as the Western military build-up, are often cited as causes for the collapse of the Soviet Union, but that the role of internal opposition has all but been ignored.

Mr. Chomiak concurred and remarked that, whereas in previous decades, there was no information in the West about human rights activism in Ukraine, today, in Ukraine itself, the history of the internal opposition movements and their activists have been almost forgotten.

Mr. Pavlov elicited murmurs of disbelief, resignation and a few chuckles from audience as he described the establishment of a memorial museum at the former site of one the most notorious camps - Perm 36 in the Urals.

The Russian organization Memorial had undertaken the project to build a museum to honor dissidents at the site, however, the site had been disassembled. So, in order to accurately portray the dehumanizing conditions, the organization now must raise private funds to recover and re-install listening devices, infra-red sensors, bars, prisoner garb, barbed wire, etc.

Mr. Pavlov mentioned that the members of the group actively solicit input from their Ukrainian compatriots since it is widely recognized among former Soviet dissidents that more than 50 percent of former political prisoners were from Ukraine.

Ms. Svitlychna commented that not only were most of the political prisoners from Ukraine, but that of the former Helsinki watch groups, Ukraine's was one of the strongest and had numerous "external" members and supporters in other republics and in the West.

The youngest member of the UHG, Myroslav Marynovych, is presently in the United States on a Pew Fellowship at Columbia University. Mr. Marynovych commented on the strong activism of religious groups in the human rights movement. Activists from many religious denominations, Greek-Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, Jews and Muslims all found a voice through the Ukrainian Helsinki Group.

According to Mr. Marynovych, in retrospect, the Western understanding of human rights as particular to the individual was not fully understood in Ukraine, even among the dissidents. The "individual," according to Mr. Marynovych is still a very "western Protestant" concept.

Human rights activism in Ukraine, as well as in other republics, was based to a large degree on some sort of group or collective identity - either religious, such as Jews and Evangelicals, or national, or ethnic. Individual rights were still viewed through the prism of a collective - the right to be a Crimean Tatar, for example, or a Greek-Catholic.

The value of an individual as a moral or social entity apart from any collective context is only now beginning to be understood in Ukraine, and in some cases is met with resistance. Very often this resistance comes from the same religous, national and ethnic groups that were integral to the human rights struggle, as the competition for the hearts, minds and souls of Ukrainians continues.

According to both Mr. Marynovych and Mrs. Rudenko, in various ways, opposition movements in Ukraine must continue. "In many instances," said Mrs. Rudenko, "communists are, for all practical purposes, still in power." "The administrative shadow of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic continues on the territory of an independent Ukraine," concluded Mr. Marynovych, "and there still must be dissidents to throw off the rotting shell of the old system."

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