EDITORIAL: Forum: more of the same (10/05/97)

EDITORIAL

Forum: more of the same

Reflecting on the second World Forum of Ukrainians on August 21-24, Dr. Dmytro Cipywnyk, president of the Ukrainian World Congress (UWC), told The Weekly: "We went in apprehensive, we were certainly glad to meet Ukrainians from all parts of the world, but now there's still a considerable amount of work to be done to get everyone on the same page." From all appearances, this assessment is very optimistic.

Just prior to these events, it was noted in this space that a raft of questions and concerns hung in the air - the Ukrainian World Coordinating Council's (UWCC) cavalier attitude about its by-laws, matters of potential conflict of interest, differing conceptions of relations between Ukraine and its diasporas (Eastern and Western) among the various stakeholders, etc., etc. If anything, these problems have been compounded.

A serious breach in views came to light when Western delegates pushed to ensure that the composition of Ukraine's delegates be more directly representative of local non-governmental organizations. UWCC President Ivan Drach rejected the approach, insisting on his right to select Ukraine's nominees to the body's executive council. "We have about 600 NGOs in Ukraine," Mr. Drach said, "but we aren't ready to function as an umbrella body for them, nor are they ready to work in concert with one."

Mr. Drach is seeking to completely revise the by-laws, a subject of much heated discussion prior to the Forum, and since Mr. Drach was re-elected for another five-year term as UWCC president, we can now look forward to another round of that debate.

Meanwhile, the skepticism of Ukrainians in Europe and the Eastern diaspora that one world coordinating body of Ukrainians will function effectively has deepened. Jurij Rejt, chairman of the national council of the Association of Ukrainians in Poland and president of the European Congress of Ukrainians, opposes the creation of an "artificial worldwide organization full of bureaucracy," and believes that the UWCC should function only as a clearinghouse of information on the activities of Ukrainian organizations worldwide. Oleksander Rudenko-Desniak, the current head of the Association of Ukrainians in Russia, was critical of the Forum's work, saying that it had failed in its mandate by not following through on commitments made to the Eastern diaspora at the first World Forum of Ukrainians held in 1992, notably in supporting the creation of Ukrainian-language schools in Russia.

They're not alone. Askold Lozynskyj, president of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, recently told The Weekly that neither the UWC nor the UWCC are what the world's Ukrainians need in the long run, but that "the UWC must remain because the UWCC has been a failure" in acting as an umbrella body for Ukrainian NGOs and in speaking up for Ukrainians worldwide.

At a working meeting of the UWC's presidium held in Toronto on September 26, Dr. Cipywnyk noted that the Forum's resolutions, as read by Mykhailo Horyn on August 23 and published in the Kyiv-based weekly Visti z Ukrainy of September 11, "were not resolutions; they were a state of the country address, not a series of directives for future action, as required. [The text] describes everything, includes everything, but in such vague and indeterminate form that no committee or commission that could be struck would know what to begin with."

Paradoxically, for such an all-inclusive document, Dr. Cipywnyk pointed out, "it contains nothing about the UWCC as a formal umbrella body ... and, oddly, no mention of the UWC, which is allegedly its major Western diaspora partner."

Some have ventured that while the UWCC might founder as an institution under Mr. Drach's continued leadership, there was little prospect that any grievous collateral damage would be suffered by the diasporas (or groups in Ukraine) as a result.

Hardly an exciting prospect, but clearly, given the re-election of Mr. Drach during the Forum in Kyiv, everyone has decided to wait and see.

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