LETTERS TO THE EDITOR (08/09/98)

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

A critical view of IMF's role

Dear Editor:

Frustration with the IMF and its increasingly political agenda is justified. After rushing to Congress and other patrons for supplemental appropriations to help fund the Indonesian bail-out last winter, the IMF suddenly unveiled $11.2 billion in aid to Russia, with $4.8 billion to be disbursed immediately. The World Bank will supplement this with another $1.7 billion.

Over the past year, Ukraine struggled to meet 87 conditions imposed on it by the IMF. On June 15, at a meeting in Kyiv, economist Jeffrey Sachs, a Harvard expert on Eastern European macroeconomics, called for the IMF to adopt attainable goals for Ukraine and urged a softer position. The IMF withheld $2.5 billion in year-old loan commitments and last month declined to release $500 million to help the struggling nation get started with some reforms.

Ukraine obtained the support of the presidents of Poland and Lithuania, who were concerned about regional contagion if the struggling republic were to fail.

Now the IMF complains that its liquidity ratio is running short and it needs more money itself. The IMF's position of favoring more powerful national administrations seems related to its own interests in additional funding rather than its stated objective of helping needy nations. An assessment of its positions versus its interests is warranted before we agree to a future bail-out of the IMF itself.

Paul Thomas Rabchenuk
Marblehead, Mass.

Documentaries set record straight

Dear Editor:

A letter from Roman Sawycky published in The Ukrainian Weekly on July 5, complains about the Ukrainian film makers who have made movies over the past 15 years that dwell on tragedy. He wants them to produce quiet love stories with "warmth and brightness." His letter was prompted by an announcement of the showing of a documentary about the Stalinist terror. Mr. Sawycky reminds me of Walter Duranty of The New York Times who hid the Ukrainian famine, thinking that it was better to write warm love stories about Stalin rather report news of the widespread state-enforced starvation of millions.

Would Mr. Sawycky tell the Jews to forget about the Holocaust and the people of Tibet to give up their land? Would he tell the Irish to forget their famine and the Armenians and Cambodians not to remember their slaughters?

It is only by knowing our history, especially the sufferings of our forebears that we can fully understand who we are as a people. For centuries, but especially this century, the people of Ukraine have been oppressed and their sufferings have been hidden. We have been libeled right up to the present day by others via malicious and inaccurate portrayals.

If Mr. Sawycky wants love stories, there are many Hollywood productions such as "Titanic" that meet his needs. Maybe someday down the road, when Ukraine becomes a truly free and self-sustaining society, we can make warm movies. Unfortunately, for the present we as a people are bound to properly document our tragic history and set the record straight. That is why our film makers, men and women of courage, must fully set out the conditions that caused so many of us to leave Ukraine to take refuge beyond its borders. Let us congratulate these Ukrainians for their terrific work and encourage them to produce many more historical documentaries.

Maria Wozniuk Connolly
Falmouth, Mass.

Re: transliteration and transcription

Dear Editor:

It is with considerable interest that I read Dr. S. Zmurkevych's letter (May 24) in which he recommends the Library of Congress (LoC) romanization system. He addresses a problem with which I had to deal in one form or another throughout my working life, and a few years ago brought me to a conference at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv.

The issue impinges on two related, but very different questions: transcription and transliteration. The former is an attempt to reproduce the sounds of one language in the alphabet of another. The latter replicates the letters of one alphabet with those of another - a very fine distinction but a very important one. For example, Russian ÏÓÂ"Ó might be transcribed in English as mayevo, but it is transliterated moego.

Being a librarian by training, it is hardly surprising that Dr. Zmurkevych suggests the widespread adoption of the LoC romanization system for Ukrainian. The librarians at that institution have developed an excellent device for transliterating Ukrainian, or for that matter any Cyrillic text into the Latin alphabet.

Unfortunately, to work adequately, the LoC system must use various diacritical marks to differentiate Cyrillic letters in Latin transliteration. These diacritical marks appear on a LoC card, and even on the screens of sophisticated electronic cataloguing systems, but do not appear on non-specialized typewriters, and require costly additional typefaces and subroutines on computers. As a result, most authors simply dispense with them.

In the majority of instances, this poses no great problem. òÂ,"ÂÌÍÓ becomes Shevchenko, and î¦ÌÍÓ comes out Franko. But how are we to read the romanized name Izhyk - is it ßÊËÍ or ÊËÍ? Is zhaha Ê¦"¦ or Á"¦"¦? Many other examples could be cited. In the modified (that is, without diacritical marks) LoC romanization system for Ukrainian, the Latin i must stand for three letters: i, ª or È. Not very accurate.

Another agency of the U.S. government, the Board on Geographic Names, has come up with a more practical romanization system. It narrows the gap between transcription and transliteration somewhat by transliterating the letters , È, ª, and þ as ye, y, yi, yu and ya respectively. This system is also imperfect because y can stand for either Ë or È. Furthermore, it produces strange-looking spellings like Kyyiv and Kolomyya. (But then, we don't seem to mind the spelling Omar Khayyam.) This system is used by librarians in Great Britain and even the New York Public Library.

As for me, I have chosen the Slavist system and try to work with it the best I can.

Andrij Homjatkevyc, D. Phil.
Edmonton

The writer is associate professor, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta.