Lviv cemetery site of second commemoration (11/08/98)

Lviv cemetery site of second commemoration

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

LVIV - While Ukraine's President Leonid Kuchma was addressing this city's residents on the 80th anniversary of the birth of the Western Ukrainian National Republic, saying that its legacy is connected in a continuum with today's independent Ukraine, protesters from the far right held their own commemoration and called for an end to a government controlled by former leaders of the Soviet Union.

The demonstrators also marched to the Lychakiv Cemetery in Lviv, where before a newly erected memorial they commemorated the Ukrainian soldiers who freed Lviv from a Polish occupying force. Not coincidentally, the memorial stands at the gate to a controversial Polish war cemetery that honors the Polish soldiers who died in the conflict.

In the first part of the daylong protests, nearly 1,000 members and supporters of the Ukrainian National Assembly (UNA), the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists (CUN) and the Social-Nationalist Party congregated near the site where the president was speaking, carrying aloft the Ukrainian blue-and-yellow banner, as well as their own black-and-red revolutionary colors.

The throng that gathered included a large number of youth, as well as elderly people, many of them former members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which during World War II did battle with both the Red Army and the Nazis in western Ukraine. They listened to speakers talk of the need to take Ukraine from a leadership that they insisted still consists largely of former members of the Communist Party and those who for decades helped oppress Ukraine's independence.

"Let today be the beginning of a new phase in Ukraine's history, one that centers on Ukraine's interests," said National Deputy Slava Stetsko, the leader of the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists.

Another leader of CUN, Yurii Antoniak, told The Weekly that today's government does not look out for the interests of Ukrainians. "The government today is a post-Communist nomenklatura that upholds the interest of the northern neighbor," said Mr. Antoniak. "We are demanding the immediate removal of the government. We want a Ukrainian nationalist government that will uphold the interests of Ukraine, the Ukrainian people, the Ukrainian family, here and over the world."

After the hourlong demonstration, held under a steady drizzle, the crowd broke into two entourages, one to go to a cemetery of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen who died in the Ukrainian-Polish war that followed the declaration of the WUNR on November 1, 1918, and the other to a new memorial at the Lychakiv Cemetery, aside which lies a cemetery for Poland's war dead, called the Polish Pantheon.

Much controversy has surrounded the pantheon because of inscriptions on a memorial at the cemetery's entrance, which dedicates the site to "the defenders of Lviv."

Last month, after the Lviv City Council approved a resolution that calls for any anti-Ukrainian inscriptions to be removed, members of the UNA marched to the Polish Pantheon with copies of the resolution in hand, and attempted to implement the decree on their own.

On November 1, with less than a hundred of the demonstrators that had gathered in the city center still in tow, the head of the UNA Lviv Oblast organization, Andriy Shkil, led a commemoration of the Ukrainian-Polish war at the site immediately adjoining the Polish war cemetery.

"If the memorial next to us has the inscription 'defenders of Lviv,' what does that make this - a memorial to the occupiers?" queried Mr. Shkil during a short program.

He assured the crowd that by the time the 80th anniversary of the union of the WUNR with the Ukrainian National Republic in Kyiv is celebrated on January 22, 1999, that inscription at the Polish cemetery would be gone. "Then the cemetery next to this will be one of people who fought and died for their own beliefs," he explained.

Ukraine marks 80th anniversary of Western Ukrainian National Republic

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