LETTER TO THE EDITOR (01/24/99)

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Is the UWC still relevant?

Dear Editor:

I read with interest The Ukrainian Weekly report of December 20, 1998, on the seventh conclave of the Ukrainian World Congress (UWC) and have also followed your recent reports on The Year 2020 Conference and other events that deal with the future of the Ukrainian diaspora, particularly in North America.

It is perplexing to me why the Ukrainian diaspora still needs bodies such as the UWC. The statement by the new president, Askold Lozynskyj, that the UWC must "function as a kind of government which defends the interests of the 20 million Ukrainians who live outside Ukraine, because the government of Ukraine is presently too weak to do it," is, in my view, preposterous.

First, this constant exaggeration of the size of the Ukrainian diaspora doesn't do much good to the credibility of UWC or other Ukrainian organizations who often bring up these inflated, self-serving numbers.

Second, the budget adopted by UWC ($240,000 Canadian or $150,000 U.S.) is so tiny that it will hardly pay for anything other than a small office, a secretary and perhaps the travel expenses of the UWC president. Maybe the Ukrainian government is weak, but it certainly has a bigger budget. By the way, at this rate, the bail money that Mr. Lazarenko paid in Switzerland, would have been sufficient to cover 20 years of the UWC's operations. Also, if one considers that a minute-long commercial on the Super Bowl telecast costs over $1 million one realizes how insignificant the UWC budget is and how little can be achieved with it.

Moreover, a careful reading of your report shows that despite the glitzy arrangements at the Toronto meeting, there was not much said about the UWC's accomplishments. In fact, I could find no reference to a concrete achievement of any kind in the past few years.

If the UWC is trying to emulate the World Jewish Congress (WJC) then it is not succeeding very well. The WJC has recently obtained from the Swiss banks hundreds of millions of dollars for Holocaust victims and their descendants, and is now going after the various German companies that employed slave labor during World War II. Also, the billionaire president of the WJC, Edgar Bronfman, was bragging sometime ago that if needed, he could arrange a meeting with the president of the United States within 24 hours. I wonder if the president of UWC could do the same. The point is one needs a lot of money to have that kind of influence or be a president of a real government; I am sure that if President Leonid Kuchma wanted to have a telephone conference with the president or the vice-president of the United States he could arrange it fairly quickly.

So, what does the UWC do? How many governments did it lobby on behalf of Ukrainians or Ukrainian interests in the past few years? How many legal actions is it pursuing in support of Ukrainians in the diaspora? What exactly does it do apart from "directing considerable opprobrium at Mr. [Ivan] Drach"? Is it merely a link between various Ukrainian organizations in several countries? If so, it seems to me that the Internet could probably do a better job - and essentially at no cost.

I also very much dislike this pompous name "Ukrainian World Congress" (we are the world!). I made an Internet search on Yahoo! and found 126 sites for world congresses of all kinds, going from those pertaining to archeology, cancer and football and ending with those relating to gays and lesbians. There were only three "national" world congresses, namely the World Jewish Congress, the Croatian World Congress and the World Sindhi Congress. Mercifully, the UWC was not among them, probably because its website is not yet in operation.

I understand that we needed the World Congress of Free Ukrainians when Ukraine was an enslaved nation. It provided a voice that somewhat counterbalanced the falsehoods of the Soviet Ukrainian republic and the USSR. Now, however, when Ukraine is a free and independent country, such a voice is no longer required. In this regard, I very much agree with the statement made by the new president of the Ukrainian American Coordinating Council, Ihor Gawdiak, as reported in the same issue of The Ukrainian Weekly, to the effect that in the future we, in the diaspora, will be working more as individuals "who as persons in position of responsibility can assist Ukraine."

I think it is time for us to shed many of these umbrella organizations and to become like the diasporas of other normal nations, such as the Irish, the Italians, the Greeks, etc., who still retain to some extent their identity without all these world congresses that more often than not lead to bickering and disunity, rather than useful action. In any event, an organization that no one wants to lead, and whose president is almost forcibly selected at the last moment, seems to be obsolete and of very questionable value.

George Primak
Pierrefonds, Quebec

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