Kuchma enters the fray over minority language rights (08/06/00)

Kuchma enters the fray over minority language rights

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - Ukraine's President Leonid Kuchma stepped into an increasingly emotional debate between Kyiv and Moscow over Russian minority language rights in Ukraine - which recently has swirled to ever-higher echelons in both governments - when he criticized an absolute lack of Russian government support for the development of Ukrainian culture in Russia.

"Please, give me an example from Russia - where more than 10 million Ukrainians reside - of at least one school, one newspaper, one radio or TV program in the Ukrainian language," said Mr. Kuchma on July 27 in Symferopol, according to Interfax-Ukraine.

The president stirred a brewing controversy over recent Lviv regional and municipal decisions to limit the use of the Russian language in commercial transactions and advertising there, which have led to an uproar, first in the Russian-language mass media in both countries and then among Russian government officials.

President Kuchma emphasized that he did not believe that any language should "be higher" than another, although he expressed support for the Ukrainian language as the state language.

"On the other hand," said the president, "let's not forget that we are Ukrainians."

The president's remarks came a week after Russia's ambassador to Ukraine, Ivan Aboimov, rekindled an issue that had begun to die out when he declared at a press conference in Kyiv that Russia was disturbed by the Ukrainian government's ineffective response to the events that had occurred in Lviv; he said the Russian government reserved the right to take appropriate action.

A day later, the Russian State Duma passed a resolution calling on Russian President Vladimir Putin to order his Foreign Affairs Ministry to propose measures "in connection with Ukraine's failure to fulfill the terms of the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership," which has come about as a result of Kyiv pursuing a "policy of discrimination against the Russian language."

The State Duma's action brought a series of rebuttals in Kyiv. First the Verkhovna Rada issued a statement on July 21 in which it called the Russian Parliament's action "a manifestation of interference in the domestic affairs of a sovereign state" and expressed surprise that the intention of Ukrainian authorities to "secure the inalienable and natural right of Ukrainian citizens to use their native tongue is interpreted by Russian parliamentary deputies as a recurrence of ethnic discrimination policies."

That was followed by a demand from representatives of the Ukrainian National Rukh Party, the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian National Conservative Party, as well as the Prosvita organization, that Ambassador Aboimov be declared persona non grata in Ukraine.

On July 26 Yevhen Marchuk, secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, went on the record, albeit in rather undiplomatic fashion, when he called the recent statements by Russian representatives on the language question "stupid and absurd."

He, as President Kuchma did a day later, attempted to turn the issue on its heels by questioning the level of Ukrainian minority rights in Russia.

"It will take the Russians at least 30 years to create for the Ukrainian residents in that country at least a hundredth part of what the Russian-speaking population has in Ukraine," said Mr. Marchuk.

How the Russian language is treated in Ukraine has become an increasingly volatile issue since the death of Ukrainian pop composer Ihor Bilozir. Mr. Bilozir died after several weeks in a coma that resulted from a beating by two Russian-speaking youths after the composer refused their demands that he and his friends stop singing Ukrainian songs because the youths wanted to listen to Russian songs being broadcast over the radio in a café.

In the ensuing days, sporadic and isolated outbursts of violence were aimed at cafés and firms that do business in the Russian language, which led both the regional and local governments of Lviv to place limitations on the use of Russian. Russian government officials have said the local government buckled under pressure from local ultra-nationalist political parties.

While the upper echelons of the Ukrainian government have stepped in to neutralize political pressure being applied from Moscow and turn the debate towards Russia's treatment of its national minorities, perhaps the most convincing tale of the difference in the practical approaches utilized by Moscow and Kyiv in support of minority language rights was told by Vasyl Antoniv, the chairman of the Moscow-based Ukrainian Cultural Society Slavutych.

During a Kyiv press conference organized by Ukraine's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Antoniv, who has resided in Moscow for 40 years, said that Ukraine must stop defending its record on supporting the language rights of minorities, especially Russian, because they are above reproach. Instead it must begin addressing Russia's failure to uphold promises it has made regarding Ukrainian minority rights in Russia.

"We are led to believe that in Lviv in particular life for Russian speakers is hard. That is difficult to believe," explained Mr. Antoniv. "[The Russian government] says there should be a balance between how Ukrainians are treated in Russia and how [Russians] are treated in Ukraine. And there truly should be, but in a very different way than they represent. They say that Ukrainians in Russia now have cultural autonomy. We don't see that in any way."

Mr. Antoniv explained that, although Moscow recognizes Ukrainians as a separate ethnic group as it does many other nationalities in its cultural autonomy program, it has not found the financing for a single Ukrainian-language day school, library, theater ensemble or radio or television program. When Ukrainians tried to obtain funding to build a house of worship for faithful of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate, they were told that there are plenty of Russian Orthodox churches, said Mr. Antoniv.

While Russian government officials claim that Ukrainians have their own library in Moscow, Mr. Antoniv explained that it is merely one room of Ukrainian books in a Russian government library. He admitted that, indeed, Ukrainians in Moscow have a cultural center in the heart of the city, on the Arbat, but emphasized that it was built by private funds and pays the city $50,000 a year in a 20-year land lease.

He also explained that any Ukrainian-language newspapers - and there are a few, especially in the heavily Ukrainian region of Tiumen - are privately financed and barely manage to survive.

According to Ukrainian government statistics presented by the State Committee on Information Policy, TV and Radio Broadcasting, the lot of Russian-language speakers in Ukraine is better.

Today Russian speakers in Ukraine have 2,400 schools and 17,700 preschools to which they can send their children. Some 35 percent of Ukrainian college students still attend college courses taught in Russian. There are 14 state-run Russian theaters in the country, as well as 1,200 Russian-language newspapers - which accounts for 49.7 percent of all periodicals.

"As a result of Moscow's centuries-old Russification policy, first by the tsarist regime and then by the leaders of Communist totalitarianism, the Russian language has taken a significant place in the cultural life of Ukraine," explained Ivan Drach, chairman of the State Committee on Information Policy.

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