2001: THE YEAR IN REVIEW: Canada's Ukrainians continue to seek justice (01/06/02)

2001: THE YEAR IN REVIEW

Canada's Ukrainians continue to seek justice

Officially the first year of the 21st century, 2001 started with a bang for the Ukrainian Canadian community in Mississauga, Ontario, just outside Toronto, when about 1,800 mainly young revelers attended a January 13 mega-Malanka event co-sponsored by the Toronto branches of the Plast Ukrainian Scouting Organization and the Ukrainian Youth Association (SUM).

The following month, the mood in the Ukrainian Canadian community was far more sober when Canada's then-ambassador to Ukraine, Derek Fraser, told a February 27 audience at the University of Ottawa that the controversy involving murdered Ukrainian journalist Heorhii Gongadze could create a "blemish" on Ukraine.

In a letter dated a day before Mr. Fraser's talk, the Ukrainian Canadian Professional and Business Federation called on Canadian Citizenship and Immigration Minister Elinor Caplan to extend an offer of asylum in Canada to Maj. Mykola Melnychenko and his family. A former member of Leonid Kuchma's presidential security detail, Mr. Melnychenko went into hiding after being charged with treason for secretly taping conversations in the president's office (later publicly released), which seemed to implicate President Kuchma and several high-level Ukrainian law enforcement officials in Mr. Gongadze's disappearance.

Canada also raised its concerns about the handling of the Gongadze case at a February 15 meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, of which both Canada and Ukraine are members.

Mr. Fraser, who has since been replaced as Canada's ambassador to Ukraine by Andrew Robinson, was the first speaker of the "Ambassador Lecture" series sponsored by the University of Ottawa Chair of Ukrainian Studies. Ukraine's ambassador to Canada, Dr. Yuri Scherbak, followed on April 18 as a guest speaker in the lecture series.

On March 2, Federal Court of Canada Justice Andrew MacKay ruled that Toronto resident Wasyl Odynsky was not involved in any war crimes during World War II and that his service with SS auxiliary forces "was not voluntary." However, the judge did find that Mr. Odynsky probably "did not truthfully answer questions that were put to him concerning his wartime experience" when he arrived in Canada in 1949. Still, Judge MacKay urged Immigration Minister Caplan to consider the fact that Mr. Odynsky has been a good Canadian since he obtained his citizenship in 1955 before deciding to denaturalize him.

That latter view was shared by groups like the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association (UCCLA) and the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC), which urged the Canadian government to initiate proceedings against Canadians allegedly involved in historic war crimes only if there is "evidence of individual criminality."

Later in the month, on March 24, UCC President Eugene Czolij and Canada-Ukraine Relations Committee Chair Myroslava Pidhirnyj met with Canadian Foreign Minister John Manley. The two, according to Mr. Czolij, called on the federal government to "to reaffirm its special relationship with Ukraine and to continue supporting those programs and projects, which develop and foster the principles of a democratic society."

The meeting preceded a visit to Canada by Ukraine's foreign affairs minister, Anatolii Zlenko. While in Ottawa, Mr. Zlenko and Mr. Manley, who visited Ukraine in December, signed a bilateral agreement on the destruction of anti-personnel mines in Ukraine. Mr. Zlenko also received $40,000 (about $26,000 U.S.) in Canadian humanitarian aid for flood victims in Ukraine's Zakarpattia region.

On March 28 a UCCLA delegation, which included the association's research director, Lubomyr Luciuk, met with Stockwell Day, leader of the Canadian Alliance, the Official Opposition party in the House of Commons. Mr. Day was briefed on the UCCLA's longtime campaign to gain official recognition of the injustices involved in the World War I internment of thousands of Canadians of Ukrainian descent. The UCCLA also told the Alliance leader that the organization had endorsed the Ukrainian Canadian Restitution Act initiated by one of the caucus members, Manitoba Member of Parliament Inky Mark, now a member of the Democratic Representative coalition of Conservative and former Alliance MPs.

In a post-meeting news release, the UCCLA described Mr. Day as having "listened attentively" to the presentation - and no doubt especially to the group's reminder that Jean Chrétien, when he held Mr. Day's position in 1993 prior to becoming prime minister, promised to personally support redress.

The Ukrainian Canadian Professional and Business Federation (UCPBF) also expressed support for Mr. Mark's Bill C-331, which was introduced in the House of Commons on April 4. The private member's bill called on the federal government to install trilingual (English, French and Ukrainian) memorial plaques at any of the 24 internment camps where they are not present; establish a museum at Banff National Park to commemorate the internment operations and honor the Ukrainian Canadian community.

The bill also featured a provision whereby the Canadian government would negotiate with the UCCLA for "suitable payment in restitution for the confiscation of property and other assets from Ukrainian Canadians," including the development and production of educational materials on Canada's past internment policies and activities. In addition, C-331 requested that Canada Post issue a single stamp or a series of them to commemorate the internment of Ukrainian Canadians and other Europeans during the first world war.

A month before C-331's introduction, UCPBF President Oksana Bashuk Hepburn wrote to Canadian Heritage Minister Sheila Copps, calling on her to champion a restitution package that includes: a policy and research center on Ukraine and the creation of academic chairs that would specialize on such issues as internment history. The federation's March 1 letter also mentioned the option of individual compensation for internment camp survivors or their relatives.

Mr. Mark's legislative proposal also received a thumbs-up from the UCC Alberta Provincial Council, which noted that the infamous Cave and Basin and Castle Mountain internment sites are located in Banff National Park.

In the meantime, on April 24, Mr. Mark, whose federal Dauphin-Swan River riding includes more than 6,000 Ukrainian Canadians (over 13 percent of the area's population), held a joint news conference promoting redress with members of the UCCLA. One of those members, children's author Marsha Skrypuch, spoke of her grandfather, an internee at the Jasper, Alberta camp. "For the crime of being Ukrainian, [he] was stripped of his worldly goods, interned and forced to do hard labor at the age of 18," she said. "It was racism, pure and simple."

A day later, the Ukrainian Catholic Church announced that 28 Ukrainians would be beatified during Pope John Paul's June visit to Ukraine. Among those to be beatified were two bishops with Canadian connections. One of the prelates, Nykyta Budka, who served as Canada's first Ukrainian Catholic bishop from 1912 to 1927, later returned to Ukraine where he was arrested by the Soviets in 1945 and sent to a prison camp hospital in Kazakstan, where he died four years later. The other bishop, Vasyl Velychkovsky, was twice incarcerated by the Soviets before being allowed to leave the Soviet Union for Canada in 1972. He died in Winnipeg a year later.

Also on April 25, the UCCLA distributed a new pamphlet on the Canadian internment operations, titled "A Time for Atonement," to MPs and senators. Meanwhile in Ukraine in May, Jars Balan of the Edmonton-based Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS), delivered an academic paper on "Ukrainians and Romanians in the New World" at an international conference, co-sponsored by the CIUS and held at the State University of Chernivtsi. While there, Mr. Balan met with representatives of the university and the Canadian embassy in Kyiv to discuss the establishment of Canadian studies courses at post-secondary institutions in Ukraine.

A month later, on June 16, the UCCLA unveiled a statue at the site of the Spirit Lake internment camp near Amos, Quebec. Sculpted by Kingston, Ontario, artist John Boxtel and called "Interned Madonna," the statue depicts a Ukrainian internee with two of her children: a swaddled infant boy and a young girl clinging to her mother's dress. The statue complements a trilingual plaque that was unveiled at the site in 1999.

A week later, the UCCLA and Parks Canada unveiled four interpretive panels in Field, British Columbia, to commemorate the internment camp at Camp Otter, named after Maj. Gen. William D. Otter, the administrator during World War I Canadian internment operations.

The summer also found the UCPBF announcing plans to produce a television documentary dealing with the contributions made by Ukrainian Canadians. Academy Award-winning documentary-maker John Zaritsky of Vancouver was tapped to serve as producer and director of the film. The federation also received funding for the project from the likes of the Taras Shevchenko Foundation, which contributed $10,000 (about $6,300 U.S).

As well, the UCCLA released an online version of its print booklet, "Roll Call: Lest We Forget," at http://www.infoukes.com/uccla/images/Roll_Call.pdf. "Roll Call," which was first released in 1999, includes the names of over 5,000 men, women and children who were interned in 24 camps across Canada during World War I.

Toronto played host to North America's largest street festival when some 35,000 people participated in the fifth annual Bloor West Village Ukrainian Festival held on September 21 and 22. Some of the highlights included a parade along Bloor Street, featuring actress Mimi Kuzyk as parade marshal, and an evening gala cabaret hosted by CBC-TV comic Luba Goy and Globe and Mail investigative journalist Victor Malarek.

Following the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, the UCPBF, which held its biennial convention in Winnipeg on October 4-5, sent a letter to Prime Minister Chrétien endorsing his government's support for America's fight against terrorism in the aftermath of the tragedy. Ms. Bashuk Hepburn urged the prime minister to "counsel" the U.S. to exert pressure on Israeli and Palestinian officials to end hostilities between them and for Canada to send aid to the "downtrodden" people of Afghanistan.

At the UCPBF convention on October 4, four Ukrainian Canadians were also honored with Nation-Building Awards. Among them:

in the category of "Friend of Ukraine," retired Saskatoon psychiatrist Dr. Dmytro Cipywnyk, former president of the Ukrainian World Congress, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress and the Canadian Ethnocultural Council, who now serves as chairman of a Saskatchewan government advisory committee on Saskatchewan-Ukraine Relations, which has developed a model for a national health system in Ukraine;
in the category of "Professional Achievement," Winnipeg singer Alexis Kochan, whose musical ensemble, Paris to Kyiv, "breathes new life into ... ancient songs from the deepest layers of Ukrainian tradition";
in the category of "Business Achievement," Ukrainian-born, former IBM vice-president Jim Temerty, who serves as president of Toronto-based Northland Power and has been active in helping to develop Ukraine's power industry; and
in the special lifetime achievement category, Leon Kossar, who died on August 4 at the age of 72 and who co-founded Toronto's annual summer multicultural festival, International Caravan, in 1968.

Around the same time, the UCC held its 20th triennial congress in Winnipeg and re-elected Mr. Czolij, a Quebec lawyer, to another term as president. Three Ukrainian Canadian Youth Leadership Awards and 12 Shevchenko Medals were presented during the congress. Among the medal recipients: Marco Levytsky, editor of the Edmonton-based Ukrainian News, who was recognized for making the publication a national Ukrainian-Canadian newspaper.

Far east of Winnipeg on October 28, Toronto's Ukrainian community paid tribute to 65-year-old Edward Burstynsky on the occasion of his retirement from a 34-year teaching career in the University of Toronto's linguistics department. Proceeds from the banquet in his honor, held at the U. of T.'s Hart House, went toward the establishment of the $100,000 Edward N. Burstynsky Ontario Graduate Scholarship. Awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1967, Prof. Burstynsky served as associate chair and undergraduate coordinator of the department of linguistics since 1993.

While Mr. Burstynsky was being feted, the UCCLA was wrapping up a weekend summit in Canmore, Alberta. Among the participants was MP Mark, whose Bill C-331 had passed first reading in the House of Commons.

The following month, on November 22, the Osvita Foundation, which promotes the teaching of the Ukrainian language in Manitoba, honored Slavic studies scholar Jaroslav Rozumnyj. A doctoral graduate in the discipline from the University of Ottawa, Dr. Rozumnyj served as chair of the department of Slavic studies at the University of Manitoba from 1976 to 1989, during which time he expanded the department's program into one of North America's largest. Retired from the university in 1995 and former chair of the Canadian Friends of Rukh Manitoba branch, he is currently editing the Canadian volume of the Encyclopedia of the Ukrainian Diaspora.

Another Winnipeger and former University of Manitoba professor, Ostap Hawaleshka, became a member of the Order of Canada on December 4 when Governor Gen. Adrienne Clarkson presented him with the distinction at her official residence, Rideau Hall, in Ottawa. Professor emeritus of industrial engineering at the university, Mr. Hawaleshka was honored for his role in helping to establish the Science and Technology Center in Ukraine, where he served as executive director from 1994 to 1997.

And, as the year wound down, it was revealed that Canadian taxpayers were hit with legal bills totaling $1.77 million (about $1.1 million U.S.) from three men, all of them Eastern European immigrants, who successfully blocked the federal government's attempts to expel them from Canada. In each case, a federal court judge ruled that government prosecutors lacked evidence that the men were war criminals.

The highest legal bill ($750,000 for defense lawyers) came from the case involving Johann Dueck of St. Catharines, Ontario, who allegedly was a police officer who rounded up civilians and soldiers for execution during World War II and whom Ottawa wanted to send back to his native Ukraine.

Meantime, the federal government, which has won six of nine cases involving alleged Nazi war criminals since 1995 (though two of them died before they were deported), has set its sights on Jacob Fast.

On November 28, a trial began in Hamilton to determine whether Mr. Fast, who was born in Ukraine in 1910 and now lives in an old-age home in St. Catharines where he struggles with Alzheimer's disease, lied to enter Canada in 1947. The Canadian government believes he failed to mention having been forcibly recruited to serve in a Nazi SS auxiliary unit during the war.

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