ANALYSIS: Why Ukraine does not have a human rights movement? (09/01/02)

ANALYSIS

Why Ukraine does not have a human rights movement?

by Taras Kuzio
RFE/RL Newsline

Ukraine has a poor human rights record, which the attainment of sovereignty has not resolved. In fact, according to international organizations, Western NGOs and governments, democratization has regressed since the late 1990s in many different areas, such as the media, and oppositionists continue to die in suspicious car accidents. Why then is there no all-Ukrainian human rights movement to counter these abuses? Two factors seem to have influenced why post-Soviet Ukraine has been unable to create a unified and visible human rights movement.

First, in the Soviet era the human rights movement in Ukraine was always tied to the national question, as it was in other non-Russian republics, such as the three Baltic states and the Transcaucasus. The combination of national and democratic demands within one movement in non-Russian republics such as Ukraine made it very different from human rights groups in the Russian SFSR that campaigned solely for democratic rights.

In the late Soviet era, this combination of national and democratic demands into one movement led to the creation of the Ukrainian National Movement (Rukh) that gradually brought together four groups: former prisoners of conscience, the cultural intelligentsia, the democratic platform of the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU) and by 1990-1991 "sovereign communists" such as ideological secretary Leonid Kravchuk.

Rukh's ideology rested on the belief that the pursuit of human rights and democratization was possible only after independent statehood was achieved, whereby the state would actively revive and promote Ukrainian language and culture to ensure majority status within Ukrainian society. Ukraine has been independent for over a decade and yet, in some important respects, human rights are worsening, not improving.

The continued linking of human and national rights in one movement is still evident a decade after the disintegration of the USSR. The Ukrainian Association of Political Prisoners and Repressed, headed by former prisoner of conscience Yevhen Proniuk, which publishes the journal Zona (The Zone), has always been allied with national democratic groups such as Rukh. The same is true of the Ukrainian Memorial organization that sprung up in the late Soviet era dedicated to exposing Stalinist crimes, which was always more active in western Ukraine even though most of the crimes it investigated were committed in eastern Ukraine. The Ukrainian Legal Foundation (ULF) was founded in 1992 and is headed by former Rukh activist Serhii Holovatyi who was elected to Parliament in the March elections within the radical anti-presidential (national democratic) Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc. The ULF publishes the annual yearbook "Human Rights in Ukraine."

Some NGOs are specifically targeted at single issues, such as elections (e.g., Equal Opportunities and the Voters' Committee) or gender, rather than all human rights as such. They operate independently of each other because they prefer to obtain access to Western funds for their own NGOs rather than through an umbrella human rights organization. Other human rights groups do exist, but they are not homegrown and are merely domestic offshoots of international organizations, such as Ukrainian branches of Amnesty International and the International Society for Human Rights. Even here, Ukraine's Amnesty International is headed by former prisoner of conscience Myroslav Marynovych, vice-rector of the Lviv Theological Academy of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church and director of its Institute of Religion and Society.

With the recognition of Ukraine's borders by Russia and the absence of any separatism since the mid-1990s, Ukrainian independent statehood as such in not in danger. Nevertheless, human rights activists see the country they propelled to independence as having been hijacked by sovereign-communists- turned-centrist-oligarchs who are supported and sustained by the executive branch of government. The executive and its allies, who abuse human rights and support a corporatist-authoritarian state, are also seen to neglect Ukrainian language and culture, and prefer Ukraine to remain within Russia's sphere of influence. In the eyes of this large body of disparate human rights NGOs and opposition parties, the state has been hijacked and Ukraine needs to complete the national and democratic revolution it began a decade ago.

Centrist parties espouse support for the rule of law, human rights and conforming to "European" standards, but reality shows this is only at the level of rhetoric, because of their control by oligarchic groups who prefer a corporatist-authoritarian state. Oligarchic parties have constantly, for example, blocked attempts by Parliament to investigate the large number of presidential wrongdoings found on the tapes illicitly made in President Leonid Kuchma's office. Oligarchic domination of the political center has meant that those interested in upholding human rights and opposing Ukraine's democratic decline have joined the anti-presidential national democrats or Oleksander Moroz's Socialists.

Second, there is no all-Ukrainian human rights movement because of low levels of national integration across Ukraine. This prevents the creation of sufficient levels of trust across different regions to allow for the creation of a pan-Ukrainian civil society. In the Soviet era, western and central Ukraine produced the majority of the republic's dissidents' and Rukh was based in these same two regions. Opposition activists and demonstrators were drawn from the same two regions during Ukraine's largest demonstrations in early 2001 during the height of the "Kuchmagate" scandal. This pattern was repeated in the March elections when these regions voted for the opposition socialists and national democrats.

On all three occasions, eastern and southern Ukraine has not become involved in civil disturbances or supported human rights movements. A far deeper Soviet legacy and ambivalent national identity has made these two regions more prone to manipulation into voting for the "sovereign Communist" Leonid Kravchuk in December 1991, the "anti-nationalist" Mr. Kuchma in July 1994 and the pro-Kuchma For a United Ukraine election bloc or the Communists in March.

Thus, despite a poor record in human rights, Ukraine has not produced a mass human rights movement. The main political group that promotes democratic values and human rights is the national democrats and, therefore, democratization, national revival and "returning to Europe" continue to be intimately bound together. Eastern and southern Ukrainian-based centrist parties do not promote human rights because they are dominated by oligarchs and the executive, the very same body that infringes on human rights.

Taras Kuzio is a resident fellow and adjunct professor at the Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Toronto, and author of "Ukraine: Perestroika to Independence," second edition (Macmillan, 2000).

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