Ukraine's national democrats accuse Russia of interfering in language issue (11/10/02)

Ukraine's national democrats accuse Russia of interfering in language issue

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - Ukraine's national democratic forces accused the Russian State Duma of interfering in the internal matters of Ukraine on October 31 after it voiced support for a renewed effort to make Russian the official language of the Crimea.

The Russian State Duma resolution, passed on October 25 even as Russia stood frozen by the siege of a Moscow theater by Chechen guerrillas, was enacted in response to legislation passed by the legislative body of Ukraine's Crimean Autonomous Republic. Crimea's Parliament supported a motion on October 18 that demanded that Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada make Russian the official language of the country's southern peninsula.

"This, for me, is the most blatant expression of chauvinism that I have seen in all my years," said Ukrainian National Deputy Pavlo Movchan, the longtime director of the Prosvita Ukrainian Language Society and a member of the National Rukh of Ukraine Party.

Mr. Movchan blamed the renewed effort to make Russian a second state language in Ukraine on Viktor Medvedchuk, the chief of staff of the Kuchma administration. The National Rukh Party and the parliamentary faction to which it belongs, Our Ukraine, have suggested that Mr. Medvedchuk has attempted to rouse dormant movements in the Crimea, as well as in Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Luhansk and Kharkiv, that support Russian as a second state language in Ukraine in order to curry favor with Moscow.

Many political experts hold the opinion that Mr. Medvedchuk has used his connections in the Kremlin, particularly his friendship with Russian President Vladimir Putin's chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin, to position himself for a run for the Ukrainian presidency.

Mr. Movchan charged that Mr. Medvedchuk organized and provoked the vote in Crimea as well as efforts to pass resolutions in most of the oblast councils of eastern Ukraine.

"Viktor Medvedchuk initiated these public debates, which took place with a minority of votes in support," said Mr. Movchan. "We point to him as the one who turned to Crimea's Parliament to speed-up the matter of the status of the Russian language in Ukraine."

The Social Democratic Party - United, which Mr. Medvedchuk chairs, responded to Mr. Movchan's accusations on November 6 by releasing a statement calling for the Our Ukraine parliamentary faction "to distance itself" from Mr. Movchan and his remarks. It called Mr. Movchan's statements part of "a campaign created by representatives of the radical-nationalist wing of the bloc against Viktor Medvedchuk." The SDPU underscored that there are no documents to support the allegations or point to Mr. Medvedchuk as the organizer of a movement to support Russian as Ukraine's second state language.

Mr. Movchan and other politicians who have criticized the resolution of the Crimean Parliament have based their defense on the inviolability of Ukrainian as the language of the land as determined in a 1999 ruling by Ukraine's Constitutional Court. The ruling confirmed the legitimacy of the Ukrainian language as the single state language.

On November 7, two days before celebration of the officially sanctioned Day of Ukrainian Language and Letters, National Deputy Les Taniuk, chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Culture and Spirituality, said he would have the language proposal posed by the Crimean Parliament struck from the Verkhovna Rada's daily agenda based on its unconsitutionality.

A report issued by the Crimean organization of the National Rukh of Ukraine showed the extend to which Russia has ignored the language needs of tens of millions of Ukrainians in Russia, even while adamantly fighting for still more Russian language rights in Ukraine.

It noted that while there are 2,973 Russian-language public schools in Ukraine, there are no Ukrainian-language public schools in Russia. Also, even though 30 Russian-language theaters exist in Ukraine, not a single Ukrainian-language theater can be found in Russia. And whereas Ukraine has 24,382 Russian-language libraries, Russia has no Ukrainian-language ones. Finally, in Ukraine 1,172 periodicals are published in Russian, while in Russia not one is published in Ukrainian.

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