FOR THE RECORD: Reaction to Los Angeles Times commentary (07/06/03)

FOR THE RECORD: Reaction to Los Angeles Times commentary

PARSIPPANY, N.J. - On June 14 the Los Angeles Times ran a commentary by Tim Rutten titled "The Blair affair fuels a 70-year-old scandal," which has caused a stir in the Ukrainian American and Ukrainian Canadian communities. The article begins by describing the campaign to revoke The New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize and ends by accusing the members of the Galicia Division and followers of Stepan Bandera in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) of anti-Semitism and atrocities against Jews during World War II.

The first half of the article affirms the validity of many of the accusations against Mr. Duranty. Mr. Rutten writes, "As the Times' Moscow correspondent in the 1920s and '30s, [Mr. Duranty] was an active agent of Soviet propaganda and disinformation - probably paid, certainly blackmailed, altogether willing. For years, Duranty lied, distorted and suppressed information to please Josef Stalin."

Mr. Rutten also writes, "In 1933, Stalin's savage campaign to collectivize agriculture in the Ukraine created a man-made famine in which somewhere between 6 million and 11 million people died. Duranty's reports did not simply ignore the famine. They denied its existence."

The article then goes on to detail the history of the campaign to revoke Mr. Duranty's Pulitzer Prize. Mr. Rutten presents the viewpoint of the North American Ukrainian communities and the responses of the Pulitzer Prize Board and The New York Times, and then explains how the Jayson Blair scandal has focused attention on Mr. Duranty.

Then, abruptly and inexplicably, the subject of the article changes to alleged Ukrainian complicity in the Holocaust. The shift is marked by the sentence: "Curiously, the same organizations and commentators who are pressing the issue of Duranty's prize have been resolutely silent about one of the Holocaust's darkest chapters - the collaboration by tens of thousands of Ukrainians with the Nazi murderers of Eastern European Jewry."

The article continues: "The Waffen SS raised an entire brigade from among the Galician Ukrainians. Ukrainian POWs volunteered to serve as guards in the German death camps. Followers of the Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera enthusiastically joined the Nazis in carrying out massacres of Jews throughout the Ukraine and adjoining regions."

Mr. Rutten's article does not explain the relevance of his accusations to the issue of Walter Duranty and the Famine-Genocide. Relevance aside, many Ukrainian Americans and Ukrainian Canadians immediately responded to the article by contesting the accuracy of Mr. Rutten's accusations with letters to the editor of that newspaper.

The Ukrainian Weekly has elected to reprint for its readers three letters sent by members of the North American Ukrainian community to the editor of the Los Angeles Times in response to Mr. Rutten's article. Thus far, none of these letters has been published in the Times.

Bandera's grandson reacts

Dear Editor:

I would like to take personal issue with Mr. Tim Rutten's article of Saturday, June 14: "The Blair affair fuels a 70-year-old scandal." In that article, Mr. Rutten writes:

"This week, the Los Angeles Times asked officials of the leading U.S. and Canadian Ukrainian émigré organizations whether they ever had censured or condemned the Galician Brigade or Bandera's followers for their participation in genocide."

"Followers of the Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera enthusiastically joined the Nazis."

"Curiously, the same organizations and commentators who are pressing the issue of Duranty's prize have been resolutely silent about one of the Holocaust's darkest chapters - the collaboration by tens of thousands of Ukrainians with the Nazi murderers of Eastern European Jewry."

First, Ukrainians have not been silent. We have been working for decades to set the record straight on the alleged collaboration between Ukrainians and Nazis.

The Nazis arrested my grandfather, Stepan Bandera, in July 1941, after the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) proclaimed Ukrainian independence as Stalin's troops retreated in front of Hitler's advancing divisions.

He spent the remainder of the war in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Two of my grandfather's brothers - Oleksa and Vasyl - were killed by the Nazis in Auschwitz.

Recall that like Jews, Slavs were considered untermenschen [racially inferior persons], and thousands of Ukrainian nationalists were incarcerated alongside the victims of the Holocaust in places like Dachau, Mauthausen and Buchenwald.

Also, it may surprise those unacquainted with Eastern European history to learn that there were Jewish Ukrainians who participated in the national liberation struggle from 1939 to 1953, including within military formations created by the OUN during its two-front struggle against both Hitler's Nazis and Stalin's Soviets.

I would be glad to introduce Mr. Rutten to Mr. Alex Epstein, a Jewish Canadian lawyer who helped our family present the case for grandfather Bandera in front of the Deschenes War Crimes Commission in Canada in the mid-1980s, in response to similar claims by the Simon Wiesenthal Center. We won our case in front of an impartial judge.

In addition, I would be glad to put Mr. Rutten in touch with Mr. Herbert Romerstein, who for the last 15 years has been engaged in research of the dual Soviet active measures campaign of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s against "Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists" and "Zionists." In his well-considered opinion, the campaign's intention was to keep the Ukrainian dissidents and Jewish refusenik movement from coalescing into a united front against the repressive apparat of the Soviet Union during the said period. Mr. Romerstein, a former Professional Staff Member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, is best known for his work with Eric Breindel, "The Venona Secrets, Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors." Mr. Romerstein's latest article is titled "Divide and Conquer: The KGB Disinformation Campaign against Ukrainians and Jews."

I fear that Mr. Rutten has not been diligent in his background work. He may in fact be unduly influenced by Soviet apologist materials of the '60s, '70s and '80s.

Stephen Bandera
New York, NY

PS: I would be glad to forward a copy of Mr. Romerstein's latest article, printed in The Ukrainian Quarterly.

PPS: If the editorial board so deems, this material can be published as an op-ed.

Galicia Division was cleared

Dear Editor:

Re: "The Blair affair fuels a 70-year-old scandal...," The Los Angeles Times, June 14, 2003, by Tim Rutten.

In 1986 the Ukrainian Division Galicia was cleared, as a unit, of any allegations of war criminality by an official Canadian Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, headed by the late Justice Jules Deschenes. After 1991 the division's record was again reviewed by the government of Canada, and our minister of justice, the Honorable Anne McLellan, then confirmed that there is no evidence of war criminality on the part of this Waffen SS formation. Jewish Canadian organizations and other interveners were always given an opportunity to provide information to the contrary but, other than making "grossly exaggerated" claims (the phrase Justice Deschenes used), they have never come forward with evidence of the sort necessary to secure criminal conviction.

In North America everyone is entitled to be considered innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around. As for allegations about entire ethnic or racial minorities being guilty of one crime or another, such remarks smack of prejudice and must be dismissed as such.

Stepan Bandera, as leader of one faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, spent most of the second world war in Sachsenhausen, and both of his brothers were murdered in Auschwitz. He was himself later assassinated by a Soviet agent in Munich. Many members of the OUN were interned at Auschwitz, and were murdered there and in other Nazi concentration camps. A Holocaust survivor, Stefan Petelycky, tattoo No. 154922, wrote about this in his memoir "Into Auschwitz, For Ukraine."

There can, of course, be no denying that some Ukrainians did collaborate with the Nazis, out of fear, prejudice, greed or simply to survive, but fewer collaborated in Ukraine than in many other parts of Europe. Arguably, however, Ukraine lost more of its population than any other country in Nazi occupied Europe. Those "20 million Soviet war dead" were, in the majority, Ukrainians, not Russians.

As for calling for the prosecution of war criminals, it must be stated that the Ukrainian Canadian community's position has always been that any and all war criminals found in Canada, regardless of ethnic, religious or racial heritage, or the period or place where crimes against humanity or war crimes were committed, should be brought to justice in a Canadian criminal court of law. Only someone aping Duranty's style of journalism would suggest otherwise.

Our organizations have in no way ignored the possibility that there may be a few World War II era war criminals in Canada. But we have not seen any evidence, to date, proving that there are any Ukrainians here who collaborated with the Nazi occupation in perpetrating war crimes.

We do know, however, there are people in Canada who worked for the Soviet NKVD/KGB/SMERSH and that they are not being investigated. Unfortunately, the media shows no interest in why that is. We conclude, with regret, that Canada, the U.S.A. and other countries, including Israel, have knowingly allowed themselves to become havens for alleged Communist war criminals.

Perhaps future articles about the Duranty campaign (which, by the way, was initiated by the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association and not by any Ukrainian American group) will do your readers the service of not diverting them from that contemporary story to another one (which is not even remotely related, unless you see the killings of the second world war as some kind of revenge for the atrocities perpetrated by the Soviets in the 1920s-1940s, a rather contentious view).

As for special interest groups like the Wiesenthal Center, apparently interested in recalling only their people's sufferings, we have no comment on such partiality other than pointing out that we have always taken a more inclusive approach, hallowing the memory of all victims of the Nazi and Soviet dictatorships and calling for all perpetrators of such crimes to be brought to justice.

Instead of regurgitating unfounded allegations about who did what to whom during the second world war, your reporter might have done better to explore why some folks at the Pulitzer Prize Committee and at The New York Times still seem intent on protecting as odious a character as Walter Duranty, the man who covered up an unparalleled atrocity that cost many millions of Ukrainians their lives during the politically engineered Great Famine of 1932-1933.

Lubomyr Luciuk, Ph.D.
Kingston, Ontario

The writer is director of research of the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association, which is based in Toronto.

What's the relevance?

Dear Editor:

Tim Rutten's "The Blair Affair Fuels a 70-Year-Old Scandal" (Regarding Media, June 14) is an excellent analysis of the scandalous exploits of The New York Times' Walter Duranty. It is the last quarter of his article that unfortunately misses the mark by a rather wide margin for reasons of relevance and historical accuracy.

What is the conceivable relevance of what happened during the Holodomor - the murderous 1932-1933 famine engineered by Stalin in which many millions of Ukrainians and others died in eastern Ukraine and elsewhere - to what 10 years later may or may not have happened in western Ukraine during World War II and the Nazi Holocaust?

There is none. And that there is none becomes clearer from the following example. One of the two founding fathers of the criminal Soviet regime, Leon Trotsky, was Jewish. Lazar Kaganovich, one of Stalin's two closest associates during the bloodiest decade of Soviet rule, the 1930s, was Jewish. If you read the second volume of Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago," you will learn that many of those who ran the Soviet concentration camps were Jewish. Yet would it ever occur to anyone to demand from someone who writes or speaks about the victimization of the Jews during the Holocaust that such writer or speaker express censure or condemnation of the criminal activities of Jews in the Soviet Union? No, and for good reason: what Trotsky or Kaganovich or the Jews who were involved in running the Soviet concentration camps did has no relevance to the victimization of the Jews during the Holocaust.

Why then is Rutten asking Ukrainian organizations who are speaking out about Duranty and The New York Times' scandalous 70 years of stonewalling to condemn what did or did not happen a decade after the Famine in a different part of Ukraine?

As for historical accuracy, Rutten implicates the Ukrainian Waffen SS Division in genocidal activities. Over a decade ago, the Deschenes Commission in Canada devoted several years and spent several million dollars researching just that question, and found that allegations against this division were groundless.

Rutten also alleges that Ukrainians among the Soviet POWs whom the Germans captured "volunteered" to serve as guards in Nazi concentration camps. The notion that a Soviet POW, of whom there were about 5 million, half of whom perished in German custody, "volunteered" to do anything betrays a profound ignorance of what was happening in that part of the world during World War II.

Lastly, Rutten writes that followers of the Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera allegedly enthusiastically joined the Nazis in massacring Jews. Really? Then how do we explain why Bandera himself spent most of World War II in German prisons and concentration camps? Or why Bandera's two brothers died as inmates in Auschwitz?

Rutten cites Rabbi Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles as the authority for his historical claims. That's like asking a Palestinian cleric for background information on the historical Israeli-Palestinian interface. There actually do exist some scholars at universities such as Harvard, Toronto and Alberta that could provide you with accurate information about Ukraine during World War II, and I would commend them to Mr. Rutten's attention for future purposes.

Bohdan Vitvitsky
Summit, N.J.

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