NEWS AND VIEWS: Fighting an attempt to subvert democracy (12/05/04)

NEWS AND VIEWS

Fighting an attempt to subvert democracy

by Lubomyr Luciuk

Writing this, I am looking at a photograph of my father. He is marching. Swirling around him are thousands of others, carrying placards, recalling the many millions murdered by Moscow's men, demanding freedom for Ukraine.

That was Munich in the spring of 1949. My parents were political refugees, displaced by war, caught up in a valiant struggle for an independent Ukraine, victims of Nazi and Soviet oppression. Later they found asylum in Canada and gave my sister and me chances for a better life, the kind Europe's tyrants denied them.

Yesterday my father went marching again. Doing so was difficult but, as he told me on boarding the bus, his life was long ago dedicated to securing Ukraine's freedom. He won't give up, not now. So, as I wrote these words, he was in Ottawa, snowflakes and sleet pelting him, and my mother, and hundreds of others standing beside them, demonstrating solidarity with the millions in Ukraine who have shown the world that they will have liberty.

Tellingly, the placards carried in Ottawa bore messages not much different from those hoisted a half century ago. While yesterday's marchers went to condemn the rigged results of an election universally dismissed as fraudulent, that was not their sole purpose. For, yet again, they were demonstrating against the Soviet-schooled satraps of Kyiv and their Moscow masters, a collective of parasites who, in decades past, engorged themselves on Ukraine's wealth.

Pining for "the good old days," when they ingested luxuries while trapping their captive nations behind an Iron Curtain, these scoundrels were spewed up only when their man, Viktor Yanukovych, was about to lose power. Knowing their fate is tied to his they reacted, deploying henchmen and hooligans to stuff ballot boxes, corrupt whomever they could. So panicked were they that they did not even bother to hide their frenetic scurrying. They perpetrated multiple deceits, openly, throughout Ukraine. A vomit from the past, they are still at it as I write, trying desperately to somehow steal power from the people.

I am now certain that all of them should have been expunged after the Soviet Empire exfoliated, in 1991, just as the Nazis were after the war. The Reds never could become democrats. In truth, there was never much difference between Black and Red fascism, save for the latters' more remarkable record of mass murder. We were too forgiving. So we have a Russia in which an ex-KGB-man- turned-president, Vladimir Putin, recently honored a Chekist killer, Felix Derzhinsky, with a new statue in Moscow. Scarcely any international outrage was expressed. Imagine what would have been said if a German chancellor accepted a statue of Heinrich Himmler in Berlin.

Not surprisingly, the mood among Ukrainian Canadians is sombre, if determined. Over the days ahead many will speak up for a country that will soon either embrace Europe or slide back to certain perdition. What is different, however, is that Ukraine's champions won't be of my father's age, or even mine. The next generation has taken charge in Canada, and over there. The young have mounted the barricades and they are the future, whatever happens. That makes them unstoppable. Mr. Yanukovych and his bussed-in buggers aren't.

What can Canada do? We have already recognized that a majority voted for Viktor Yuschenko. Unquestionably, he was democratically elected president. Now we must isolate Mr. Yanukovych and the ringleaders of his November putsch. They know that power brings perks, so we must deny them their pleasures by freezing their assets. They should not enjoy our resorts, get treatment in our hospitals, study in our universities, or claim refugee status when, inevitably, they flee. By trapping them where they are, making it impossible for them to leave Ukraine unless they slink away to Russia or Belarus, we leave them surrounded by people who know what they are, who will - sooner rather than later - bring them down. In the West we need to round up Mr. Yanukovych's agents of influence, deporting them whence they came. No democratic country should have any truck with those bent on indulging relic Great Russian imperial pretensions, imperiling the present and future peace of Europe.

Many hope this crisis will resolve itself through a Rose Revolution, similar to Georgia's last year, that Mr. Yanukovych will yield in the face of overwhelming protests, as Eduard Shevardnadze did. That view is likely naïve. Yanukovych is no Shevardnadze. The West must act, urgently, to help Ukraine's people expectorate the criminal gang that blatantly attempted to subvert Ukrainian democracy. If we fail, a revolution will do so. That won't be rosy.

Lubomyr Luciuk is a professor of political geography at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston Ontario.

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