This revolution is my own (12/12/04)

This revolution is my own

by Yaroslav Harchun

I emigrated from Ukraine to Argentina in 1974 but, quite naturally, those fastflowing 30 years could not change my ethnocultural orientation. Today I resent the fact that Putin, Lavrov, Kuchma & Company chose a thug as a desirable president of my motherland. They nurtured him, pampered him, provided him with funds and instructions and said: "Now go and do the dirty job for us."

I do not hesitate to use the word "thug": I heard it at an international conference of Canadian, American, British and German political scientists, cultural anthropologists and sociologists in Ottawa two weeks before the Ukrainian election. The word, therefore, a legitimate scholarly definition of the phenomenon of Viktor Yanukovych.

Mr. Yanukovych spent over three years in detention for robbery, assault and who knows what else; his criminal record was smuggled to Moscow immediately after the collapse of the USSR. He was young and stupid, some apologists would say. But this kind of reasoning is rather simplistic since the jail became his university. As prime minister, today he sports a heavy golden chain around his neck and he hates neckties. My Ph.D. is in Slavic linguistics (University of Ottawa), I studied at Harvard as well, and I am quite capable of identifying people by listening to them speaking formally or casually. My verdict: Mr. Yanukovych speaks the language of the convicts when he speaks Russian informally and his Ukrainian, both formal and informal, is heavily loaded with "surzhyk."

This guy chosen for us by Putin, Lavrov, Kuchma & Co. sure lied to Richard Armitage, undersecretary of state, by complaining that the "orange" people from the opposition almost killed his son so he was obliged to evacuate his family to his native Donbas. One has to have a very sick and criminal mind to be able to misuse one's own family for the sake of political gain.

Similarly, he lied while behaving like a clown in Ivano-Frankivsk under the impact of an egg. And this man who has been solemnly blessed and keeps feeling protected by Moscow was and still is supposed to become president of my nation!

He would represent my nation while traveling abroad, he would meet Her Majesty the Queen of the United Kingdom and many other crowned and uncrowned VIPs. God knows what lies he would utter in front of them. He would be the supreme commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and the supreme quarter-master of the Ukrainian diplomatic activity. No wonder, therefore, that so many appalled Ukrainian diplomats signed the petition rejecting him.

As far as his Russian mentors are concerned, they would only be happy to see again widespread political reprisals in Ukraine. They would find it hilarious to see hundreds of thousands political refugees from Ukraine flooding Europe from Poland up to Cornwall. They would welcome the decision of Mr. Yanukovych the president to send a couple of Ukrainian battalions to help them in Chechnya. For this noble purpose the law on dual citizenship would be custom-tailored at once. Since Mr. Yanukovych's criminal dossier is kept in Moscow, he is perfectly blackmailable and would do whatever the bosses tell him to do.

They want to humiliate Ukraine again and for good, and to show the Ukrainians their "right" place in geopolitical reality. The core of these pseudo-diplomatic reasonings by Messrs. Putin, Lavrov and the Duma is just this: We loathe you profoundly, you, "Little-Russians." We sort of like you when you blink and roll your eyes sideways. And we hate you, Ukrainians who gaze at us unblinkingly.

Yaroslav Harchun, an emigrant from Ukraine, is a former employee of Radio Canada International.

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