FOR THE RECORD: Ukrainian Canadians no longer "in fear of the barbed wire fence" (09/11/05)

FOR THE RECORD

Ukrainian Canadians no longer "in fear of the barbed wire fence"

Below is the text of a speech presented by Dr. Lubomyr Luciuk in Regina, Saskatchewan, on August 24.

I stood the other day on Hill 70, just beyond Vimy Ridge, looking down into the French town of Lens. There, 88 years ago, on August 22, 1917, the valor in battle of a Canadian soldier, Corporal Filip Konowal, was recognized with the highest military decoration of the British Empire, the Victoria Cross.

Yet even as Konowal and thousands of other Ukrainian Canadians fought in the ranks of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, many thousands of their fellow Ukrainian Canadians, and other Europeans - people who had been lured to the Dominion with promises of freedom and free land - were being branded as "enemy aliens" and herded into Canadian concentration camps. There they were forced to do heavy labor for the profit of their gaolers. What little wealth some of them had was confiscated, and a portion of it still remains in the federal treasury to this very day. They suffered restrictions on their freedom of movement, association, and free speech, and even, in 1917, disenfranchisement.

Everything that was done to them took place not because of anything they had done but only because of who they were, where they had come from. No wonder that Ukrainian Canadians were reported to still be "in fear of the barbed wire fence," decades afterwards.

One of the innocents apprehended during Canada's first national internment operations was Mary Manko, a 6-year-old Montreal-born girl who would be transported north by railway car to the Spirit Lake internment camp in Quebec's Abitibi region, along with the rest of her family. There she would watch her 2 1/2-year-old sister, Nellie, perish, needlessly.

Mary is 97 years old now, the last known survivor of the internment operations. While age and ill health keep her from being with us today we must remember that it was Mary Manko Haskett who charged us, when she was still able, to never forget what was done to her and all the other internees. She did not ask for an apology, or compensation. She asked only that we secure their memory.

Last Sunday I stood at Essex Farm, where John McCrae penned "In Flanders Fields": "from failing hands we throw the torch, be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die, We shall not sleep..."

We did not break faith. A score of years ago our community began to recover the memory of what it had endured - a "national humiliation," as an editorial writer described our disenfranchisement in Canada's oldest newspaper, Kingston's Daily British Whig - one that sooner or later would have to be atoned for. That time for atonement begins here, today, in Regina, with the first steps we now take forward together, having signed this agreement in principle that puts us on the path to securing an acknowledgement of an historic injustice, and so heralds the way toward reconciliation and a healing. And it does more, for it signals to all that, forever more, we are no longer "in fear of the barbed wire fence," and never again will be.

* * *

On behalf of the Ukrainian Canadian community, as represented by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, Ukrainian Canadian Foundation of Taras Shevchenko and Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and the community's negotiating team, Mr. Paul Grod, Mr. Andrew Hladyshevsky and Dr. Lubomyr Luciuk, we offer thanks to Prime Minister Paul Martin and all of the other good men and women who helped bring us together here today, to begin working toward a final Ukrainian Canadian Reconciliation Accord, and in particular the Honorable Peter Milliken, MP (Kingston and the Islands), who was the first MP to rise in the House of Commons, on September 27, 1991, to call for a righting of this historic wrong, and Inky Mark, MP (Dauphin-Swan River-Marquette), whose Bill C 331 - The Ukrainian Canadian Restitution Act continues to further that just cause.

Lubomyr Luciuk, Ph.D., is a professor of political geography at the Royal Military College of Canada, in Kingston, and serves as director of research for the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association. He is the author of "In Fear of the Barbed Wire Fence: Canada's First National Internment Operations and the Ukrainian Canadians, 1914-1920" (Kashtan Press, 2001).

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