EDITORIAL: 30 years ago: a new movement (11/05/06)

EDITORIAL

30 years ago: a new movement

Thirty years ago, on November 9, 1976, the Ukrainian Public Group to Promote the Implementation of the Helsinki Accords was established. Its founding members were: Oksana Meshko and Oleksander Berdnyk, both veterans of Stalin-era camps; Ivan Kandyba and Lev Lukianenko, who had been active in the Ukrainian Peasants and Workers' Union of the late 1950s-early 1960s; Oleksiy Tykhy and Nina Strokata, who were involved in the intellectuals' movement of the 1960s; Mykola Rudenko, a member in the early 1970s of the Moscow chapter of Amnesty International; Petro Grigorenko, a Red Army major-general who had become a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group; and two neophytes, Myroslav Marynovych and Mykola Matusevych - the only ones who had not been imprisoned before joining the new group.

The Ukrainian Helsinki Group outlined its goals as follows:

"1. To assist in making wide circles of the Ukrainian public familiar with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To demand that this international legal document serve as the regulating principle of relations between the individual and the state. 2. ... to promote the implementation of the humanitarian provisions of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. 3. To work toward ensuring that Ukraine, as a sovereign European state and as a member of the United Nations, is represented by a separate delegation at all international conferences where compliance with the Helsinki Accords is reviewed. 4. To demand, with a view to encouraging a free exchange of information and ideas, the accreditation to Ukraine of representatives of the foreign press, the establishment of independent press agencies and such."

To join the Ukrainian Helsinki Group was an act of great courage, as Soviet repression in Ukraine was harsher than in any other republic of the USSR. Still, its members were steadfast in their belief that the accords signed on August 1, 1975, provided an opening for them to hold the Soviet Union to the commitments it freely undertook in Helsinki, in particular its humanitarian provisions. In addition to human rights, the Ukrainian Helsinki Group focused on national rights, and it did not mince words. Already in its first document, Memorandum No. 1, the group spoke of the physical and spiritual genocide of the Ukrainian nation (citing the Famine-Genocide of 1932-1933, among other examples) under the Soviet regime. Its first memorandum also documented the fate of 75 political prisoners from Ukraine.

Soviet persecution of the group's members was fast and furious, as the regime sought to silence the group from the first day of its existence. On February 5, 1977, the Soviet authorities' crackdown intensified, with Rudenko and Tykhy becoming the first Ukrainian Helsinki monitors to be incarcerated for their activity. As its members were arrested and sent off to prisons, camps or psychiatric wards, new activists joined the group's ranks.

Many members paid even more dearly - with their lives. Two of the Ukrainian monitors, Yuriy Lytvyn, 50, and Mykhailo Melnyk, 35, committed suicide as a result of harsh imprisonment and repression; three, Vasyl Stus, 47, Oleksiy Tykhy, 57, and Valeriy Marchenko, 37, died in the gulag as a direct result of their conditions of imprisonment and lack of medical care.

But the group continued its work, demonstrating, as their Memorandum No. 1, had announced to the world, that "... the struggle for human rights will not cease until these rights become the everyday standard in social life" and that "prisons, camps and psychiatric hospitals are incapable of serving as dams against a movement in defense of rights."

Twenty-five years after the founding of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, Kyiv witnessed an anniversary gathering of its surviving members. One of them, Vasyl Ovsienko, explained the group's contribution to Ukraine: "Without the Helsinki Group there would have been no independent Ukraine. U.S. military, economic and political pressure came in response to light shed by the Helsinki groups. We helped to destroy the Soviet Union. "

Today, 30 years after the emergence of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, we bow our heads in memory and in tribute to these heroes.

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