COMMENTARY: Equal human rights for all (12/31/06)

COMMENTARY

Equal human rights for all

by Oksana Bashuk Hepburn

John Humphrey, the Canadian who was the principal drafter of the United Nation's Declaration of Human Rights, helped me to understand the importance of human rights for all. He wrote the declaration to protect humanity from itself - its own inhumanity to man - brought sharply into focus on the ruins of World War II. He wrote it for people like me, one of some 40,000 Ukrainians that Canada accepted after the war.

The preamble states: "Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people ..."

The list of 27 articles ranges from the right to life, liberty, freedom from persecution and fear, equality before the law, the right to nationality, freedom of opinion and expression, to the right to a good reputation.

My father was an Auschwitz survivor. He was incarcerated in the notorious Nazi concentration camp for promoting Ukraine's liberty. Unlike the Holocaust of 6 million Jews by the Nazis that is well documented and universally condemned, my father's plight, and that of some other 10 million Ukrainians who perished in World War II and its aftermath - on the front, murdered, exiled, displaced - is little known.

The task of setting straight historic records is gargantuan. Few are aware, for instance, that the liberator of Berlin and Prague was the 1st Ukrainian Division, not the Russians. Few recognize that the murder of yet another 7 to 10 million Ukrainians during the Soviet Terror Famine in 1932-1933 was a crime against humanity.

Opposition to such historic claims is everywhere. Sometimes it is so subtle it fails detection by all but those closest to the issue. For example, my father and other prisoners of Ukrainian descent were not invited to the Auschwitz commemorations on Canada's Parliament Hill. Efforts by their children to honor these survivors with inclusion were met by silence. Furthermore, ongoing attempts to put up a marker to the murdered and incarcerated Ukrainians in Auschwitz have gone nowhere.

And, regarding the 10 million murdered in the Moscow-orchestrated famine, the knowledgeable Washington Post writer, Anne Applebaum, stays silent on the 10 million starved in a recent article on genocides while citing horrific human atrocities. She includes the Holocaust, Rwanda and Darfur.

Why are these facts being sidelined or, worse, erased? Why the reluctance, if not a conspiracy of silence, to admit to crimes against the Ukrainian people? Who stands to gain?

After Auschwitz, my father devoted himself to setting the record straight. He co-founded the World League of Political Prisoners while eking out a living helping thousands of displaced families from losing their minds after being thrown from the horrors of the war into Canada's mine pits, logging camps, the "shmata" sweat shops and other undesirable jobs relegated to immigrants. He brought them dignity, reminding them that once they were freedom fighters opposing Nazi and Communist tyrants only to be confronted with media taunts from the likes of former Minister of Justice Irwin Cotler claiming hundreds or thousands of Nazi collaborators in Canada.

The claim was staunchly supported, among others, by Communist ideologues and the Weisenthal Center, but dismissed by the Deschenes Commission, a special body called by Canada's Parliament to look into the allegations. However, the slur that the national aspiration of former USSR republics like Ukraine is dangerous Nazi fascism lingers long after the threat of that dictatorship has passed, while Communist and Russian atrocities, like those in Chechnya, confront us with impunity today.

Obviously, there exists an uneven human rights reality in the world. Dead dictatorships posing no threat, e.g., the Nazis, are condemned; events like those in the Balkans and Darfur are met with repulsion; but one of the most severe examples of a nation deprived of rights, like the Ukrainians, is erased.

John Humphrey wanted it to be different. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations in 1948, talks about "... universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms."

Canada and the United States, among others, have abided by the declaration - accepting refugees like me, tackling poverty and participating robustly in accepting women as equals. Most Canadians are proud of Prime Minister Harper's position on human rights in China and respect U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Louise Arbour for speaking out against war crimes in Israel's recent attack on Lebanon.

However, globally, human misery continues to unfold on the TV screens. The emaciated children; the blood-soaked bodies in the Middle East; the carcass-strewn cities of Chechnya; the dead bodies of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko manifest the gaps between the declaration's intent and reality.

Even in Canada, one of the best places in the world according to United Nations documents, we have issues undermining our commitment to the declaration. Our native reserves, for instance, compete for attention with some of the poorest housing in Ukraine.

On a visit there recently, I witnessed the difficulty of standing up to the excesses of Russia. Ukraine's Parliament recognized the Terror Famine as a genocide by only 233 out of 450 votes. The pro-Russia party of Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych and the Communist Party abstained because, he claimed, condemnation of these atrocities would offend Russia.

The fight for equal human rights for all is far from over. However, it is being pursued around the world, albeit unevenly, thanks to the fine Canadian John Humphrey who gave the world its road map.

Oksana Bashuk Hepburn is a former director (communications) of the Canadian Human Rights Commission. She has finished a literary work on the application of human rights in Canada and Ukraine.

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