Twenty-five years ago, on August 26, 1991, following the declaration of independence by Ukraine’s Parliament on August 24, 1991, leaders of the United States and Canada showed two different stances in reaction to the news.
Attorney Bohdan Vitvitsky, based in New York, wrote a commentary about the reactions by Canada and the U.S.
Dr. Vitvitsky highlighted President George H. W. Bush’s comments at Kennebunkport, Maine, during a press conference that was reported by the Financial Times. “You’re asking me about some public works committee in downtown Kiev, and you want to know if we support them?” he asked reporters with heavy sarcasm.
In contrast, Canada’s Prime Minister Brian Mulroney said he would be inclined to recognize Ukraine if its population supported independence in the December 1, 1991, referendum. However, an Ottawa-based group of “international analysts” attacked the position as “politically unwise.”
Dr. Vitvitsky noted:
“If the status that existed in Ukraine and the rest of the non-Russian republics up until as recently as two or three years ago had continued for another 50 or 100 years, Ukrainians may well have disappeared as a nationality – given the population resettlement and intense political and cultural Russification policies emanating for decades, if not centuries, from Moscow. Ukraine’s most recent push for independence is, therefore, nothing short of an attempt to avoid extinction.
“Most civilized people and nations acknowledge the devastation that the Jews suffered during the Nazi Holocaust to be an irrefutable argument for the need for Israel’s existence. We here in the United States have even adopted various laws to prohibit the extinction of various species of small fish.
“Yet, the desperate desire of an entire nation to avoid extinction has, in the case of Ukrainians, met with, alternatively, hostility, scorn or lack of comprehension.”
Dr. Vitvitsky questioned the motivations for the hostile reactions to Ukraine’s declaration of independence. He drew parallels between the existence of Israel as a preventive measure against a repeat of the Nazi Holocaust, and Ukraine as a preventive measure against Moscow atrocities like the Famine-Genocide of 1923-1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians.
The character “massacre” as Dr. Vitvitsky put it, was the fault of the Ukrainian community’s failure to “create and hire a group of talented and articulate people who could on an ongoing basis and in a professional manner explain who we are, what we have suffered and endured, and why we, too, have rights.” Dr. Vitvitsky also recommended a speech writer-researcher on staff to consistently voice these views in public statements, op-ed articles and letters to the editor.
He concluded: “To be voiceless, is to be powerless. Our community leaders, our professors, our few intellectuals and whoever else can write must now step forward to fill the void in the arena of public discussion. We cannot simply allow others to frame the issues when it comes to the question of the need for Ukrainian independence. We cannot afford to lose by default.”
Source: “We’re being massacred, again,” by Bohdan Vitvitsky, The Ukrainian Weekly, September 1, 1991.