On the eve of the G-7 summit last month, the Canadian Group for Democracy in Ukraine (I’m a member) asked the government of Canada to advise President Petro Poroshenko to withdraw from implementing Minsk II until Russia removes its military and terrorists from Luhansk and Donetsk. To do less, according to the letter to Canada’s minister for foreign affairs, is to “legitimize the occupation” and participate in Ukraine’s dismemberment. Most clauses of the agreement are Russia-dictated demands detrimental to Ukraine.
The group pointed to the “limits of diplomacy,” as Russia breaks the ceasefire incessantly and the West’s lack of resolve encourages further aggression. Now the death toll is nearing 7,000, the wounded surpass 13,000, the displaced are well over 1 million, and the devastation of Ukraine physically and psychologically is immeasurable and will be felt for generations.
Meanwhile, President Vladimir Putin claims that the worst event of the 20th century was the fall of the Communist USSR, which he is determined to re-establish. His vicious tactics – kidnapping civilians, burning national symbols with cigarette butts on Ukraine’s patriots, using children as shields – recall tortures from Russia’s past, as do the lies employed to cover up the crimes.
To counter, the Canadian Group for Democracy in Ukraine – a virtual organization of Canadians concerned with policy and politics relevant to Ukraine’s democratization – urged the G-7 to deliver a heavy blow to Russia’s arrogant intransigence by removing it from the SWIFT banking system. The move would deprive Russia of the ability to handle financial transactions in a secure, standardized and reliable way. The letter also urged military aid for Ukraine.
The G-7 decided differently. It failed to punish Russia. Despite hollow threats, sanctions have remained at about the same level since being introduced as punishment for annexing Crimea. Now, over a year later, neither the culprits’ families nor the instigator of this global calamity, President Putin, have been added to the sanctions list. Nor has Russia been designated as a terrorist-exporting state. There are no teeth in the military aid offered by fellow democratic states, and it’s business as usual.
So why wouldn’t Russia keep raising the bar? Now it’s building military bases in Ukraine, sneaking in heavy artillery and increasing its land grab. It demands immediate Western economic aid and for Kyiv to hurry up and negotiate with the terrorists for the country’s territories. The Putin regime would be the beneficiary of both.
While the struggle against Russia is being fought heroically on the front in Ukraine’s east – regrettably with little more than the applause of democrats around the world – Canadians are confronted by a different, yet somewhat familiar, battle. It deals with Communist crimes against humanity committed and led, for the most part, by the Russia-controlled USSR.
The Monument to the Victims of Communism speaks for some of the 120 million murdered by Communist regimes around the world in the 20th century. Also called “Canada, the Land of Refuge,” it recognizes that nearly one-quarter of Canadians trace their roots to escapees from Communism.
The monument’s planning efforts have been in the public eye for over five years, but the storm over location and design broke only after the design was announced last fall. With remarkable speed, powerful entities like the Royal Society of Canadian Architects and Ottawa’s mayor joined the protest.
It’s not clear why the National Capital Commission, which oversees land designation, shifted the monument’s locations several times. The current site, next to Canada’s Supreme Court, had previously been allocated to the Holocaust shrine. However, the two were switched, contributing to the controversy over the memorial to Communism’s victims.
The design criticisms – primarily about size – were addressed but failed to appease critics. At the 11th hour two architects – Shirley Bloomberg, a dissenter from the memorial’s design selection jury, and Barry Podolsky, a local architect – founded the Ottawa Heritage Group to launch a lawsuit charging the commission with “undermining the consultation process.” Bureaucratic correctness seems to have greater value than memorializing the greatest crimes against humanity by crazed ideologues. While lip service is paid to the monument’s validity, the lawsuit may stall it indefinitely. Communists around the world must be pleased.
This is but the latest attempt to whitewash Communist crimes in Canada. Only a few years ago, Ukraine’s Holodomor, the deliberate starvation of some 10 million Ukrainians by the Kremlin – was marginalized by the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. The museum failed to give equal treatment to the two most heinous crimes of the last century – the Holodomor and the Holocaust – favoring the latter with a disproportionate amount of space.
Failure to expose Communist crimes appears to be systemic. Democratic societies around the globe commemorate, educate and treat the Holocaust with far greater attention than that paid to the crimes of Communism. Yet the exposure of both, side by side, is paramount to understanding that crimes against humanity are not restricted to a time, place or a people, and are rooted in absolute power.
Democracies must stop pandering to autocrats’ whims, whether current or historic, whether in Ukraine, Canada or elsewhere. Otherwise all hell breaks loose, as it has in Ukraine today.