Around 1,000 striking miners reached Kyiv on Thursday at the end of a grueling month-long march and surrounded the presidential headquarters and parliament to press home their demands for payment of massive wage arrears. Their protest outside the government buildings marked the culmination of a tortuous 500-kilometer (310-mile) march from the Dnipropetrovsk region which had attracted widespread sympathy along the way. Banging their orange helmets on the pavement in the angry gesture of protest they have made their own, the miners demanded their long-overdue wages. One miner wrote on his helmet, 'Thieves, give us our money back.' As in other demonstrations over the past weeks the miners were wellbehaved and there were no violent outbreaks. Police reinforcements were called to the scene, but kept a low profile and were not needed. The miners have been eager to enlist general public support and have gone out of their way to portray themselves as championing demands for fair treatment not just on their own behalves but those of thousands of other public sector employees who have not been paid 'The miners did not come to Kyiv to take money away from pensioners, students, invalids, teachers and medics,' march leaders said in a statement calling on Kyiv residents to support their plight. 'We came to make the government return the money we have legally earned, to defend our constitutional right to be paid for our labor,' said the appeal, cited by the Interfax news agency. The protest march from coal-producing regions of eastern Ukraine began in mid-May, accompanying scattered strikes that have idled dozens of mines. Forty-five of Ukraine's 276 mines were striking on Thursday, union leaders said. The miners are owed an average of eight months in back wages and the overall wage debt stands at 2.2 billion hryvna ($1.1 billion), according to the Coal Industry Ministry. The miners also want wage and pension increases and more funding for the coal industry, plagued by numerous accidents caused by aging equipment and neglect for safety rules. More than 170 miners have died in accidents this year. The cash-strapped government, which blames managers in the coal industry for many of the problems, has sent some money to coal regions and is supposed to come up with an additional 600 million hryvna (dlrs 300 million) allocated by parliament to help the struggling workers. On the streets of Kyiv, the miners were greeted with honks from passing cars and shouts of support. Many Ukrainians, whose country of more than 50 million people has experienced economic decline since the Soviet collapse, sympathize with the miners. Most of the miners dispersed in the evening and went to camp at the Hydro Park island on the Dnipro River. A token picket remained outside the parliament building. Viktor Sergeyev,48, with 17 years experience underground, said: 'We have come here to show the president how we are starving. But I do not hold out much hope that we will get the results we want. Those pigs in the government never listen to us.' One of his colleagues, Vitaly Potapenko, 36, a machine operator in one of the Dnipropetrovsk mines, said: 'My children are hungry, I have to do something. I'm a simple miner, what else can I do but protest?' Dozens of leftist and nationalist activists joined the miners in rallies next to President Leonid Kuchma's headquarters and the parliament building nearby. The miners say they have no political demands and pledge to return to their homes as soon as back wages are paid.
