New presidents in Ukraine routinely redact the procedural issues regarding the award upon coming to office. Former President Viktor Yushchenko made amendments to the award process in force during President Leonid Kuchma’s administration. Since additions/deletions are generally of a procedural nature, there was no alert when Viktor Yanukovych issued his revisions.
Except with this one difference: Yanukovych went beyond procedure.
Yanukovych’s personal war against the Holodomor has become legendary in Ukraine and beyond its borders.
In December 2007 President Yushchenko expanded the subjects for Shevchenko Award consideration by inserting the following language, “works which serve to enlighten the topic of the Holodomor 1932-33…” Apparently this was a major problem for his successor. Viktor Yanukovych decreed to strike out the reference to the Holodomor, a Soviet engineered famine which took the lives of millions of Ukrainians. He did not address any other substantive issues in the award criteria.
Certainly Yushchenko’s initiative can only be perceived as part of an agenda to enhance the study of the Holodomor. Likewise, Yanukovych’s reaction three years later can only be interpreted as an attempt to undermine that initiative.
Yanukovych’s personal war against the Holodomor has become legendary in Ukraine and beyond its borders. A week ago he bizarrely and rudely did not accompany Canadian Prime Minister Harper to the Holodomor Memorial in Kyiv. Is all this simply sycophantic pandering to Moscow?
Yanukovych’s opening salvo against the Holodomor was delivered on the very day of his inauguration. Reference to the Holodomor was deleted from the presidential website. On April 27, 2010, in Strasbourg, Yanukovych stated to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, “We consider it incorrect and unjust to consider the Holodomor a fact of genocide of a certain people.”
He then proceeded to replace highly respected Ihor Yukhnovsky as chair of the National Memorial Institute with communist Valeriy Soldatenko, who not only dates his communist membership well into the period of Leonid Brezhnev and Volodymyr Scherbytsky, but also flaunts the fact that he has not renounced his communist membership to this day. Soldatenko has not only denounced the Holodomor as not being a genocide of the Ukrainian people, but has on more than one occasion mentioned that draft legislation is ready to be introduced in the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine to repeal Ukraine’s law from November 2006, which declared the Holodomor to have been Genocide.
Yanukovych’s denouncement of the Holodomor has been tendentious and gratuitous.
Yanukovych’s denouncement of the Holodomor has been tendentious and gratuitous. Were he simply passively intellectually opposed to characterizing the Holodomor as genocide, he would not have acted as expeditiously in deleting the website reference; he would not have made a special effort to address PACE only to denounce the Holodomor; and, certainly, he would have replaced Yukhnovsky with a moderate. In all instances he went out of his way to manifest that he was waging and unconditional war on the Holodomor.
Over the past few years Ukraine, together with the Ukrainian World Congress (UWC), has been organizing Holodomor commemorative events at the United Nations in New York. This year the UWC received no signal of any interest in this topic from Ukraine as it had in the past. The UWC on its own then attempted to reserve a conference room at UN headquarters in New York for such an event. Going back and forth over several weeks, the UN Economic and Social Council, with which the UWC has consultative status, declined the UWC’s request ostensibly based upon its opinion that commemorating the Holodomor does not fall within its purview and suggested that the UWC seek the sponsorship of a UN member-state. It should be noted that the head of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs NGO office is a Russian.
The UWC turned to Ukraine’s Permanent Representative to the UN. Ambassador Sergeev responded: “The Permanent Mission together with individual activists from Ukrainian organizations in the United States for several months now have been preparing a commemorative assembly at the UN to honor the memory of the victims of the Holodomor, as had been done in prior years. Representatives of the UWC, the UCC, WFUW, Ukrainian National Association, New Wave will be invited for this event.”
The Personal Representative did not include the UWC, the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, the World Federation of Ukrainian Women’s Organizations or the Ukrainian National Association in the planning, leaving us to presume that it, i.e., the Ukrainian government of Yanukovych, will handle all of the arrangements. We’ll see what happens. Hope springs eternal!
Askold S. Lozynskyj is immediate past president of the Ukrainian World Congress and its current main representative at the United Nations.
