We're being massacred, again (09/01/91)

We're being massacred, again

by Bohdan Vitvitsky

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.

The Financial Times, reporting on President George Bush's August 26 press conference at Kennebunkport, carried the following description: "'You're asking me about some public works committee in downtown Kiev, and you want to know if we support them,' he said with heavy sarcasm to a reporter's questions."

At the same press conference, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney indicated a somewhat different position: that he would be inclined to recognize Ukraine if its population supported independence in the December 1 referendum. The Mulroney position, however, was almost immediately attacked as "politically unwise" in a statement made by a group of "international analysts" in Ottawa.

Why such hostility? Why such scorn? If, as in the minds of most, Israel must exist as an independent state to guarantee that the experience of the Nazi Holocaust is not repeated, why is it any less obvious that an independent Ukraine must similarly exist so that the famine of 1933 and the various other Moscow-inspired atrocities that have led to the murder of between 10 and 15 million Ukrainians likewise are not repeated?

We in North America are being massacred, again, in the arenas of public discourse and public relations, in part, because of our own stubbornness and stupidity. We have steadfastly refused 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. It has not even occurred to our community's few significant leaders that they ought to emulate leaders in, for example, the Jewish or Black communities and have a speech writer-researcher on staff to consistently voice that leader's views in the form of public statements, op-ed articles and letters to the editor, etc.

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 simply cannot 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.

Bohdan Vitvitsky practices law in New York.