1995: THE YEAR IN REVIEW: Ukrainian diaspora: worldwide events (12/31/95)

1995: THE YEAR IN REVIEW

Ukrainian diaspora: worldwide events

Probably the most salient event within the organized Ukrainian community worldwide was the 31st plenary session of the Secretariat of the Ukrainian World Congress, which was convened in Toronto on June 2-3. It was a landmark session at which the organization once known as the World Congress of Free Ukrainians accepted membership applications from Ukrainian representations in Russia, the former Yugoslavia, Moldova, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The body's purview was thus broadened, as by necessity was its agenda. There was talk at the session also of opening a UWC office in Kyiv, and the matter was to be seriously studied.

A healthy sign for the worldwide body was the fact that its five-figure budget deficit had been wiped out due to some concerted fund-raising efforts and, thus, UWC President Dmytro Cipywnyk could even state hopefully that perhaps some of the organization's dormant committees, particularly its Human Rights Commission, could now be reactivated. He underlined, "We have a role to play internationally as a non-governmental organization."

The UWC president gave high marks at the time of the plenary session to several of the UWC's subsidiary bodies, including the Sports Commission, the World Council of Ukrainian Social Services, the World Council of Ukrainian Cooperatives and the World Ukrainian Coordinating Educational Council, explaining that their work has had a far-reaching impact both in the diaspora and in Ukraine.

Later in the year, the UWC Secretariat's Presidium met in Toronto on September 29-30, focusing on financial concerns. Fiscal restraints carried the day, and the previously broached proposals to open a Kyiv office and to reactivate the Human Rights Commission were shelved. The latter decision was particularly difficult inasmuch as events in Bosnia, Slovakia and Poland had put Ukrainians there at risk.

Dr. Cipywnyk raised the plight of Ukrainians in Bosnia during the Presidium meeting, but explained that the UWC cannot act directly to assist refugees. This was better left to the national Ukrainian representations because they could lobby their respective governments to seek action. It was decided that the UWC and its subsidiary bodies, most notably the World Council of Ukrainian Social Services, would investigate allegations of corruption at the Canadian and Australian embassies in Belgrade, where immigration officials were said to have accepted bribes to process refugees' documents.

Meanwhile, the WCUSS worked together with the Ukrainian Canadian Social Services in order to ensure that the Canadian immigration service allows in as many Ukrainian refugees from Bosnia as possible.

The Ukrainian World Congress had a bit of a tiff with another worldwide body, the Ukrainian World Coordinating Council, established in Kyiv in 1992 during the first anniversary celebrations of Ukraine's independence at the World Forum of Ukrainians. The UWC is one of the founding member-organizations of the Kyiv-based coordinating council. The row was over the UWCC's by-laws, as UWC officials said the Kyiv body had substituted at least two other sets of by-laws for the originally agreed-upon document, apparently making amendments at will and then submitting these without approval to Ukraine's Ministry of Justice, where the organization is legally registered. The UWC voted to take a firm stand toward the UWCC: its delegates would not participate in the next plenary session unless the Ukrainian World Congress received written confirmation of the original by-laws and a clear agenda.

The aforementioned plenary session of the Ukrainian World Coordinating Council took place in Kyiv on December 8-10. It was the third plenary session of the worldwide body. Attention was focused on the UWCC budget and the council's aims and priorities for the coming year, especially the World Forum of Ukrainians, which will be held in August 1996 to coincide with the fifth anniversary of Ukraine's independence.

The forum also sent a delegation to meet with President Leonid Kuchma to appeal for financial and moral assistance for this forum, and to seek his commitment in providing state support for Ukrainian culture, language and publications, as well as a pledge that the Ukrainian government would seek to secure the ethnic rights of Ukrainians in Russia, comparable to the rights of the Russian minority in Ukraine.

The delegates voted to eliminate the limit on representation in its governing body (previously the limit had been 14 representatives each from Ukraine, the Eastern and Western diasporas) and to allow for membership in the UWCC for various Ukrainian organizations and individual benefactors.

The UWCC plenary session was attended by 40 delegates from Ukraine and the Western and Eastern diasporas, plus over 50 guests. Among the delegates were representatives of the Ukrainian World Congress, the Ukrainian American Coordinating Council, the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America and the Coordinating Committee to Aid Ukraine; the largest contingent of delegates represented the Eastern diaspora.

In Poland, the biannual Festival of Ukrainian Culture this year was moved from Sopot to Peremyshl (Przemysl in Polish), close to the Ukrainian border, where the politically charged atmosphere made itself felt. A city of 70,000 with Poland's largest urban concentration of Ukrainians (there are 2,000 in the city proper and another 6,000 in the province), Peremyshl is home to the Ukrainian Catholic Eparchy that was revived in 1991, a Ukrainian school that was recently established and many Ukrainian organizations. Thus, it was decided in 1993 at the convention of the Association of Ukrainians in Poland to hold the 1995 festival there.

Opposition to the Ukrainian festival on the part of Polish organizations began in the form of letters of protest to the Minister of Culture. What followed can only be described as a general anti-Ukrainian campaign that reflected the hostility of certain segments of Polish society. There were acts of vandalism, anti-Ukrainian posters, anti-Ukrainian graffiti, assaults, death threats, arson and a smoke bombing. Still, the show went on as scheduled on June 29-July 2. Warsaw, which is pursuing a policy of good relations with Ukraine, apparently gave an order to beef up security. And, the deputy minister of culture and art of Poland, Michal Jagiello, was there to open the festival along with Mykola Yakovyna, Ukraine's acting minister of culture. As one observer noted, it seems that the fate of the Ukrainian community in Poland is very much dependent upon whether Ukraine becomes a strong country.

Ukrainian women of the world were particularly active during 1995 as it was the year of the United Nations' Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing and the companion NGO Forum on Women, held in Huairou, China, in August-September.

Represented at what was billed as the largest gathering of women in history was the World Federation of Ukrainian Women's Organizations. Among its five delegates were representatives also of the Ukrainian National Women's League of America, the Ukrainian Women's Association of Australia and the Ukrainian World Congress. The WFUWO's participation was made possible due to its Category II consultative status in the Economic and Social Council.

In Beijing, Ukrainian women from the WFUWO and Ukraine held a workshop on the continuing impact of the 1986 nuclear disaster at Chornobyl. Their presentation was titled "Environmental Disaster and Its Effects on Women and Children." The WFUWO also issued an appeal to participants of the Fourth World Conference on Women to focus attention on Chornobyl's tragic legacy and the importance of nuclear safety.

In other developments that affect Ukrainians worldwide, one of the Polish government's chief investigators of the Katyn Forest massacre, part of the Soviets' 1940 campaign to decapitate the Polish Army and intelligentsia living on formerly Polish territories, was in Toronto on October 20. There Stefan Sniezko met with representatives of the Ukrainian community, including officials of the Ukrainian World Congress, the Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Center and the Ukrainian World Coordinating Council. He came to solicit help from the Polish, Jewish and Ukrainian communities to help identify victims listed in documents his unit has compiled.

Investigators had determined that Ukrainians, Jews, Belarusians and other civilians were among the 26,000 murdered by the Soviets in Katyn. Stefan Sniezko, a member of the Polish Parliament who has also been serving on the investigation committee, reported that at the original site in Katyn Forest there were about 300 Jews and 600 Ukrainians; some of them were Polish Army officers, but most were civilians, including elderly women and children. The investigating team also uncovered that many of those not shot at Katyn were then taken to prisons in Ukraine, including Kharkiv, Kyiv and Kherson, and dealt with there.

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