British Ukrainians reflect on kinfolk from Ukraine (03/01/98)

British Ukrainians reflect on kinfolk from Ukraine

by Tony Leliw

LONDON - It's difficult to get people to talk on the record on the topic of Ukrainians from Ukraine, as any negative comments might be deemed unpatriotic. Scratch the surface of the Ukrainian community in Britain, however, and there are plenty of individuals ready to unload their horror stories related to their Ukrainian relatives, new wives and those who thought their kin were coming for a holiday, but instead have joined the growing "banda" [horde] of illegal workers.

"I put him on a bus last week," said 30-year-old Ivan, a computer programmer from Ipswich. "Whether he made it back to Ukraine, God only knows."

Roman, 45, from Leeds, had his parents pestering him to marry a girl from Ukraine since he was a teenager. His first wife was English and they divorced after two years. They told him it wouldn't work. "My parents were over the moon when I married a 20-year-old 'chornobryva' [black-browed beauty] from Ivano-Frankivsk," he said. "They thought I'd found happiness. Instead I have to do 12-hour shifts to support her family in Ukraine."

"Her sister in Ukraine wants designer label clothes, her brother keeps pestering us for an invitation because he has lost his job and wants to come and work here, and her father wants a new Lada car," he added.

Stefan, 36, a Londoner and father of two, said: "My wife wanted to go back to work and we needed somebody to look after the children and teach them Ukrainian. Cousin Kateryna from Khodoriv seemed the obvious choir. Because it was illegal for her to work here, we offered her 30 pounds (1 pound is approximately $1.65 U.S.) living expenses a week plus free board and lodging to take care of our children. We had heard that the average wage in Ukraine is 18 pounds a month, so we felt we were giving her a good holiday."

"One day she met some Ukrainians working here illegally," he continued, "and she was told that we were exploiting her. She could earn 200 pounds a week working in a restaurant. Within two days she had left us, cursing us for not paying her enough, and refusing to give us a forwarding address, even though we were legally responsible for her."

He continued: "She kept telling us that she had borrowed 2,000 pounds from the village shopkeeper to get here and needed to pay him back. We were convinced she needed the money to refurbish her dacha."

Bohdan Furdyn, a pensioner from Surrey, was equally outspoken: "Over the past five years I have given more than 20,000 pounds to deserving causes - usually artists, intellectuals, diplomats, people who needed financial support. Half of them did not even write a letter of thanks."

The lack of sympathy for Ukrainians trying to evade their economic plight was recently echoed by Ukrainian-born journalist Vitali Vitaliev, who now works for the British newspaper The Guardian on the column "Outside Eye."

Bemoaning the deportation of several hundred Czech and Slovak gypsies, who he believed genuinely deserved asylum in Britain as they were ruthlessly persecuted to the point that some politicians there publicly called for them to be sent "to the gas chamber," in the same breath Mr. Vitaliev raised the case of a refugee from Ukraine asking for political asylum on the grounds that he had "voted for the wrong party" and therefore his life was in danger. "The asylum was granted," he added, "despite the fact that supporting a different party in Ukraine these days is no more dangerous than swapping one's shopping allegiance."

Zdorov, an English-language magazine for Ukrainians, published in Canada, in its winter 1997 issue ran a feature on "The New Immigrants." It wrote: "At first (after 1991), our foreign cousins were welcomed with open arms as liberated people. Later, scare stories of families arriving to claim back the inheritance of deceased relatives they had never seen or spoken to started to appear. Stories of racketeering and mafia connections have appeared even in the British press and our new-found cousins have suddenly become the black sheep of the family. Where did it all go wrong, and how can we repair the damage?"