Duma Committee hears calls for Ukraine's reunion with Russia (03/15/98)

Duma Committee hears calls for Ukraine's reunion with Russia

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - Pro-nationalists and Communists turned a Russian Duma legislative committee hearing on ratification of the Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership between Ukraine and Russia into a political circus on March 3 when they transformed it into a spectacle calling for the reunion of Ukraine with Russia.

The hearing was disrupted numerous times by hooting and foot-stomping by guests in response to demands by committee members for the return of the Ukrainian city of Sevastopol to Russia and for the enforcement of Russian minority rights in Ukraine.

The committee hearing was all the more a show because it was attended by an official delegation of the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada on the invitation of the Russian Duma.

Since February, the Russian legislature has been reviewing the "big treaty" between Ukraine and Russia, which was signed in May 1997. It has been unable to approve it chiefly because pro-nationalist and Communist forces have continuously disrupted debate over the emotional issue of the status of Sevastopol, which many in Russia feel should be handed over to Russia.

National Deputy Bohdan Horyn, a member of the Ukrainian delegation to Moscow, said the circus atmosphere of the committee hearing was a premeditated "provocation" against the Ukrainian delegation orchestrated by Georgi Tikhonov, chairman of the Russian State Duma Committee on CIS Affairs and a member of the special committee reviewing the Ukraine-Russia treaty. Mr. Tikhonov is a member of the Narodovladia (Popular Power) faction of the Russian State Duma headed by the former chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, Nikolai Ryzhkov.

The hearing was attended by some 100 people, including members of the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party headed by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the Communist Party of Russia and former members of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, many of whom were invited by Mr. Tikhonov, according to Mr. Horyn.

Besides the official Ukrainian delegation, CIS Committee Chairman Tikhonov also invited members of the Parliament of Ukraine's Autonomous Republic of Crimea and Ivan Symonenko, another member of Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada, who brought with them petitions calling for Ukraine's reunion with Russia.

"It is no wonder that there was an atmosphere of nostalgia for the Soviet Union, to rebuild it and to destroy the Ukrainian nation," said Mr. Horyn.

During the hearing Mr. Tikhonov presented the Ukrainian delegation a resolution that he asked it to carry back to Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada. The resolution calls for Ukraine's legislature to organize a referendum on the reunion of Ukraine with Russia and Belarus.

Mr. Horyn, a national deputy from the Ternopil region in western Ukraine who is a member of the Republican Christian Party, said he was presented the documents, but refused to take them. Afterwards the Russian parliamentarian handed the papers over to the head of the Ukrainian delegation, Volodymyr Yatsenko, a member of Ukraine's Communist Party.

After repeatedly accusing Mr. Tikhonov of intentionally and provocatively stirring up the hearings and the issues, Mr. Horyn said he was threatened with removal.

Mr. Horyn said he was not pleased that Mr. Yatsenko, while accepting the documents, told Mr. Tikhonov that the Ukrainian Parliament would look at the resolution after the Russian and Belarus Parliaments had passed it. Nor was he happy that Mr. Yatsenko, while making the last presentation of the hearing, said the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada would reconsider membership in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Commonwealth of Independent States and a new treaty with the organization after the March 29 parliamentary elections. According to Mr. Horyn, Mr. Yatsenko said he thought a more left-leaning legislature would be more amenable to such moves.

One speaker after another spoke during the hearing on why the State Duma cannot ratify the "big treaty" between Ukraine and Russia: because Ukraine has not resolved problems of Russian minorities in Ukraine and the status of the Crimean city of Sevastopol, the home of the Russian and Ukrainian naval fleets on the Black Sea.

Mr. Horyn said the information that was presented was largely twisted and inaccurate.

"I do not know a more democratic law on national minorities in the world than the one that the Ukrainian Parliament passed," said Mr. Horyn. "It is a model used by other countries; that is what we were told by the Council of Europe." He said that although 22 percent of the population of Ukraine is ethnically Russian, some 50 percent of the schools teach in the Russian language. "We will not heed calls by some to teach children in the Russian language in two-thirds of the schools or all of the schools. That will not happen."

But it was difficult for the official Ukrainian position to be heard at the legislative hearing because when members of the official Ukrainian delegation rose to speak they were shouted down by guests in the gallery. "If something was said that did not please them, [visitors] either hooted or stomped their feet," said Mr. Horyn.

He said that when the head of the committee, Svetlana Goriacheva, tried to bring the proceedings under control, she also was shouted down. The Ukrainian parliamentarian explained that many present expressed dissatisfaction with Ms. Goriacheva's support for the Ukraine-Russia treaty. Ms. Goriacheva's mother is an ethnic Ukrainian.

Mr. Horyn said that two members of the committee, Yurii Kuznetsov and Oleksii Mitrofonov, who belong to Mr. Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party, made statements calling for the reunion of Russia and Ukraine, using what Mr. Horyn called "absurd" rationalizations.

"They expressed an absolutely absurd thesis that contemporary Russia resembles Germany of the recent past, which was divided into east and west, and just as Germany united so should Ukraine unite with Russia," said Mr. Horyn. "But they forgot that in Germany, in the east and west, there was one language, that it was a single nation that was divided up politically, whereas Ukraine and Russia are two separate nations with separate languages, separate histories, cultures and traditions."

"This absurd logic was the logic used in many of the presentations," he added.

What happened at the hearing, which occurred three days after the first state visit to Russia by a president of Ukraine, did not go unnoticed by Ukraine's presidential administration. Volodymyr Ohrysko, foreign affairs aide to President Leonid Kuchma, said on March 4 that Ukraine would not make an issue of the proceedings because they did not reflect the official policy of Russia. "These people are living in the days of the past, and more probably in the days before that," said Mr. Ohrysko.