1998: THE YEAR IN REVIEW

Canada's Ukrainians: facing serious issues

The Ukrainian Canadian community's battle with the federal government over its approach to handling alleged war criminals dominated the news in 1998. The year began with Olya Odynsky calling for a fair trial for her 74-year-old father, Wasyl, of Toronto, who was targeted by the Canadian government for deportation as one of two suspected Nazi war criminals who arrived in Canada allegedly without informing immigration authorities about their pasts. Mr. Odynsky arrived in Halifax in 1949 after having lived in a refugee camp following his arrest by the Nazis when he was 19, wrote his daughter an op-ed piece in The Weekly. "He is not a murderer, nor was he ever a Nazi," she insisted.

In early February, Ms. Odynsky told a gathering in Toronto at the St. Vladimir Institute about the stress her family endured in 1997 after he became the object of denaturalization and deportation proceedings. "[The media] came to my mother's door with hidden microphones and cameras, then showed her picture and played her comments, every hour, on the hour," she said. "They announced my parents' street address and telephone number on the air."

Ms. Odynsky's member of Parliament is former federal justice minister Allan Rock who kicked Canada's war crimes process into high gear. In June, she went to Ukraine looking for witnesses who could corroborate her father's story and his innocence.

Meantime, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress announced in late January that it would challenge Canada's Justice Department in court over its decision to denaturalize and deport 14 citizens suspected of war crimes. "In order to combat what [the UCC] regards to be a grossly unjust course of action by the government against its own citizens," a special committee to deal with the issue was struck earlier in the month. Winnipeg-based immigration lawyer John Petryshyn became chairman of the Justice Committee on Deportation and Denaturalization.

He said the committee would pursue everything from intervention on individual cases based on technical matters through the immigration process, to challenging the constitutionality of the government's "civil not criminal" approach.

Plans were afoot to create an educational research fund on the issue as well.

Federal Court Justice William McKeown ruled in late February that 88-year-old Toronto resident Wasily Bogutin "concealed that he was a collaborator during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine" (assisting in such tasks as "the round-up of young girls"). The judge also said that Mr. Bogutin lied to Canadian immigration officials that he was a "Romanian national" when he applied for a entry visa to Canada in 1951. It was the first Canadian court case focusing on the denaturalization and deportation of accused war criminals since Ottawa abandoned its criminal-court-approach to such cases in 1995.

Though Judge McKeown dismissed allegations that Mr. Bogutin participated in Nazi-led executions in the Selydove area between 1942 and 1943, the elderly man's 40-year-old Canadian citizenship became illegal because of a civil court's decision that he was a collaborator, which is an accusation of criminal behavior. According to a section of the Canadian Immigration Act, Mr. Bogutin could not appeal Judge McKeown's decision.

Nevertheless, then-UCC president Oleh Romaniw called on Prime Minister Jean Chrétien to reject any recommendation to deport or denaturalize the elderly Ukrainian Canadian man.

In late August, Canada's Justice Minister Anne McLellan told the Canadian Bar Association's annual meeting that Canada's newly merged Extradiction Act and Fugitive Offenders Act would "enable Canada to meet its international obligations to hand over suspected war criminals to an international tribunal, such as that in the Hague, or to the new international court, which Canada played a very key role in creating."

Canada's attorney general also highlighted a fivefold increase in funding of the war crimes effort to the tune of $46.8 million (about $33.4 million U.S.) over the next three years. She said it would "strengthen Canada's ability to bring to justice those responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity and other reprehensible acts in times of war."

Meanwhile, Ms. McLellan's war crimes consultant, Neal Sher, the former director of the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, lashed out at his critics, including those from the Ukrainian Canadian community, during a late-January speech at a Toronto synagogue. "They're not doing any service to their communities by circling the wagons to protect some in their community who are guilty."

But Mr. Sher's appointment as a consultant to the Canadian Justice Department's Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Section came under scrutiny at a late-April Canadian parliamentary Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. Official Opposition justice critic Jack Ramsay of the Reform Party requested the meeting in response to protests over Mr. Sher's hiring - and because of the heavy volume of correspondence he received complaining about the OSI's handling of no less than the case against retired Cleveland autoworker John Demjanjuk.

Assistant Deputy Attorney General John Sims defended Mr. Sher, who also appeared as a witness before the committee, saying the U.S. attorney was retained by the Canadian government as "an advisor" and not as "boss of the war crimes unit." Mr. Sims added that Canada's war crimes efforts were "in the same league" as those of the OSI.

In his own defense, Mr. Sher said his OSI reputation was that of a "tough prosecutor but a fair one." He acknowledged allegations that the Soviet regime (the KGB in particular) supplied Nazi hunters with phony evidence but explained that he never encountered instances of such. Furthermore, Mr. Sher suggested that despite the Israeli death sentence being overturned on Mr. Demjanjuk, the Ukrainian American could face new prosecution based on "non-Treblinka evidence." However, he conceded that "mistakes were made that I wish hadn't been made" over the OSI's handling of the Demjanjuk case - considered a "fraud on the court" by two U.S. judges.

The UCC also was unhappy over Mr. Sher's December 1997 appointment and the OSI-Demjanjuk controversy, and it launched an information campaign directed to government officials about both concerns. The Canadian Jewish Congress issued its own communiqué that "strongly reaffirmed its endorsement of Ottawa's choice of Mr. Sher.

In early August, the Ukrainian Canadian Professional and Business Association stepped up the campaign against Mr. Sher's appointment and filed a request for information under Canada's Access to Information Act to obtain information about his hiring. Outgoing UCC Ottawa Branch president Dr. Walter Shelest, however, thought UCC national should have been the organization initiating the request.

And the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association entered the fray when it protested a July 23 cartoon appearing in the national edition of The Globe and Mail depicting a hand decorated with a swastika and raised in a Nazi salute. The accompanying caption read: "All those opposed to increased funding for war-criminal deportation, please raise their hand." UCCLA chairman John Gregorovich called the cartoon defamatory and "hate-mongering that should be dealt with very sternly."

Earlier in the year, Mr. Gregorovich expressed his organization's opposition to a proposed Holocaust memorial at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. Such a gallery would better be called a "genocide gallery," he told the Senate Subcommittee on Veterans' Affairs in February. Mr. Gregorovich also accused war museum officials of not consulting other ethnic groups beyond the Jewish community - and singled out the museum's then-director, Vic Suthren, of focusing solely on the Nazi killing of Jews. The war museum later announced that no Holocaust gallery would be installed there. Much later in the year, the UCC was heartened by comments made by Jules Deschênes, the Quebec Superior Court judge who headed the Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in the mid-1980s, when he publicly supported bringing alleged war criminals to justice in criminal courts rather than through the civil deportation and denaturalization process.

In other news, two plaques - one on the grounds of Toronto's Canadian National Exhibition, the other next to the Shevchenko monument at Manitoba's legislative grounds in Winnipeg - were unveiled to commemorate Ukrainian Canadians interned during a national operation that ran from 1914 to 1920. The Ukrainian Canadian community has yet to receive any acknowledgment of injustice or monetary restitution from Ottawa.

Immigration was a key issue for several Ukrainian Canadian groups that were highly critical of a review of Canada's citizenship and immigration policies released earlier in the year. Among several recommendations raised in the review was the highly sensitive issue of revocation of citizenship and deportation when an individual is suspected to be a war criminal.

This year Statistics Canada reported that Canadians of Ukrainian origin ranked ninth (1,026,475, or about 1 in 30 Canadians) in terms of total number among ethnic groups in Canada; 41,085 reported speaking Ukrainian at home. A quarter-century earlier, Ukrainian had ranked fifth as a home language behind Italian and German.

In a March lecture at the St. Vladimir Institute in Toronto, University of Toronto sociologist Wsevolod Isajiw said that Ukrainian Canadians have difficulty in sustaining their influence on the country's society as a whole. The reason: much of their activity is "expressive" (preserving and promoting) rather than "instrumental" (organizing to achieve political and economic goals).

And it was tough to be Ukrainian, or part of any other non-francophone group for that matter, in Quebec in light of remarks made by Quebec's deputy premier. Bernard Landry opined that requiring anything more than a simple 50 percent majority in a future referendum on independence would give the ethnic community a de facto veto, and, "that can't be done," said Mr. Landry.

Several ethnic groups, in turn, suggested the deputy premier was out of line as the incident reminded Canadians of former Quebec Premier Jacques Parizeau's attack against "money and the ethnic vote" for contributing to the defeat of his "Yes to Sovereignty" campaign in the 1995 referendum.

At the UCC's 19th triennial meeting in Winnipeg on October 9-12, the UCC's national vice-president, Montreal lawyer Evhen Czolij, was elected president of the UCC, which renamed its presidium a board of directors. The so-called Big Six organizations (Ukrainian Catholic Brotherhood of Canada, Ukrainian Self-Reliance League of Canada, League of Ukrainian Canadians, Ukrainian National Federation, Council of Ukrainian Credit Unions of Canada, and the Ukrainian Canadian Professional and Business Federation) lost most of their power in vetoing decisions. However, the group retained some clout in being able to send a maximum of 50 delegates to a congress - twice as many as other non-Big Six organizations. Also new was the presence of simultaneous translation (Ukrainian and English) at the four-day conclave.

Mr. Czolij - at 39, the youngest UCC president in its 48-year history - didn't wait to flex some muscle. During the triennial meeting, he threatened to resign affective immediately if a convention resolution calling for the resignation of Canada's attorney general and suggestions for making the denaturalization and deportation of suspected war criminals the Congress' main priority weren't dropped. They were, though the latter issue remained a priority. The new UCC boss also hinted that national headquarters could be moved from its Winnipeg base.

The UCC also passed resolutions supporting a "united" Canada and increasing opportunities for Ukrainian immigration to Canada. Some delegates accused the Canadian Embassy in Kyiv of being inept in handling applications from would-be immigrants. Some improvement was seen in new immigration agreements between the federal government, provinces and territories in which Ottawa wouldn't be the sole arbiter of determining quotas.

Other UCC congress activities included the establishment of a Youth Leadership Award of Excellence and the presentation of Shevchenko medals to 29 activists including the late Supreme Court of Canada Justice John Sopinka - the first Ukrainian Canadian appointed to the country's highest court.

On October 29-31 the Ukrainian-Canadian Program at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies and the Robert F. Harney Professorship and Program in Ethnic, Immigration and Pluralism Studies at the University of Toronto held a conference titled "Cross-Stitching Cultural Borders: Comparing Ukrainian Experience in Canada and the United States," at which a mix of established scholars and senior graduate students from across North America examined major issues of identity that distinguish the two communities.

Co-organizers Prof. Frances Swyripa (University of Alberta) and Prof. Isajiw elicited presentations and discussions which achieved their respective goals. For Prof. Swyripa, it was to show that the border between Canada and the U.S. is a very real psychological and cultural barrier (with the historical experience of arrival and mainstream integration also differing radically) and yet, on many occasions Ukrainian communities of both countries have managed to interact as if it were not even there. For Prof. Isajiw, it was to refocus scholarly interest on local diaspora concerns, to begin to fill the gaping hole in studies on the life of Ukrainians in the U.S., and to provide an outline of the changes the diaspora on the continent is undergoing.

On a different note, the Toronto-based Petro Jacyk Educational Foundation initiated the nomination of Ukraine's President Leonid Kuchma for the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize "for his outstanding contribution to global security" early in 1998.

Later in the year, Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy bid adieu to outgoing Ukrainian Ambassador to Canada Volodymyr Furkalo at a luncheon at which Mr. Axworthy noted the "real progress in [the] bilateral relations between Canada and Ukraine. Mr. Furkalo was reassigned to Belgrade as ambassador to Yugoslavia; he was replaced in Ottawa by one of Ukraine's former vice minister of foreign affairs, Volodymyr Khandogiy.

In the meantime, Mr. Axworthy's hometown, Winnipeg, elected a new mayor - the first openly gay mayor in Canada. Glen Murray also happens to have Ukrainian roots: his maternal grandmother was born in Ukraine. Joining him in Winnipeg's city council were two Ukrainian-Manitoban councilors. Eleven of the 29 community members also won trustee spots in local school divisions.

And, as the year wound down, the war crimes issue again made headlines when Justice Minister McLellan confirmed that Ottawa had not uncovered any evidence that would initiate court proceedings against any member of the Ukrainian Galicia Division - confirming the conclusions reached by Judge Deschênes during his inquiry.

In response, UCCLA's Mr. Gregorovich expressed his hope that "this would bring to a close media reports about the alleged presence of thousands of Nazi war criminals hiding in Canada."

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, December 27, 1998, No. 52, Vol. LXVI

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