Advance coverage of Chrétien visit creates controversy back home (01/31/99)

Advance coverage of Chrétien visit creates controversy back home

by Christopher Guly
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

OTTAWA - The first visit by a Canadian prime minister to independent Ukraine was meant to reinforce the close ties between Canada and Ukraine.

Instead, some advance coverage of the event in Canada has created controversy.

On the eve of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's departure for his weeklong European tour to Ukraine, Poland, Germany and Switzerland, a reporter with one of Canada's daily national newspapers suggested Mr. Chrétien will have to be "mindful" of "the enmities" between Canada's Ukrainian and Jewish communities.

Jeff Sallot, a reporter with The Globe and Mail's parliamentary bureau in Ottawa, wrote about the "tricky political two-step" that Prime Minister Chrétien was about to engage in.

Three days before arriving in Kyiv January 27 for a 24-hour visit, Mr. Chrétien was to become the first Canadian prime minister to visit the Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps in Poland where millions of Jews died at the hands of the Nazis.

While in Kyiv, the prime minister was to become the first Western leader to lay a wreath at the monument to victims of the Great Famine, which was erected in 1994 to commemorate the millions of Ukrainians who died in the Soviet-engineered artificial famine in 1932-1933. Though intended to be a preview to Mr. Chrétien's European visit, Mr. Sallot's January 22 story has been criticized as being more of an editorial. The Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association took exception to the journalist's references to Canada's controversial approach in handling suspected war criminals.

"Tensions between the Jewish and Ukrainian communities date back to the persecution and murder of Jews in Ukraine during the war and the post-war influx of European refugees to Canada," Mr. Sallot wrote. "There were a number of Ukrainian war criminals, former soldiers and police officers in Hitler's service, who slipped into Canada in the refugee stream." He added that while Jewish groups "urge the prosecution of suspected war criminals, many in the Ukrainian community see this as the needless hounding of a small handful of very old men."

In a letter sent to The Globe and Mail, a copy of which this publication received, a spokesperson for the UCCLA accused Mr. Sallot of repeating the "canard" about Ukrainian war criminals entering Canada. UCCLA Special Projects Director Borys Sydoruk also took exception to the reporter's take on the Ukrainian Canadian community's view of dealing with suspected war criminals.

"That statement is what we call a red herring," wrote Mr. Sydoruk. "The organized Ukrainian Canadian community's position remains that all war criminals found in Canada, regardless of their ethnic, religious or racial origin, or the period or place where a crime against humanity or war crime was committed, should be brought to trial in Canada under Canadian criminal law."

Those who oppose such a position and support denaturalization and deportation "do so, as they freely admit, because they haven't got serious evidence of the sort required to successfully prosecute these very old Canadians in criminal courts," he added.

In another letter sent to the Globe, Volodymyr Halchuk, president of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress Council in Sudbury, Ontario, wrote: "Small groups of zealots in each community have aggravated the relationships between Jews and Ukrainians since before the turn of the first millennium" and "focusing on the 'tensions' is irresponsible." Mr. Halchuk told The Weekly that Mr. Sallot only "added to the misunderstandings rather than the understandings between the two communities."

Meanwhile, UCCLA Chairman John Gregorovich called on Prime Minister Chrétien to take advantage of his visit to the national Famine memorial in Kyiv to announce the development of a "Canadian Museum of Genocides" in Ottawa.

"A genocide museum would be inclusive, recalling not only the horrors that befell many Europeans during the Nazi Holocaust but also the other genocides suffered by many different nations in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America in the 20th century," said Mr. Gregorovich, who is also heading up a multi-ethnic group called Canadians for a Genocide Museum, in a January 23 statement.

Making such an announcement in Kyiv, instead of Auschwitz, however, could indeed prove to become a political misstep for the Canadian government considering that Canadian Jewish groups have lobbied for a Holocaust memorial. And the UCCLA seemed to recognize that, issuing another statement. It stated that "... we are certain that the prime minister is very much aware of the fact that millions of non-Jews perished during the Holocaust. We believe that his tour of the infamous Auschwitz camp will remind him of that fact and ensure that, if and when the issue of a Genocide Museum or Holocaust Museum in Ottawa is raised again, he will ensure that any such federally funded museum is inclusive, recalling the sufferings and losses of all of the nations victimized by Nazi tyranny."

The prime minister has already felt the sting of overlooking multicultural sensibilities back home.

Polish Canadian leaders have chastised Mr. Chrétien for failing to include representatives from their 400,000-member community - including Nazi victims - in his visit to Auschwitz, where he was accompanied by a Jewish death camp survivor from Toronto and members of the Canadian Jewish community. According to the Prime Minister's Office, the Polish Canadian Congress declined an invitation to meet with trade officials in Poland.

And, while the UCCLA welcomed Mr. Chrétien's visit to Auschwitz, it also expressed concern "about the lack of any official representation from the Ukrainian Canadian community."

"Few appreciate that Ukraine lost more of its people during the second world war than any other nation in Nazi-occupied Europe," said Mr. Gregorovich. He added that one of the association's members, death camp survivor Stefan Petelycky, "offered to pay his own way to attend the commemorative service" but the PMO "never took him up on that offer."

Mr. Chrétien's visit to Ukraine, which was slated to include meetings with President Leonid Kuchma and Prime Minister Valerii Pustovoitenko, was meant to highlight other issues however.

"In terms of the objectives with respect to Ukraine, the key is promoting the political economic reform agenda," said Jim Wright, director-general of the Central, East and South Europe Bureau of the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. "Ukraine, of course, is key to a stable Central and Eastern Europe, and Canada has been a very strong backer of an independent Ukraine."

He said the prime minister's visit was meant to "reinforce Canada's strategic partnership with Ukraine and our commitment to assist it in its difficult transition."

How difficult that transition is was perhaps best highlighted in the media itinerary for Mr. Chrétien's four-state visit which noted that U.S. dollars "are recommended" in Ukraine.

Michael Kergin, assistant Cabinet secretary in foreign and defense policy at the Canadian Privy Council Office, explained that Prime Minister Chrétien would tell President Kuchma and Prime Minister Pustovoitenko "to stay the course on reform" and underline "the importance of undertaking banking and opening market reforms in order to continue to receive [International Monetary Fund] support."

Others issues to be raised included Ukraine's concerns, which Canada shares, about its peacekeeping mission in Bosnia "given the investment that we've all made in terms of peace and stability in the Balkans [and] not to see it undone because of Kosovo," said a Canadian government spokesperson during a press briefing on January 21.

It is believed that during his January 28 morning meeting with Prime Minister Pustovoitenko, Prime Minister Chrétien would discuss the case of a 6-year-old Montreal boy abducted by his mother last June and taken to Kyiv. The child's father in 38-year-old cancer researcher Dr. Yury Monczak of Montreal.

Accompanying Mr. Chrétien on his visit to Ukraine is a group of Canadian businesspeople, primarily from the agricultural, construction and energy sectors - the latter of which has been a prime focus for the Canadian government as part of its Chornobyl-related assistance.

Originally, the commercial component of the trip was intended to be more significant as it was to be a "Team Canada" trade mission involving Canadian premiers and business leaders. But that idea got shelved when the Canadian government postponed the Russian leg of the trip to later in 1999 in light of that country's economic woes.

Also included in the Canadian delegation to Ukraine are two members of Parliament of Ukrainian descent: Walt Lastewka of St. Catharines, Ontario (who also serves as parliamentary secretary to the federal Industry Minister John Manley), and Lou Sekora of the Vancouver riding of Port Moody-Coquitlam-Port Coquitlam, as well as Oleh Romaniw, a Winnipeg lawyer and former president of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress.

Also during his Kyiv visit Prime Minister Chrétien was to answer questions from some 150 Ukrainian students enrolled at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy in Kyiv on January 27. As one Canadian government spokesperson said, it would give the prime minister the opportunity "to show his personality."

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