EDITORIAL: Pre-election provocations begin (06/06/99)

EDITORIAL

Pre-election provocations begin

With the official launch of the presidential campaign season in Ukraine a couple of weeks ago on May 14, endorsements and protests have begun to come in. Among the first protest was the recent declaration by the Organization of Russian Ukrainians of its opposition to the election of Leonid Kuchma for his failure to come through on a 1994 campaign promise to make Russian one of the official languages of Ukraine. The organization claims to speak on behalf of the 12 million ethnic Russians in Ukraine.

This declaration comes a few months after the left majority in Ukraine's Parliament passed a non-binding resolution that stated it is not obligatory for elected officials to speak Ukrainian. And that resolution came on the heels of a decision by Parliament to eliminate from pending education legislation a requirement that study of the Ukrainian language be mandatory in secondary schools. Fortunately that bill has not yet been passed.

During the Soviet era, the Ukrainian language was not seen as a threat by Communist Party officials and, therefore, was treated as the accepted language of ritual in the republic, though for serious work the preferred language was Russian. In 1989, now seen by many young scholars in Ukraine as a more nationally conscious period than today, Ukrainian was officially designated the state language. However, older scholars, who remember several decades of Soviet rule, note that this seemingly nationally conscious gesture was not the result of pride in things Ukrainian.

"Remember," says Dr. Yuri Shapoval, a history and politics scholar at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, "this was still the time of [First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine Volodymyr] Scherbytsky, who had no great love for Ukrainian. He agreed to give the language official status for purposes of ritual. Not because he was nationally conscious - he simply did not have any respect for the language, did not take it seriously. He did not perceive the Ukrainian language as a threat, therefore, it did not cost him anything to declare, on paper, officially, that it was the state language."

Now, however, the Ukrainian language has come to be seen as a threat. For, no matter how weak its usage in Ukraine - and in most areas it is very weak - any usage at all implies, fundamentally, a separation from things Russian. For those who do not want separation from Russia and things Russian, this threat of things Ukrainian must be reduced. Therefore, even though it is almost impossible to find any genuine examples of government repression of Russian speakers in Ukraine, the Organization of Russian Ukrainians nonetheless accuses the government of President Kuchma of "establishing a policy directed at a massive expulsion of the Russian ethno-cultural factor from all aspects of society."

This false issue of linguistic and ethnic repression of Russians in Ukraine is only among the first of what will no doubt become a series of pre-election provocations and diversions. The Kuchma government cannot be seriously accused of repressing Russian-language speakers and expelling the Russian ethno-cultural factor from all aspects of society. For that matter, the government cannot be held accountable for doing much of anything good or terrible regarding the enactment or enforcement of any coherent language policy. The language factor is simply used as political leverage during election campaigns and to grandstand in between - but otherwise is not taken seriously, even though it should be. However, this cynical manipulation of language as part of a political game is not without consequences. In 1994, Mr. Kuchma used the language lever to his political benefit; now those same voters plan to use that lever against him.

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