NEWS ANALYSIS: Plast and its struggle for recognition by world scouting movement

by Oksana Zakydalsky

KYIV - When the scouting organization Plast was reborn in Ukraine in 1990, it was assumed that, for the first time in history, Ukraine would become part of the worldwide scouting movement, a member of the World Organization of Scouting Movements (WOSM).

Plast grew in terms of members (today it has a membership of 10,000); embraced every region in Ukraine (by 1999, when the last oblast, Sumy, reported a Plast group, there were Plast groups in every one of the 25 oblasts and Crimea); registered as a national organization and in 2000 received the coveted "national" designation; sent large groups to two world scout jamborees (1995 and 1999-2000); developed a leadership training program that has been acknowledged to be among the best in Ukraine (according to the Canadian Bureau of International Education which has used Plast in several of its CIDA funded civil society programs funded by the Canadian International Development Agency). And yet, the prize of membership in the WOSM has remained out of reach.

The biggest blow in that respect came in October 1999 when the WOSM Committee sent a letter to Plast saying that it was favoring another organization, Scouts of Ukraine (SU), as the potential WOSM member for the country.

At the time, Scouts of Ukraine was not even a legally registered national organization but a loose confederation of several scouting organizations - the largest being Sich and the Association of Scouts of Ukraine (ASU). Sich subsequently left the SU and to this day SU has not been legally registered.

Since its establishment in 1998, the SU has been advised by Oleksander Bondar, director of the Eurasia Region of the World Scout Bureau, and Jean Cassaigneau, former director of relationships and special events for the bureau and, since the beginning of 2000, director of world events.

[Note: In order to be a legal national organization and have its own bank account, every organization in Ukraine has to register with the Ministry of Justice, provide a copy of its constitution, report procedures followed at its founding meeting and show that it has branches in at least 14 regions.]

On April 20-21 of this year, the Scouts of Ukraine held a meeting in Puscha Vodytsia, a few miles outside Kyiv, the genesis and procedures of which so infuriated some of the participants and people involved in scouting in Ukraine that they wanted to make the facts public, since one of the possible consequences of this meeting might be a decision by the WOSM about who will represent Ukraine in the international scouting movement.

I met with Nadia Melnychuk, president of Scouts of Dnipropetrovsk, or Skif (a regional scouting organization); Denys Masmai, who heads the SU branch in Kerch and is a member of the SU national council; and Volodomyr Dovbyshchenko, former head of SU.

Ms. Melnychuk confirmed that both Oleksander Bondar and Jean Cassaigneau of the World Scout Bureau were in Puscha Vodytsia, although they did not attend the meeting itself.

I asked Nadia to relate how she came to be in Puscha Vodytsia. She explained:

"We received an invitation from Scouts of Ukraine to their meeting to be held in Kyiv on April 20-21. Although we are not members of the SU, we are in contact with Mr. Oleksander Bondar, who has been promoting SU as the group around which scouting in Ukraine should be organized. We received the invitation by e-mail; it included the date of the meeting and said that all costs would be covered by the organizers. The invitation was signed by Oleksander Kuzmenko, the national secretary of SU. To find out about the meeting program, I called the telephone numbers provided but was told that the program was not yet ready and would be given out at registration. Our organization chose me and Uliana Ryzhko to go to the meeting," she said.

"When we arrived at Puscha Vodytsia we were told that our work would begin not at a SU meeting but at a conference dealing with the human rights of children. We would work on a resolution that was to be presented at a Special Session on Children of the U.N. General Assembly [planned for September 19-21]. This conference was part of a worldwide UNICEF project in preparation for that session. Booklets with the resolution (about 10 pages of tiny print in Russian) were distributed and we were told to analyze the text and provide some input. I asked why we had not been provided with copies of the resolution beforehand, but received no answer. We were then gathered together in a large room and told to sign up for one of four groups, Youth and Health, Youth and Education, Youth and Initiative and Youth and Family, and to go and work on the resolution document," she related.

I asked Mr. Masmai how he had come to be at the meeting. He said that he was a member of the SU national council and received notification by e-mail to take part in a meeting of the national council to discuss SU's registration. He had no idea there would be a UNICEF-sponsored conference.

Ms. Melnychuk said that, when they broke up into groups, there were about 50 people at the conference and that they had come in response to various invitations and notifications. Some had invitations to the UNICEF conference - these were mostly people who had come under the auspices of the Centers of Youth Social Services, government centers that exist throughout Ukraine and fall under the ministry responsible for youth. The youth centers had received telegrams from the Kyiv Center of Youth Social Services, whose director is SU National Secretary Kuzmenko. They were asked to send people who would be able to take part in a meeting of Scouts of Ukraine.

Mr. Kuzmenko also heads an organization called SPOK (Spilka Pionerskykh Orhanizatsii Kyeva which lately has been calling itself Spilka Dytiachykh Orhanizatsii Kyeva). SPOK is a volunteer (hromadska) organization and a member of SU. Other organizations - Skifs from Dnipropetrovsk, and groups which belong to another scouting organization, the Association of Scouts of Ukraine (ASU) from Luhansk, Sumy, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia received invitations to a meeting of SU and did not know about the conference.

The UNICEF conference lasted from 4 p.m. through the evening; comments on the UNICEF resolution were discussed and gathered from the four groups and representatives from the groups wrote up a revised version of the resolution. The following day this version was read out to all the participants of the conference, who were then asked to vote on it. But it was read out that the resolution was being submitted by the SU organization. Ms. Melnychuk said that she stood up and corrected this point, saying that the resolution was being submitted not only by the SU but also by representatives of the youth centers and scouting organizations that were not members of SU. A correction to the final version of the resolution was promised and this was recorded in the minutes of the conference. The UNICEF conference ended at 10:30 a.m. and at 11 a.m. the SU meeting was due to start.

However, Ms. Melnychuk said, the SU had already been discussed the previous evening. One representative from each region had been invited to the organizers' room for an informal gathering. On seeing them, Volodymyr Vovk, a government official from the Cabinet of Ministers, expressed pleasure that 22 regions were represented whereas, he said, only 14 were needed to register a national organization.

Ms. Melnychuk continued: "At this point I asked for an explanation of where we were - we had been invited to a meeting of SU, arrived at a UNICEF conference and were now being informed that we were at a founding meeting of a new organization. No explanation was provided. Instead, we were told that those who did not want to take part could leave. One boy left and the atmosphere in the room became very strained. The organizers tried to explain the importance of setting up a single scouting organization in Ukraine so that it could lobby scouting interests with the authorities. They maintained that scouting was entitled to government funding and referred to the fact that there were important people associated with Scouts of Ukraine such as Volodymyr Vovk and Rostyslav Kandeyev - a Kyiv municipal deputy. Volodymyr Vovk added - and I particularly remember his words: 'I am a government employee and am not allowed to join any commercial structures in order to make money but, on the other hand, a volunteer (hromadska) organization...' He did not finish the sentence."

Ms. Melnychuk related that at the evening gathering a girl from Ternopil, who was a member of Plast, said that when the local youth center had asked her to go as a representative, they told her not to mention the fact that she belonged to Plast. The Ternopil Youth Center had received instructions from Kyiv that no Plast members were to be sent to the meeting in Kyiv, Ms. Melnychuk added.

"When I continued to press for an answer as to what kind of meeting this was turning out to be, Oleksander Kuzmenko told me I could not have received an invitation to an SU meeting; I could only have been invited to the UNICEF conference. I said a copy of the e-mail could be faxed to Kyiv the next day," she related. "But he continued to insist that I could not have been invited to an SU meeting and added that the SU meeting that would begin the next day would be open only to those who supported the idea of SU or were already members. No guests would be allowed."

"Then Oleksander Kuzmenko asked me to step out 'for a smoke.' The two of us were joined by Serhiy Kapustin, an employee of the Kyiv Youth Center, and Mykola (assistant director of the Kyiv Youth Center - I can't remember the surname) in another room. Kuzmenko told me that I had been invited to the SU meeting at the request of Oleksander Bondar and added: 'try and guess why.' I didn't want to play their games and asked why they had insisted, in front of everyone, that I had never been issued an invitation. They laughed that off and repeated that I was there only because Oleksander Bondar had wanted me to be there. Then they tried to find out the Skif position with respect to SU. I answered that I had no position as I didn't even know what the SU was supposed to be," Ms. Melnychuk said.

She continued: "I said that we were very interested in the creation of a single scouting organization in Ukraine and were ready to work with such an organization - if it was set up for the sake of children and young people whose interests this organization would serve. They answered that, first of all, it was important to have an organization which would lobby scouting interests. I replied that I did not consider that a priority and pointed out that they wanted to set up a united scouting organization and apply for WOSM membership and yet had not included Plast, which had thousands of members in Ukraine and was an organization of genuine scouts. I asked, 'how could you honestly claim to be working for scouting interests when you made sure that Plast wasn't even here.' "

The next day, when registration for the SU meeting began - the Luhansk, Zaporizhia and Donetsk ASU groups didn't even show up. But Ms. Melnychuk, Plast members from Kirovohrad and Rivne oblasts, tried to find out how they could gain entrance to the meeting to which they had been invited. When Nadia asked to be registered as a guest, she was refused and again told she did not receive any invitation to the meeting (in spite of the fact that the previous evening Mr. Kuzmenko had admitted that such an invitation had been sent at the request of Mr. Bondar). She was also told that the decision not to admit guests had been made by the national council, a fact that Mr. Masmai denied, then and there. Ms. Melnychuk then made a request to have the participants of the meeting vote on whether to admit guests.

Asked how many people were at the meeting, Ms. Melnychuk answered: "As six oblasts had refused to accept the conditions set out to be admitted, 16 regions were left. This meant 32 people plus eight from the national council, which would make it about 40 people total Those refused entry waited at the guarded door. There was no answer from the meeting, so I proposed that we put our request in writing and hand it over to the meeting. As we began to write up the statement, we were told that the meeting was over. It had lasted about one hour - one and a half maximum."

It became obvious that the whole meeting had been scripted. Mr. Kuzmenko proposed Mr. Vovk, who was elected head of Scouts of Ukraine. A new position of chief scout (holovnyi skaut) was created and Mr. Kandeyev, the municipal deputy who has never been a member of any scouting organization, was named to the post. The constitution was accepted, although copies of it were not distributed. All those present received declarations of membership in the Scouts of Ukraine and were asked to put down how many people from their region they represented, as if they had been delegated by them.

"I talked to several of the regional representatives - the boy from Poltava had told me that morning that he had just come along for the ride and had no idea what the meeting was for. But at the meeting he signed a declaration saying he had been delegated by 24 people," Ms. Melnychuk said.

Why did the people at the meeting go along with the proposals of the organizers?

Ms. Melnychuk explained: "People had no idea about what was happening. Those who worked for the Youth Centers were intimidated and feared they might lose their jobs if they did not cooperate. I would estimate about half of the people present were sent by the centers. The people who had come were mostly very young; for example, the representative from Kharkiv was a Grade 8 student. What kind of decisions can a child like that make?"

Asked for her explanation of what had taken place at Puscha Vodytsia, she answered: "It is my personal opinion that it was an attempt of state employees to create a state scouting organization. They are very interested in the international contacts that scouting can provide. Also, they would be able to control the organization because they have the means to channel state money into it. They get funding from the state for social projects which can then be called scouting projects. Because SU is to be led by state employees like Kuzmenko and Kapustin, the state programs and scouting programs can be meshed together. I think their talk about the need to lobby for scouting means that their ultimate goal is to have scouting financed through the state budget."

What was the point of the UNICEF conference before the meeting? According to Ms. Melnychuk, it was organized "to take advantage of the funds available under the UNICEF program to hold a meeting of SU using UNICEF funds. I am sure that they will only report the conference to UNICEF, not the fact the funds were also used to hold the SU meeting."

What did she think would be the next step? Ms. Melnychuk responded: "I think that the new leaders of the SU will try to register this organization as soon as possible. They collected membership declarations from people which said that founding meetings had been held in the regions - their hurry tells me that they want to register quickly in order to demonstrate to WOSM that they exist, knowing that they already have the backing of the World Scout Bureau. The process of their registration has been dragging on since 1998."

Mr. Masmai explained that, although the first meeting of SU had been held in 1998, since then some documents which were needed for registration had been lost. For example, he said that the original membership declaration from Kerch was missing.

Volodymyr Dovbyschenko, a member of the Sich scouting organization, was elected head of SU in October 2000. At that meeting he took on the responsibility of registering SU as a national organization by the end of March 2001 in order to apply to WOSM in April 2001. Mr. Kuzmenko, the SU national secretary, was to be responsible for the technical aspects of the registration. When the registration process was going nowhere and it became obvious to Mr. Dovbyschenko that it would not be completed on time, on March 16, 2001, he resigned his position as head of SU. Although he had not been present at the April 20-21 meeting (he had not been invited) he was very concerned about what had occurred.

He explained: "The meeting which took place was against the rules of the SU constitution, which I wrote, and which was passed by the general meeting in October 2000. The constitution says that SU meetings must be called by the national council. How this meeting was organized and the procedures that were followed there make it unlawful both with respect to the SU constitution and the rules of the state. As a scout and as a Ukrainian citizen, I would like to express my objection to what took place. Although they were not present at the meeting, I know that Oleksander Bondar and Jean Cassaigneau were there, but I believe that neither Mr. Bondar nor Mr. Cassaigneau were informed about how the meeting was called or about the procedures that were followed.

"The organization created at Puscha Vodytsia was set up by a government structure. The meeting was an event organized by the Kyiv Youth Center and Mr. Kuzmenko, its director, was there as a government employee. The UNICEF funding proves that the meeting was not a scouting event - only an event of the centers of youth social services. They have created an organization that will be run by government employees and officials, and it will reflect their kind of scouting. The inclusion of the government in the actual creation of a scouting organization is against the essence of scouting."

Formal letters informing the Ministry of Justice of the true nature of the events surrounding the SU meeting have been sent by some of the participants in the event that SU applies for registration.

The absence of the rules of a civil society in Ukraine has derailed many attempts to set up truly independent national non-governmental organizations. In this respect, Plast has been one of the exceptions - its 10-year history as a volunteer organization and expansion into all regions of independent Ukraine proves both its relevance and its sustainability as a scouting organization.

Is it not time that the WOSM and the World Scout Bureau, instead of promoting dubious initiatives which seem to have their own agendas, gave Plast the attention it deserves?

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, May 20, 2001, No. 20, Vol. LXIX

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