ANALYSIS: Kuchma speaks about achievements of independence (09/02/01)

ANALYSIS

Kuchma speaks about achievements of independence

by Jan Maksymiuk
RFE/RL Poland, Belarus and Ukraine Report

"Independent Ukraine came into being ultimately and irrevocably," President Leonid Kuchma said in Kyiv on August 23 at a gala meeting to mark the 10th anniversary of the country's independence.

Mr. Kuchma said some 17 million young people have been educated in schools and educational institutions of independent Ukraine. "We have a potentially powerful human resource, not burdened with canons of the past, which is capable of taking responsibility for the future," Interfax quoted the Ukrainian president as saying.

Mr. Kuchma stressed that the nation's main achievement in the past 10 years is the peaceful way in which Ukraine's independence has been established.

"One thing is beyond doubt: the Ukrainian state has never taken up arms against its citizens, and its soldiers have not fought against other countries," President Kuchma said.

Mr. Kuchma noted, however, that this peaceful way of building Ukraine's independence has had its price, too. "We were forced to make grave compromises with enemies of democracy, private ownership, free entrepreneurship, [as well as] of the independence and statehood," he said.

The Ukrainian leader admitted that "the results of the decade [of independence] are not such as we would like to see them or such as they could be." But, he added, "great deeds are [usually] accompanied by great difficulties."

President Kuchma took advantage of the solemn occasion to stress his own role in Ukraine's transformation: "As the head of state, I have demonstrated to Ukrainian society and the entire world my dedication to the lawful, generally accepted democratic principles of resolving the problems [that surfaced during Ukraine's transformation]," he said.

The Ukrainian Weekly, a respected publication of the Ukrainian diaspora, interviewed a number of Ukrainian politicians "from different points on the Ukrainian political horizon" on what they think is the greatest achievement of Ukraine's 10 years of independence. The Weekly's correspondent reported in the paper's August 26 issue: "The response, although less than enthusiastic and optimistic, nonetheless succinctly explains an incontrovertible fact: State independence is in and of itself by far the most important achievement for a Ukrainian nation that suffered over 300 years of imperial hegemony, according to the politicians we queried. Everything else is secondary and simply follows logically from that which happened first."

From July 25 to August 5, the GfK-USM polling center conducted a survey among 1,000 Ukrainians on their assessment of the first decade of independent Ukraine. Of those polled, 32.2 percent said "not everything took place [in independent Ukraine] as it should have," while 51.5 percent said "everything took place in the way it should not have." Only 6.6 percent declared that "everything took place as it should have," while 9.7 percent were unable to answer the question.

In a poll conducted by the Oleksander Razumkov Center for Economic and Political Studies among 2,007 adult Ukrainians on August 14-23, 80.5 percent of respondents said they would participate in a referendum on Ukraine's independence if such a referendum were organized today, and 67.9 percent of them declared that they would back Ukraine's independence. In comparison, in the December 1991 referendum, Ukraine's independence was supported by some 91 percent of voters.

The same poll found that 51.1 percent of Ukrainians believe that Ukraine has failed to become an independent state in the 10 years following the declaration of its independence; and only 36.6 percent said Ukraine actually is an independent state.

Jan Maksymiuk is the Belarus, Ukraine and Poland specialist on the staff of RFE/RL Newsline.

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