Waiting

As the wait for the opening of talks between the president and the opposition continues, and the protests go on, it's perhaps as well to consider that Ukraine's struggle has always been a twofold one: while the first stage of the struggle, independence, has been won, the second stage, which will decide what kind of a country Ukraine is to become, is still being fought.

Earlier this year the Canadian academic and political commentator Taras Kuzio pointed out that

Those who refuse to criticize President Kuchma should bear in mind his presiding over a Ukraine that is going to commemorate the 1654 Pereiaslav Treaty and Ukrainian Communist Volodymyr Shcherbytsky's 85th anniversary, while continuing to refuse to honor the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) as genuine veterans and freedom fighters.

And Kuzio asked:

Does the Ukrainian diaspora wish to support this kind of Ukraine which is being subjected to what Ukrainian scholars are increasingly describing as the country's "Little Russianization?"

Not only the Ukrainian diaspora, but the Western world as a whole needs to ask this question, for in the answer to it may lie the future of entire areas of modern democratic practice. The fate of Europe, in particular, is acutely bound up in it.

What we see in Ukraine today is a continuation and development of the processes that took place in Eastern Europe and parts of the Soviet Union during the second half of the 1980s.

Roman Szporluk, Professor of History at Harvard University, says that

The Ukrainian crisis today brings to mind events in Poland in late 1988 and in 1989. Under the pressure of the popular democratic movement Solidarity the Communist rulers of Poland agreed to negotiate with leaders of the democratic forces and undertook to conduct an honest parliamentary election. In order to ensure that the election would be truly free, the Communists allowed the democrats access to the mass media, including TV. In the election the democrats won a convincing victory and the Communist establishment accepted the nation's verdict. In August 1989, Poland had a government headed by one of the opposition leaders. There was no violence, no arrests, no revenge.

Professor Szporluk also points to some other 20th century historical precedents:

In a situation like this, a law-abiding citizen has to ask whether he or she is obliged to obey an authority that is engaged in breaking the fundamental laws of the state. Thousands of people are now demonstrating in the capital of Kiev and in other cities and towns of Ukraine in order to defend their democratic rights and the state constitution. Especially impressive is the participation of the younger generation, including university students, which is understandable because they are the people who were young children in 1991 when democracy seemed to have been coming to Ukraine. They feel that their struggle for fair elections is legitimate even if it appears to be in opposition to the established authorities.

A historian knows that there are certain turning points in history when resistance to the ruling powers is justified and indeed is a moral duty of the citizen. Nobody questions the decision of Charles de Gaulle to defy the French parliament and the head of the French state, Marshal Petain, when they established a collaborationist regime in France in 1940. Looking back at Hitler's rise to power, many people now understand that he should have been resisted as early as 1933, even though his appointment as chancellor of the German state was consistent with legal formalities. These examples are not to suggest that President Kuchma or Viktor Yanukovich are comparable to Petain or Hitler. But they do provide historical support, just as in a different way does the case of Poland in 1989, to those who believe in the supremacy of a law that respects the fundamental human rights of the individual and the sovereignty of the nation. The decision is now in the hands of President Kuchma. It is not too late for him to uphold the integrity of the law.
(JRL #8468)