Ok, so this is a belated birthday post, but here is a video from our small celebration and card signing in Kyiv on the 18th. The event was held by the Eastern European Development Institute, the Nigerian Community of Kyiv and the African Center. Special guest speakers included the Ambassador of South Africa and Mr. Stanislaw Cieniuch, the first Ambassador of Poland to South Africa.
Of course, this pales in comparison to the crowd of over 40,000 that came out for the celebration in Hyde Park. 46,664 to be exact.
46664 is an African response to the global HIV AIDS epidemic that invites the whole world to take the fight in hand. It’s our aim to raise awareness overall and educate the younger generations in particular. By gaining global backing for the cause, we will also raise funds to directly assist the many HIV AIDS projects we support. We intend to do this by using our international ambassadors to spread our messages of hope, our calls to action, our pleas for compassion and our requests for assistance and support for those living with HIV AIDS.
46664 (we say four, double six, six four) was Nelson Mandela’s prison number when he was imprisoned on Robben Island, off Cape Town in South Africa. He was jailed in 1964 for 27 years for leading the liberation movement against apartheid and for his impassioned stance on the rights of everyone to live in freedom. He was prisoner number 466, imprisoned in 1964. The Robben Island prisoners were never referred to by their names, but rather by their numbers and year of imprisonment - hence 46664 was Nelson Mandela’s number…
It was for precisely this reason that Mr. Mandela decided to use this powerful, symbolic number in the fight against HIV AIDS. Through this simple, poignant means he has demonstrated and communicated to the world that people must never be reduced to simple numbers - we are human beings, all equal, and those infected and living with HIV AIDS have the same right to live and to be treated as equals…
It is continually imperative for us at 46664 to make an impact on a global scale in order to draw attention to the HIV AIDS issue; so far we have had success thanks to a worldwide audience of over 1 billion people either viewing or listening to our concerts on TV, radio and the internet…
We will continue to produce these unique concerts combining international, local and African artists joining together symbolically onstage to demonstrate their support for Mr. Mandela’s 46664 campaign. We will also be staging significant sporting and other entertainment events worldwide. Nevertheless a major part of our effort now will involve promoting community outreach campaigns that will encourage people to participate in discussions, educational activities, volunteer work and prevention, care and treatment support programmes. To do this we often partner with governments, NGOs and the private sector.
So, I suppose it is about time for a personal update while I wait for my laundry to finish up.
First, Happy Birthday Mom!
And Happy belated Independence Day. Unfortunately, being a Fulbright doesn’t get you an invitation to the fancy Embassy 4th of July Party and it looks like the American Chamber of Commerce Picnic is going to be rained out today. Oh well. To be honest, I see fireworks from my apartment almost every night so they’ve sadly lost their charm.
Here are some pictures of Kyiv I took the other day while wandering near Universitet metro:
A Ministry building of some sort:
Lovely fountain:
Well, I have officially moved on to my extension project. The focus has significantly narrowed. At first, I had planned to do more review of research than original research by collecting and drawing connections between existing material (the little there is) on the rise of xenophobic violence and attitudes in Ukraine. Now, I will be concentrating on the experience of foreign students in Kyiv. There is only one pre-existing study that we know of, so it is going to be more original research than I had intended to collect, but I think it will be worth it. Over the next two months, we will be gathering focus groups of students from a selection of Kyiv’s universities to find out what the process has been like from the beginning (in their home country) to the point they are at now, and how their experiences in Ukraine have affected them. Just from collecting background information and making initial student contacts, I think this is going to be a really interesting project and it will say a lot not only about the life of international students in Ukraine, but also about the larger situation facing foreigners in Kyiv and the Ukrainian higher educational system.
I spent a semester of my own in an Ukrainian university in Chernivtsi (voted, by the way, to be the best city in Ukraine to live in. Sorry, available in Russian only) I never had to deal directly with the administration of the university, but I also never feared for my safety the way my African student friends here do. Just from reports from students who have attempted to talk to their administrators to address their concerns and improve safety on campuses, it seems the administrations are fairly inaccessible and lack a serious attitude about the threatening situation facing their students.
I should probably explain the title of the post at some point, right? From my apartment in Kyiv, I can either walk or take buses or marshrutkas to wherever I need to go. The 527 is one of those marshrutkas, and yesterday, I passed up my 2 hryvnia bill and patiently waited for my change. As I noticed the driver was not making any effort to pass the change back to me, I looked above the windshield to see that the price had jumped up to 2 hryvnias a ride from it’s original 1.75. To put it into perspective, it’s not that big of a jump. 2 hryvnias is roughly 44 cents. But still! Inflation is taking its toll and the dollar is slowly, but surely dropping in value in Ukraine. I guess the hryvnia couldn’t stay at 5 to the dollar forever. It has since 2005.
Inflation, however, is definitely making life harder with an overall rate somewhere between 25 and 31%. Everything from rent prices to taxis to the price of meat and fruit is going up, up, up. When (if) I leave to come back to Buffalo on September 10th, I may be getting out just in time to save a few bucks.
Speaking of coming back to Buffalo, I’m going to need a job. Anybody have any ideas? After seeing that the U.S. lost another 62,000 jobs, I’m feeling a little nervous.
- He’s Ukrainian!
(In part at least.) He’s the son of a Ukrainian Jewish father and a black mother of Caribbean descent. Kravitz considers himself both Christian and Jewish, describing the faiths as “all the same to me.” He also notes that the melange of spirituality he inherited “has been an important issue in my growth.”
-His father, Sy Kravitz, was a news producer for NBC television. He was also a jazz promoter, which allowed him to make friends with Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Bobby Short, Miles Davis and other jazz greats. Ellington played ‘Happy Birthday’ for little Lenny one year.
- In 1993, Kravitz wrote ‘Line Up’ for Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, and appeared on Mick Jagger’s solo album ‘Wandering Spirit’, in doing a version of Bill Withers’ soul classic, ‘Use Me’. That year Kravitz also got to work with his idols Al Green and Curtis Mayfield, two of the great names in soul.
- He’s a vegetarian. Which is a shame for him really, as he’ll miss out on great Ukrainian cuisine such as shashlyk and salo.
I know I raised some alarm with my last post on racial issues in Ukraine, and there is good reason to be alarmed. But at the same rate, ground has been gained. A couple weeks ago, there was the first conviction of a violent crime using Article 161 of the Criminal Code:
The Darnytsky District Court on Friday issued its verdict over the killing of Nigerian national Kunyon Myevi Hodi* in Kyiv near the metro station “Poznyaki” on 25 October 2006.
Of the group of four people whom the criminal investigation unit believed involved in the attack or present at it, one appeared as a witness and one came under an amnesty as being underage.
The other two were both convicted.
One was found guilty of murder (Article 115 § 2 of the Criminal Code) and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment and of inciting racial hatred and enmity and denigrating a person’s ethnic honour and dignity (Article 161 § 3) and received a four year term of imprisonment. Since the sentences are to be partially merged (under Article 70 of the Criminal Code), he was sentenced to 11 years imprisonment. The sentence is counted from 15 November 2006.
The other was found guilty of inciting racial hatred and enmity and denigrating a person’s ethnic honour and dignity (Article 161 § 2) and received a four and a half year term of imprisonment. This sentence is counted from November 2006.
In passing sentence, among other considerations, aggravating circumstances were taken into account – the fact that at the time of the crime, the men were in a state of alcoholic intoxication (Article 67 of the Criminal Code)
The defendants only partially admitted guilt. They have 15 days from 18 April to appeal against the verdict.
* In all the reports at the time, the name was given differently - Hodnoys Myevi. The victim was 47 years old and had lived in Ukraine for a number of years. He had graduated from the Institute of National Economy, defended his PhD thesis in economics and was married to a Ukrainian.
As well, there have been two more cases opened.
Today, I was able to get a bit more imagery on growing understanding among people in Ukraine. Today was Dehn Evropi (Europe Day) in Kyiv and there were a couple dozen tents and stages set up all the way down Khreshatik representing European countries, EU institutions, and a few others. Among the few others was the Diversity Initiative. We had hand-outs, a quiz, a skit about inter-racial marraige, and we also had an African drumming group. During the drumming, this happened:
These lovely Ukrainian ladies jumped into the circle during a drumming dance contest, and showed everyone what was up. A small reminder that this is not a foregone problem and that a little interaction goes a long way.
So a little over eight months into my research and I’m finally wrapping my case studies of domestic non-governmental organizations that do anti-trafficking work in Ukraine. In the coming weeks, my research assistant (yes, that’s right, a research assistant. I feel so legitimate) and I will head off to Chernivtsi and Mykolaiv to meet with the last two organizations we will be studying. So far we have gone to organizations in Ternopil, Simferopol, Vinnytsia, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zhytomir, Pavlohrad, and Odesa. It’s been an unending blur of planes, trains, marshrutkas, squatter toilets, strangely suspicious hotel lobby employees, and Cheletano pizza. The task of taking down fourteen to twenty pages worth of notes and retyping them has been daunting, but extremely rewarding.
The purpose of these case studies is to take an in-depth look at the structure of these organizations, their mission and activities, their financial operations, their external relations with the government, community, other NGOs, etc., as well as taking some time to ask questions that require self-assessment and reflection on the part of the directors of these organizations. They are connected because they all provide direct services to victims of human trafficking in Ukraine and are IOM partner organizations (one of the groups I work the closest with). We tried to select based on geographical representation, as well. All of this will culminate in a best and sustainable practices manual as well as a possible training seminar for NGOs to be put together in June.
Most of these organizations branch out into other areas- HIV/AIDS, street children, immigration assistance/consultation, domestic violence, drug use, etc. Some do it because there is more funding that way, some do it because they feel the topics are inextricably related, and some both.
Another common thread thus far is a complete dependence on international donors. And at least some of these organizations are considered very strong and stable as far as the work they do, the transparency of their operations, and the way they run their show meaning that it is unlikely we will see a different trend elsewhere. The problem is, once the international donors lose interest, the organizations will either be forced to find funding some other way by going into different areas of work or will have to close-up shop.
In my time at these organizations, I’ve also been able to get invaluable interviews with the State Border Guard Service, the State Security Service (SBU- the hand down of the KGB), the Ministry of Family, Youth, and Sports, the Ministry of Interior, as well as lawyers and social workers that take time to work with these organizations and victims.
But it’s not all work and no play. In Simferopol, for example, the director of the organization we studied, who is a real firebrand and human rights defender both in her organization and as a practicing lawyer, decided to bring us out after the study was finished into the countryside of the Crimea to meet a Crimean artist and friend of hers. His name is Aleksander Khmailo and his work is absolutely fascinating. He lives in a small village in the Bakhchesarai region and his studio was a very small room connected to his house, which stored most of his work. He has sold very few pieces (because he does not sell them) and puts them on exhibit rather infrequently. Some of his work he claims to be prophetic: he sees the images in his dreams and paints tragedies that do not happen until years after he has finished the piece.
Believe it or not, he painted a piece during the 90s which depicted 9/11. It was of a woman, on her knees with her head down and an American flag draped over her shoulder. In the background to the right is a bright figure of death and to the left are two modern buildings upside-down and smoldering. He also painted a piece of an upside-down plane over a woman and a statue with the lion of Lviv just before the tragic plane crash in Lviv that killed over 80 people. Not all of his paintings are like this, of course, but they’re the ones he spent the most time explaining to us. The whole thing was bizarre, but fascinating nonetheless and the art was quite amazing. Below are a couple pictures I took while we were talking to him.
What else? Well I took my first express trains in Ukraine on a couple of these trips. The trains were really nice, very European. It was probably bought from Poland or the Czech Republic or something. One problem: they still run on Ukrainian tracks. To put it into perspective for my Western New York readers, it was kind of like taking the cars off the Superman at Darien Lake and putting them on the tracks of the Predator. Does the Predator still exist?
One more piece of research news: I will be staying in Ukraine through August to work on the research project on xenophobia and xenophobic violence. I’m quite excited about the project and am looking forward to really starting it. I’ve already taken on some tasks within the DI, participating in presentations to embassies and local schools so I look forward to working on the project (at least mostly) full time.
Tomorrow I leave for Istanbul as, in my mind, I thought it would be the best way to go somewhere I haven’t gone before and restart my 90 day clock to avoid registering with the city. Well, apparently, I’m screwed even if I do leave the country. Ukraine, as part of its WTO commitments is cracking down on foreigners within their visa/registration regime. I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do about registering once I get back, but I guess I have to figure it out or I’m going to get fined.
At least the weather in Kyiv is finally getting better.
Maidan Nezalezhnosti is known in the West mostly as the scene of the Orange Revolution, Ukraine’s most significant event in it’s independent democratic history. Well, a little over three years later, President Bush has decided to come to Ukraine just days before an important NATO summit in Bucharest where Ukraine’s future in the organization faces its next test. However, instead of the square being filled with a young force of pro-democracy demonstrators, today, part of the square was occupied by members of the Communist and Socialist parties as well as people who had come strictly because they oppose NATO. And let’s not forget all the people in between who really couldn’t care either way, but were offered 10 hryvnias to stand in the square and protest for an hour.
President Bush says he supports a clear path to Ukraine’s eventual membership into NATO. Poland backs Ukraine’s bid as well, however players like Germany and France think Ukraine is not ready to join the alliance particularly without full public support for the move. Some say all of this boils down to Russian pressure and influence, however it does seem that people are still wary about what will be Ukraine’s obligations under NATO membership.
President Bush has cooled down the rhetoric during this trip about NATO members fulfilling obligations to the pact and providing more troops. In fact, he stated he will not be putting pressure on Germany to add more troops to the mission in Afghanistan. This comes a little over a month after Secretary Gates warned that NATO allies were not putting in enough effort or troops.
Three of Ukraine’s leaders- President Yushchenko, Prime Minister Tymoshenko, and Parliament Chairman Arseny Yatsenyuk- issued a joint statement in January with their intentions to seek a Membership Action Plan, which would rapidly speed up the process of membership beyond anything happening now. During two separate meetings I attended earlier on in the course of my fellowship, U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor stated that the U.S. was not pushing Ukraine to join NATO, but rather simply letting Ukraine know that the doors were open if they chose to move forward.
Of course, not everyone in Ukraine is salivating at the thought of Ukraine’s membership in NATO. Unfortunately, it is difficult find solid, reliable information on how many Ukrainians actually support NATO membership and how many are opposed to it. Everyone writing these articles has an agenda so finding figures online and posting them here won’t give you a good understanding of whether or not the idea is feasible among most Ukrainians. However, this article from the government of Ukraine gives you a basic idea of where public opinion stands at this point. All we know is that NATO membership is not as popular as EU membership, but opposition is growing less as people know more.
As for the protest today, yes, there were thousands of people on Maidan. However, some of them were paid. The pictures available on the articles of major international news agencies are probably the really mild protestors. I ran into a group of them carrying posters of half-Bush, half-Hitler, signs calling him a terrorist and fascist, as well as a big banner across a fence next to Maidan that said “*Expletive deleted* Bush, *Expletive deleted* NATO,” in English nonetheless. I probably shouldn’t show them here either, but I will show some of the other pictures I took with my mobile phone.
As you can see, there really weren’t that many and this was about 14:00. However, I avoided going near them.
The protesters walked right passed my office on Mykhailivska singing Katyusha.
As for tomorrow, I’ll be in Vinnytsia conducting my third case study so I won’t be around for President Bush’s visit. The most I got to see today was his motorcade going to pick him up from the airport followed by his advance security team heading towards the hotel. Tomorrow the streets of Kyiv will be plagued with traffic congested even moreso than usual because they will be closing down certain streets while the President conducts his visit. Not really regretting my absence…
Well, I am supposed to be packing for Vienna, but I got caught up in some headlines and here I am, finally posting to my blog. I had to pick the cobwebs off first, but I think this will work
Yesterday, I headed out to Komarivka to visit the kids again. This time I was greeted by a new little guy I hadn’t seen before. Geoff thinks he may be new to the orphanage. His name is Zhenya, and he has the cutest cheeks I had ever seen and eyes like little saucers. I wish I had a picture of him, but I didn’t have my camera with me. After walking around with me outside, we went into one of the rooms where a bunch of the younger children were watching some cartoon movie about birds going to war. There he sat on my lap, and we watched the movie with the other kids. Natasha and Anya were there. Zhenya tried to share his chewed gum and half-eaten banana with me, but I politely refused and pinched his cheeks.
Geoff and I spent much of the drive there and back discussing developments in the Ukrainian adoption system over the last decade or so. I was able to contribute to the conversation through some of the research I had done at La Strada focusing on child trafficking and exploitation.
First of all, there are three kinds of adoption: domestic- which involves parents and children of the same nationality in the same country; intercountry- which involves the child moving to another country other than the one it resides in regardless of the parent’s nationality; and lastly there is international- which involves parents of a different nationality than the child, who may or may not reside in the same country that the child resides in.
Examples:
Ukrainian child adopted Ukrainian parents living in the U.S.: Intercountry, but not International
Ukrainian child adopted by U.S. parents living in Ukraine: International, but not Intercountry
Ukrainian child adopted by U.S. parents living in the U.S.: International and Intercountry
Perhaps today you saw the article in the NY Times about the families having difficulties bringing children whom they’ve adopted from Vietnam to the U.S. Some families in California that are having a very difficult time bringing back children they have adopted from Vietnam due to restrictions placed on the process by the U.S. government.
Twenty-one entry visas for children have been rejected in the last two years, according to the State Department. More than half the denials have come since last October, prompting complaints that the department is singling out individual cases to embarrass the Vietnamese government into changing its adoption process…
The State Department says it is making sure babies are legitimately available for adoption.
“It would be unforgivable for us to look at a case and think something is wrong, then to let it go,” said Michele T. Bond, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for overseas services. Ms. Bond said Vietnam had never posted a schedule of adoption fees, as required in the bilateral agreement, and said documentation on how some babies came to be orphaned “is unreliable.”
The State Department warning said that embassy personnel had seen “an increase in the number of irregularities appearing in orphan petitions and visa applications,” and “significant increases in the number of abandoned children” in two provinces, including Thai Nguyen, where the three contested babies were adopted.
Now the families have gone through some extreme and expensive measures of ensuring that the babies have not been adopted or abandoned under falsities or coercion including hiring high-priced Vietnamese lawyers and staying in-country for months at a time.
Newsweek printed an article earlier this month on what was going on in the international/intercountry child adoption scene noting that intercountry adoptions have decreased over the last few years, and the article quotes lawyers who blame UNICEF for this fact stating that the agency is placing too much emphasis on trying to find ways of ensuring children stay within their own culture and, where possible, their birth family.
There is no argument over the need for adoptive homes—UNICEF estimates that there are 143 million orphans in the world—or the unprecedented interest among Westerners eager to adopt. And children’s advocates of all stripes agree that when possible, children should be raised by their own families and in their own cultures. But there seems to be a discrepancy over what qualifies as “when possible.”
The other thing that their should not be discrepancy over is the use of adoption for exploitative purposes. This is from a document entitled, “Measures to Counteract Child Trafficking And Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in Ukraine.”
In recent years many abuses and illegal acts connected with child adoption have occurred. This form of alternative family care has been turned into a profitable business by traffickers, particularly as adoption has become ‘globalised’, with a rapid increase in intercountry adoptions of children born in countries with less developed legal structures to protect them, who are offered to couples who are unaware or unconcerned with the measures employed to facilitate the adoption.
In some cases, mothers or parents are paid to sell their babies or young children. There are numerous cases of birth certificates or similar documents being forged to show that babies belong to someone other than the birth mother. Child trafficking for illegal adoption is a problem in Ukraine. After the collapse of the USSR, a large number of foreign citizens waiting to adopt children came to Ukraine. At that time, the procedure was very simple: after filling out the forms, a foreign citizen could adopt a child from a regional (oblast) adoption centre. As there was no relevant legislation to regulate this, a large number of minors were thus taken abroad.
Thus, when there were no regulations to monitor the welfare of the child, it left an easy route for traffickers to bring children abroad to be exploited. Now Ukraine has much more strict regulations regarding foreign adoption, and in fact, closed the foreign adoption procedure down all together for some time in the 90s after it was discovered doctors were involved in the criminal sale of newborns from hospitals.
While I can see the frustration of these families, and the fact that they have put forth the effort to try to ensure they are not taking part in parents either knowingly selling their children or unknowingly losing their children, it is also a balancing act that only works if the two countries practice transparent and well-documented procedures for conducting foreign adoptions. The kind of money Western families are willing to pay for foreign adoption may seem like a testament to their love for their child, but they could also be unknowingly contributing to a new kind of trade in children driven by unprecedented profits. Alexandra Yuster of UNICEF hits this point in the Newsweek article-
“We’re concerned with the commercialization of vulnerable children,” says Yuster. “It gives an incentive to intermediaries to look for the kind of children these families most want to adopt.” Some poor mothers are tricked into relinquishing healthy babies, while disabled and older children living in state institutions are left out of the foreign adoption loop because there’s no profit incentive to match them with families. “Adoption is supposed to be about finding homes for children, not finding children for families,” she says.
The only catch here is that some countries, such as Ukraine, actually allow foreigners to adopt children with severe problems earlier. For example, according to Ukrainian adoption legislation, normally a foreigner can only adopt a child once he/she has been “in the system” for more than one year, except in the case that the child has special needs such as HIV, Down’s Syndrome, impairments of brain activity, heart diseases, etc. In fact, it was explained to me that in fact some foreign families are actually shown and must reject two or three children with these problems first before they are shown children in full health.
Now this balancing act tips against the children in another way when children are able to be adopted and there are foreign families who want to adopt them, but rules, regulations, laws, or immigration problems forbid the adoption from occurring and the children end up remaining in state care for extended periods of time. The fact that a foreign company is coming in to replace the heating system so that the children don’t have to walk around inside the orphanage with their coats on is revealing as to what kind of priority and funding the state puts into institutional care for its orphans in Ukraine.
On the other hand, most of these children at Komarivka have families. They are called “social orphans”. Some of them even go home during the holidays to spend a day or two with their parents. For whatever reason, either the parents themselves or the state has deemed them unable to care for the children and so the children live in this home. So it is not outlandish to think that children, under better economic circumstances and social support structures, could care for their children themselves, going back to UNICEF’s point.
I realize this post hardly settles the issue, and I feel a bit biased in one direction because I have now had the chance to see how these children live under state care, and how many of them end up stuck in orphanages for extended periods of time with no one to look out for them once they are 18 and out on their own. And how much they love to just walk around holding hands or sit against me while we watch a movie- it’s a starvation for affection like I have never seen. At the same time, I am pulled in the other direction by my research, which has shown that the commercialization and profit margin of criminal activity mixed with foreign adoption is driving a trade in children, and families are either losing their children under coercive circumstances or giving up their children at the thought of gaining money from this increasingly lucrative process.
I hate posting about the bad stuff in Ukraine. There are so many good things to report about Ukraine’s development and people and culture. However, among the organizations that I work with, specifically the IOM which does work and research on xenophobia in Ukraine, there has been a disturbing increase in racially-motivated violence in Kyiv over the last few years. Or at least, more of it is finally being reported by the victims. I wouldn’t post about this to instigate trouble or cause Ukraine bad publicity if I didn’t feel this particular issue is something that is causing serious harm and even death to foreigners in Kyiv.
Last week, a young asylum-seeker from the Democratic Republic of Congo was killed on his way to the grocery store near the Nivkiy metro station. He was stabbed 15 times, and died before even getting medical attention. The attack occurred on a Sunday evening, around dinner time, and there were many witnesses to the crime. So far, there have been no solid arrests and the police have not cited racial motivations. Whenever crimes like this happen, where people of obvious foreign origin are attacked, beaten, harrassed, and even killed, the authorities will label it as “hooliganism.” It has gotten to the point where they are issuing warnings at work that there will be public demonstrations by Nationalists and for our foreign coworkers to be careful to avoid these scenes.
Earlier this month on the same day that ultra-nationalists joined a mass march in favour of recognising the WWII-era UPA Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a Bangladeshi man was brutally murdered in Kyiv in an apparent racially motivated attack, while three Chinese girls were stabbed in a separate incident.
Ukrainian officials are loathe to admit that this rising tide of violence against foreigners is racially or nationalistically motivated, preferring to categorise all such attacks as common hooliganism, but the organised nature of the violence and numerous eye-witness accounts of individual attacks, citing large groups of teenagers screaming racial epithets, would seem to confirm that this is a far bigger and more sinister issue than simple youthful excess.
This kind of violence happens more often than people realize, and the IOM and UNHCR are taking more steps to document and expose this dark trend. Whether or not Ukraine is willing to step up and respond will be another story. As far as I have heard, it was originally the Jewish Lobby, which has strong organization, that was able to get President Yushchenko to react to this problem.
As for Ukraine, Butkevich feels the situation is worsening rather than improving.
Butkevich notes that law enforcement agencies are doing a better job at combating the problem of ethnic violence and that there has been a rise in arrests over the past four years.
“Neo-Nazi violence in Ukraine is something that gets almost no media attention, which is mostly focused on what happens in Russia,” Butkevich said. “But over the past three years it has really gotten very bad. And this is after years of neo-Nazi violence almost being not even a problem in Ukraine.”
In Ukraine, where there are fewer Muslims and foreign students than in Russia, Jews are the primary target for neo-Nazi groups. Most of the attacks occur in Eastern Ukraine and in Kyiv.
And the police response has been wholly inadequate, according to Butkevich: “I have to say [that] as many positive things that have happened over the past year — I’m not denying the progress — the way that the Ukrainian law enforcement officials have reacted to this problem makes the Russians look good.”
The article highlights the response problem, although I don’t know if the problem is mostly a Jewish problem anymore. While Jewish people are still being attacked, people from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East are the easiest to spot in Ukraine as far as foreigners are concerned. Tatar Muslims and Roma are also targeted. Even if they can speak the language(s) really well, they have a difficult time dealing with the police. I have American friends, of Asian descent, who have been detained for no reason for hours before being released because, often, the companies or organizations they work for step in. I know people from Africa and the Middle East who are jumped and beaten as often as once a month. And the people who attack them make no qualms about expressing their dislike for foreigners, whether in groups or by individuals.
The big issue is going to be when Euro 2012 comes to town. The government is spending millions on improving the structure and aesthetic qualities of its cities, however an issue like this could blow Ukraine’s chances of being considered a modern country for a long period of time. If fans are attacked or unprotected, all of Europe will be watching.
And aside from this future consideration, the present considerations are enough. It is not just that these attacks are happening, but also that these attacks are going unanswered. Foreign students and workers will not want to come here if they are not safe and are warned ahead of time that the police will not respond in case something happens because this kind of violence is not taken seriously. Just the foreign students that come and study here alone spend millions of dollars on tuition, living expenses, etc. I already know of a UK citizen of Zimbabwean decent who is cutting his stay in Ukraine short next month because he is violently attacked on the streets on a regular basis. His company had to hire a driver to take him to work because it is not safe for him to walk on the streets. The US State Department Country Report on Human Rights in Ukraine details other such accounts.
I am not calling Ukrainians racist, but even if small groups of Ukrainians are committing this violence, especially if it is in an organized fashion with intent to harm people based on their race or ethnicity, it needs to be responded to and it needs to stop. It is also not to say Ukraine has done nothing, but the trends are clear that it is not enough. And me saying all of this hardly means a thing; that is to say it has to be Ukrainians that unite their fellow Ukrainians to respond to this terrible crime (like this and this). I will say that if Ukraine cannot get this problem under control, it will never move forward as a European country or a responsible member of the international community.
Heard, watched, discussed, I have been receiving more and more questions from my friends in Ukraine lately about my opinion on the US presidential elections. Appropriately timed, I read this article in the Times a couple days ago on the attention the election is drawing around the world.
From Berlin to London to Jakarta, the destinies of Democratic and Republican contenders in Iowa or New Hampshire, or Nevada or South Carolina, have become news in a way that most political commentators cannot recall. It is as if outsiders are pining for change in America as much as some American presidential candidates are promising it.
The personalities of the Democratic contest in particular — the potential harbinger of America’s first African-American or female president — have fascinated outsiders as much as, if not more than, the candidates’ policies on Iraq, immigration or global finances.
And there is a palpable sense that, while democratic systems seem clunky and uninspiring to voters in many parts of the Western world, America offers a potential model for reinvigoration…
But there are broader concerns. As Ramesh Thakur, a political science professor in India, wrote: “We foreigners can but pray that the new president, whoever he or she may be, will return America to its strengths, values and the tradition of exporting hope and other optimism. And so help to lift America and the world up, not tear one another down.”
Even my friends in the smaller cities in Ukraine have been keeping tabs on the primary winners. As far as Ukraine’s stake in the outcome of the election, Ukraine has an interesting dynamic with the U.S. The U.S. has been invaluable in certain respects of Ukraine’s security and development goals, and the ties between the two countries are strong, especially as there is a significant Ukrainian diaspora in the States and Canada. However Ukraine also spends a significant amount of its westward-looking foreign policy on the EU, as it has ambitions to one day join the Union. Nevertheless, the current U.S. President, despite being in office for the most significant event in Ukraine’s independent history and despite Ukraine’s sacrifice in providing troops to the Iraq war, still has not made an appearance in Ukraine. Both former presidents Clinton and Bush, Sr. made their marks here in Ukraine during their terms. According to Unian, Ukraine expects that Bush will visit this April, but either way, as a lame duck, his visit will not mean as much as it would have earlier. People are hoping for someone with stronger diplomatic skills and leadership, even if they know they can’t vote themselves. I have not had anyone trying to influence me either way or tell me who I should vote for, but my experience has been the same as the article points out: very few have shown interest in the Republican side of the race.
So as you noticed, I have posted exactly jack in the last two weeks or so. My week in the States for the holidays was a highly unproductive blogging period. It was great to see my family and friends though, as well as going to the Winter Classic and a lot of my favorite restaurants in Buffalo. I stocked up on Frank’s and peanut butter, and headed back to Europe with Adam. We almost immediately went off to Krakow for a few days, followed by a day trip to Lviv, and finally he returned to the States from Kyiv yesterday and I am going through a mini panic attack with all the work I have to do in the next month. The flight back was just as crazy the flight to the States. Apparently United/Lufthansa can’t get their act together either. At least for the trouble, Adam and I got moved to business class on the trans-Atlantic flight to Frankfurt from Dulles. So that’s how the other half lives…
Nonetheless, here I am posting at Gloria Jeans, and I will probably stay, work, and close out the place tonight until I go to Zoloti Vorota to watch the Packers/Seattle game with Hans. I did create a web album of the pictures from my Chornobyl trip. I haven’t created the captions yet, but if you follow my last post, you can figure out where most of the pictures are from.
There is so much to post about and I’m a little overwhelmed with the idea of posting more now. My next post will probably focus on our trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau, but there is obviously a lot of international news to sift through. It will have to wait until tomorrow though.
