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.
I’m sure the small article in the Times didn’t jump out at you as you scanned the headlines this morning, but Yulia Tymoshenko lost the re-vote yesterday in the Rada for the premiership. With a squeaker majority of only two votes, the fact that she lost by only one vote doesn’t come as a huge shock to me. Even though the newly elected speaker Arseniy Yatsenyuk stated that “nothing will prevent parliament from voting for Yulia Tymoshenko” prior to the vote. Even though media already had complete reports on the make-up of her government. The girls at the La Strada office and I watched Tymoshenko’s speech to the press after the vote. We were pretty sure she had been crying, or at least she appeared as if so. As far as I know, she’s still standing by her charge that the voting was rigged or there was some foul play afoot in the voting.
Now President Yushchenko has decided to press ahead with her nomination, and parliament was supposed to reconvene today, but the opposition has said they want to “first to deal with the selection of senior officials in the chamber” and demanded a meeting of parliament’s conciliation council.
Sorry for the serious delay in posting. Between research, work, Telders, and moving, this week got a little out of hand. And we also still don’t have internet at the apartment yet. Less than three weeks until I come home for a visit! From The Age
The articles coming out on the UNAMID hybrid force set to deploy in January say things like “less than half” the troops expected to complete the project will be available to begin the mission. Actually it’s even less than a third. 6,500 out of 20,000 troops and 6,000 police will arrive in January for certain and possibly another 2,000 police will be available. Almost all of the 6,500 will be AU peacekeepers, the force that has already been conducting operations there.
The UN has accused Sudan of dragging it’s feet by stalling the entry of important equipment for the troops, and not providing agreements on the scope of the force’s activities as well as complicating the entry of non-African troops. Sudan has, of course, denied any of this and the has said that the SG’s statements are “unfair” The foreign minister states Sudan will make an official statement tomorrow regarding the force.
The force is also lacking critical equipment such as helicopters to provide to the troops. This has been atributed more towards lack of will power among SC members.
“While helicopters alone cannot ensure the success of the mission, their absence may well doom it to failure,” he said in a letter to Council members.
With only three weeks left before the 26,000-member U.N.-African Union force is scheduled to start deploying, Ban lamented the U.N.’s failure to get a commitment for even one helicopter.
Ban said he had personally contacted every country with the potential to contribute a helicopter — from industrialized to major developing nations — “to no avail.”
He said he was sending two high-level envoys to a summit of European Union and African leaders in Lisbon, Portugal, this weekend “to directly engage with as many key leaders as possible on this subject.”
“We are at the critical moment for Darfur,” Ban said. “Member states have spoken clearly about what must be done. It is time for them to walk their talk.”
In the US, while these events may not directly effect the events above, they are related. H.R. 2489 has gone to President Bush for his signature. The Genocide Accountability Act expands the US’s power to prosecute those suspected of genocide. It expands the law as follows:
An amended U.S. Genocide Code expands U.S. ability to prosecute genocidaires in its borders. The current U.S. law is too narrow to provide adequate accountability for individuals in the United States who have committed genocide. According to the Genocide Intervention Network, the U.S. Justice Department has identified individuals who participated in the Rwandan and Bosnian genocides and currently live in the United States. Under current law, these individuals cannot be arrested or prosecuted because they are not U.S. nationals and the genocides they perpetrated did not take place in the United States.
A U.S. role in prosecuting genocidaires - even those who commit crimes outside of the U.S. - helps enforce an international code of justice. For example, the amended U.S. Code could allow for some of the worst perpetrators of genocide to be prosecuted in U.S. Courts. The current gap in the law has proven problematic; former U.S. officials have stated that the United States wanted to arrest and prosecute Cambodian dictator Pol Pot but couldn’t because of gaps in the U.S. criminal code.
H.R.2489 moves the U.S. toward a complimentary legal system. Under the Genocide Convention, State Parties are obligated to prevent and punish genocide wherever it occurs. These jurisdictional gaps under the U.S. Genocide Code must therefore be addressed for complementarity as well as impunity reasons-the U.S. must contribute to preventing and punishing the crime of genocide by ensuring jurisdiction over every scenario of an offender committing this crime. -From CGS
Lastly, a Times article came out today stating that the Senate is considering cutting money to the Millenium Challenge Corporation citing progress being slower than anticipated. Not that there hadn’t ben any progress, just that it had been too slow.
Eyeing the unspent billions [the money promised to go to the fund], the Senate has proposed that Congress provide no more than half the money up front for future five-year projects, which typically come with a price tag of $250 million to $700 million. Such projects are now fully financed at the start to make sure countries have the wherewithal to finish what they start…
By changing how its projects are financed, “then M.C.C. becomes like the World Bank and all the other countries using overseas development aid in stop and go fashion,” said John A. Kufuor, the president of Ghana, who heads the African Union. “The aid is spread so thin that at the end of the day the necessary difference is not made.”
The article also discusses some of the potential consequences of cutting this aid, citing the example of Burkina Faso, which has undergone lengths to meet the requirements to receive aid under the Millenium Challenge Corporation:
If the agency gets the lesser Senate amount, under the current rules requiring the money up front, Burkina Faso, a West African country that has spent more than two years qualifying for and drafting its $560 million to $620 million plan, will get nothing, agency officials said. Tanzania and Namibia are ahead of it in line.
Burkina Faso has gone to great lengths to meet the agency’s good governance standards. The agency gave it a $13 million grant to improve girls’ education, which the country used to build, among other things, schools with day care centers so school-age girls do not have to stay home to look after their younger siblings.
Identified by the International Finance Corporation as one of the most difficult places in the world to do business, Burkina Faso has also halved the number of days it takes to start a business, and reduced by a third the cost of registering property.
“What type of message does that send to Burkina Faso, a country that has spent a huge amount of political capital and money on this process?” he asked. “What does that tell the Togos, the Nigers that want to become eligible? It tells them: Do everything like Burkina Faso, make all these reforms, spend millions of your own money, and then maybe at the end we might be able to sign a compact with you — or maybe not.”
Now the article ends there, forcing readers to decide for themselves what the actual consequences of the promising aid and then not delivering it are. As the US has been slacking on aid to Africa (and the Millenium Challenge Corporation affects more than African nations), other countries like China have been stepping in to take’s its place, namely China. In a time when our reputation is so damaged internationally, making promises we chose to back out of won’t help us to become a more effective diplomatic force whether we are pushing for an international peacekeeping force in Darfur or for assistance in our own work abroad.
The World Bank released a book yesterday, The International Migration of Women, showing that female migration increases and spurs development. This volume is the third publication under the Research Program on International Migration and Development, which the World Bank initiated to gain a more precise database of migration statistics. The study’s overview states that despite the significant amount of female migrants, the effects of their migration haven’t been studied intensively and that sex-disaggregated statistics are severely, if not completely, lacking.
Women make up almost half the migrant population in the world and their numbers are increasing, according to a new World Bank report released today.
“The fact that women now account for almost half the total migrant population is having enormous effects on development,” says Andrew Morrison, lead economist at the World Bank’s Gender Group. “Women are sending lots of money to their families back home, and evidence from rural Mexico shows that their migration leads to positive economic effects for the homes they leave behind.”
Between 1960 and 2005, the percentage of international migrants who are women increased by almost 3 percentage points from 46.7 percent to 49.6 percent, to a total number of approximately 95 million women, according to the new World Bank volume, The International Migration of Women, edited by economists Andrew R. Morrison, Maurice Schiff, and Mirja Sjöblom. -Press Release
Especially in the former USSR, female migrants make up 58% of all migrants.
The share of women migrating for employment rather than family reasons has increased over time, though their performance in host countries’ labor markets varies significantly according to country of origin,” Maurice Schiff, World Bank lead economist at the Development Research Group.
The report also includes recommendations, which the authors believe will spur more positive effects from female migration:
-Developing mechanisms to increase women’s ability to influence the allocation of household expenditure. This is especially important for migrant women sending remittances, since they are likely to want to spend more on children’s education;
-Expanding temporary migration opportunities for women through Mode IV [1], guest worker and other mechanisms; and
-Allocating significant resources to collecting and analyzing new sex-disaggregated migration statistics, which will inform next-generation migration policy
As someone who’s spent the better part of the last three months researching the darker sides of migration, this report is interesting and fairly uplifting. Of course, the first thing that came to my mind was that people often hear about successful migration that allow people to send money home, and the idea of being trafficked becomes less of a reality in their minds. According to one of my interviews here in Ukraine, Ukrainians (and more likely people in general) tend to have this idea that “It will never happen to me.” Of course, this has little to do with the numbers being offered in the report. Just a reflection.
I also found it interesting that
The International Migration of Women also finds that increased border expenditures in the United States significantly deter migration by Mexican women, but not by Mexican men. This is likely because the cost of illegal migration is greater for women than for men because women are more vulnerable to abuse while migrating.
Good to see there is a starting point now on female migration research.
Fooled you! Thought I was going to talk about human trafficking, didn’t you? Actually I was forwarded this extensive article in the Washington Post about traffic (as in cars) in Kyiv, and the burden it’s placing on the people, infrastructure and environment.
Can’t Stand D.C. Traffic? You Should See Kiev
Kiev’s problem is cars. The city’s increasingly well-off post-Soviet population has taken to automobiles with the intensity of the long-deprived. Ukraine’s booming economy is blast-forging the country’s first mass middle class, and by many locals’ count, perhaps 10 times more vehicles are now rumbling through this ancient city’s hilly streets than there were when the Soviet Union expired in 1991. In 2006, according to the Kiev Post, Ukraine climbed from 12th place to ninth place in Europe in terms of new car sales, which a leading Ukrainian newsmagazine reports grew 52 percent here from last September to this. About 60,000 new cars were registered in Kiev this October alone, according to the Unian news agency, bloating a total that Ukraine’s Emergency Ministry puts at 1.5 million — and the number is expected to grow by a million more by 2011.
Now Buffalo isn’t really known for bad traffic. I admit when I lived with Grandma and Grandpa P in Cheektowaga my first year at Canisius, I avoided the 33 like the plague from 7:30 to 9:00 am due to traffic, forcing me to go off-roading down Delavan (this was before it was repaired). However, I think compared with other cities, Buffalo is doing pretty well as far as commutes are concerned.
For Kyiv, this not only means obnoxious travel time (especially on the over-crowded marshrutkas), but as the article points out, its leading to a more closed-off society.
And all of this is a shame, given that Kiev has historically been considered the most pleasant of the former Soviet Union’s capitals — a walkable alternative to Moscow. In his book “Imperium,” about his travels through the declining Soviet Union, the late Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski described Kiev as “the only large city of the former USSR whose streets serve not merely for hurrying home but for walking, for strolling.” Kiev’s main boulevard, Khreschatyk, he wrote, is something like a local Champs-Elys¿es, and he was impressed by Kiev’s downtown “crowds of people” out “to get some fresh air.”
A decade and a half later, the city that Kapuscinski liked no longer exists. Walking here can be dangerous because the sidewalks are covered with cars, both parked and moving. That ritual of city life — the promenade — has become an adventure in the sort of defensive, serpentine ambulation with which the pedestrian makes his way through a strip mall parking lot. And it doesn’t help that Ukrainian traffic cops know better than to stop expensive vehicles: It can be bad for their careers. Drive a Hummer or a Bentley here (Bentleys are common), and you can barrel through any red light and over any lawn or sidewalk…
Like survivors of a flash flood, residents (especially those who don’t own cars) are just coming to terms with the sudden change in their physical reality. Their neighbors in Europe have started dealing with the antisocial effects of urban car use and are banning, restricting or taxing driving in many downtown cores. But Ukraine, despite the aspirational rhetoric of some of its Western-looking politicians, isn’t Europe. In a macho culture that has embraced conspicuous consumption, the idea of people taking to bicycles like the burghers of Amsterdam is inconceivable. Just a little less so is the idea that, in a nondemocratic culture defined by elite prerogative, the newly affluent will use public transportation like wealthy Westerners. And a culture with an almost totally corrupt public life, no functioning justice system and a tendency toward political murder seems unlikely to make “green” choices when it comes to urban planning.
It’s quite the pessimistic article. I can attest that the traffic situation here is pretty ridiculous. Artyoma with its patchy reconstruction is a particular kind of basket case, and Khreshatik is constantly at a dead stop during rush hour. Kyiv may be bad, but Chennai and Bangalore in India make Kyiv look like East Aurora. Perhaps what the author worries about is that Kyiv will increasingly become more like these cities without proper awareness of what all this traffic is doing to the city, its residents and the environment.
A phrase that I’m sure doesn’t ring a whole lot of bells for many back in the States, but is something I spent the better part of the weekend learning more about. Yesterday, Ukraine held a ceremony in remembrance of the victims of the Holodomor, an artificial famine that directly or indirectly killed millions of people in Ukraine.
The U.S. recognizes this event as genocide, as well as 25 other countries. The 1988 U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine stated the following:
There is no doubt that large numbers of inhabitants of the Ukrainian SSR and the North Caucasus Territory starved to death in a man-made famine in 1932-1933, caused by the seizure of the 1932 crop by Soviet authorities.
Some argue that it was collectivization gone wrong rather than deliberate starvation. But the Commission asserts the following countering that belief:
The victims of the Ukrainian Famine numbered in the millions…
In 1931-1932, the official Soviet response to a drought-induced grain shortage outside Ukraine was to send aid to the areas affected and to make a series of concessions to the peasantry.
In mid-1932, following complaints by officials in the Ukrainian SSR that excessive grain procurements had led to localized outbreaks of famine, Moscow reversed course and took an increasingly hard line toward the peasantry.
The inability of Soviet authorities in Ukraine to meet the grain procurements quota forced them to introduce increasingly severe measures to extract the maximum quantity of grain from the peasants.
In the Fall of 1932 Stalin used the resulting “procurements crisis” in Ukraine as an excuse to tighten his control in Ukraine and to intensify grain seizures further.
The Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933 was caused by the maximum extraction of agricultural produce from the rural population.
Officials in charge of grain seizures also lived in fear of punishment.
Stalin knew that people were starving to death in Ukraine by late 1932.
In January 1933, Stalin used the “laxity” of the Ukrainian authorities in seizing grain to strengthen further his control over the Communist Party of Ukraine and mandated actions which worsened the situation and maximized the loss of life.
Postyshev had a dual mandate from Moscow: to intensify the grain seizures (and therefore the Famine) in Ukraine and to eliminate such modest national self-assertion as Ukrainians had hitherto been allowed by the USSR.
While famine also took place during the 1932-1933 agricultural year in the Volga Basin and the North Caucasus Territory as a whole, the invasiveness of Stalin’s interventions of both the Fall of 1932 and January 1933 in Ukraine are parallelled only in the ethnically Ukrainian Kuban region of the North Caucasus.
Attempts were made to prevent the starving from travelling to areas where food was more available.
From there, it states very bluntly that from these findings, the famine in Ukraine from 1932-1933 was genocide.
Russian officials claim this effort to have the Holodomor recognized as genocide only further divides the Russian and Ukrainian people, and that it is “offensive” to other nations that have fallen victim to famine. Some, even Ukrainians, feel that it is an over-politicized subject. However, evidence has come to light from more recently declassified Soviet documents from the 1932-1933 period, which show
…it was revealed that an elaborate paper trail of the 1932-33 famine and the Soviet authorities` involvement in it had been preserved in party and state archives. These documents are being slowly declassified, examined and published[2]. Historians can now give us a fairly accurate account of the catastrophe and ascertain the responsibility of Stalin and his collaborators.
As a result, scholars who previously hesitated to recognize the genocidal character of Stalin`s forced starvation of Ukrainian farmers, have reexamined the question and readjusted their interpretations. In his latest book, Nicolas Werth comes to the conclusion that thanks to recent studies based on the new documents, it is now “legitimate to qualify as genocide the cluster of actions undertaken by the Stalinist regime to punish the Ukrainian peasantry by famine and terror”[3]. -UNIAN
There was a solemn procession yesterday to Mykhailivska square, where President Yushchenko, among others, made a speech. I, unfortunately, did not make it to this part of the commemoration, however Ukrainiana has video from parts of the event. I was home at the apartment with Tanya during the ceremony. I actually was ready to jump out the door and see if I could catch part of it, but Tanya insisted I eat some more of the veggie mash we made together the night before and she lit a candle in the window and we watched the ceremony on tv. She wouldn’t speak much about it, so we just watched. Somehow, I felt this was a better way to spend the commemoration than being downtown. I also realized I’m going to have a harder time moving to my new apartment near Arsenalna than I thought I would have because Tanya has become more like family to me.
Later on, after a Fulbright get-together, I went to the square and looked at the memorial. There were fewer people as it was almost 11 pm, but nonetheless quite the crowd for it being so late. I sometimes prefer to see things like this when fewer people are around. It reminded me of being in Dachau in January 2006. There were almost no other visitors there that day, and it was frozen and quiet. My trip to Auschwitz was somewhat less effective on me as it was April and it was already starting to get crowded with tourists. Anyway, the photo at the beginning of this post was taken with my camera phone. Here are a couple others I took:
“Ukraine remembers! The Holodomor 1932-1933- the genocide of the Ukrainian people”
The Ukrainian trident in candles
Mykhailivska square alight with memorial candles
This is a link to a collection of photos from the famine that Ukrayinska Pravda has on their site. Ironic that in the same week, the U.S. enjoys a holiday where people eat insane amounts of food and enjoy the company of their family and friends and Ukraine remembers a time in the not-so-distant history when their relatives and countrymen were starved. I know what I’m truly thankful for this year…
Just very unfortunate things coming out of Russia, and literally spilling on to other countries. I was going to write a lengthy post on the oil spill that happened in the Black Sea last weekend during the storm on Sunday, but this post by Ukrainiana does a good job of explaining the situation and linking to pictures and articles on the spill. The articles in the New York Times and AP basically said zero about Ukraine. In fact, another Fulbrighter was so outraged by the complete lack of news on the impact to Ukraine, she drafted a letter to the NYT editor. An MSNBC article touches a little more on why the situation is complicated due to the location of the spill. The governing of the Kerch Strait was agreed upon in 2004, but now because a joint effort will be needed to clean up the straight and Russian state environmental officials are already suggesting building a dam to the island of Tuzla (which caused the dispute in the first place) in order to “contain” the damage, the environment will be the one to suffer.
This post isn’t just about what’s spilling out of Russia, but also what’s being prevented from going in Russia. I received a notice today from the OSCE/ODIHR that they will NOT being deploying an observer mission to the Duma elections in December. This is bad news bears. In Ukraine, anyway, the OSCE/ODIHR provided long-term and short-term observers that were highly professional in their monitoring of the September elections. They are one of, if not THE, major international election observer groups, especially in the former USSR. Their presence is important to preventing sneaky activity before and during the election. Part of the reason they’re not conducting the mission is because they’ve already been prevented from the long-term observing that is necessary to make full use of the short-term observing.
“We have not received a single visa for the 70 observers,” OSCE spokeswoman Urdur Gunnarsdottir said. “We have tried everything. … But we sadly now have to conclude that it is not possible.”…
Gunnarsdottir said that even if visas were to be granted now, it was too late to conduct a “meaningful” observation of the election. Candidates have already registered, the media campaign was under way and there was too little time to get observers in place, she said. -AP
I got a bad feeling this would happen when I saw an article a couple weeks back stating Russia was going to cut back on the amount of election observers. Here again, you see alot of double talk on the part of Russian officials:
Russia’s top election official denied it has refused the visas and said they were waiting in Warsaw at the headquarters of the election monitoring office, the Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights.
“All the necessary documents including visas are already in Warsaw, at ODIHR headquarters, so I don’t understand what could have prompted such a decision,” Vladimir Churov said at a news conference at the Russian Embassy in Berlin.
There was no immediate explanation for the discrepancy, and Russian Embassy officials in Warsaw were not available to comment…
Peskov said that visas were “a rather technical issue” and referred questions to the Russia’s foreign ministry, insisting the decision over whether to send election monitors rested with the OSCE and not Moscow.-AP
Yeah, visas are only “technical issues” that are absolutely necessary to enter Russia, you know, technically. But a couple of weeks ago when Russia first issued its decision to cut down on observers:
The Kremlin warned foreigners on Wednesday not to interfere in Russia’s parliamentary elections after it cut sharply the number of Western observers permitted to view the polls, drawing criticism from the United States.
“No country will accept any attempts from abroad to try to influence it,” Kremlin deputy spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a news conference. “It’s a matter of sovereignty of the country.” -Reuters
No country will accept attempts from abroad to try to influence it? Yea, just like no country would ever shut off a gas supply to get what it wants, right? Sorry to bring it back to Ukraine, but for the last two elections, there have been OSCE observers, American observers, Russian observers, Labor Group observers, and I think Ukraine still was able to decide for itself who’s in power now without these “attempts from abroad to try to influence it.” I’m starting to think the actions of Ukraine have more of an influence over Russia’s actions than they care to admit, and that Russia is more threatened by Ukraine’s growing democracy than democracy in the West. Remember in my post about Nashi, the leader of the group spoke of the closeness of Ukrainians to Russians rather than Ukrainians to Americans? Just a theory, but that may be why democracy in Ukraine is so threatening to the powers that be in Russia because Russians can identify with Ukrainians and if their democracy shines (or at least polishes up), it will feel that much closer to Russians. Either way, the lack of an OSCE observer mission in December is a pretty big red flag (no pun intended) for democracy in Russia.
It’s kind of redundant to say that the youth of a nation are the hope a country has for it’s future. The same goes for organizations, be it political, religious, cultural. If the growing numbers of Nashi, the Putin youth following are any indication of the lifeblood of Putin’s political future or the future of United Russia, we’re only seeing the beginning of this political movement in Russia. Their summer camp alone has tripled in attendance since 2005.
Recently I was sent an article by Kremlin, Inc on the activities of Nashi, including their summer training camps and opposition intimidation tactics. The article described Nikita Borovikov, Nashi’s current leader as such:
Nikita Borovikov looks like he could be with the Young Republicans. Sporting a smart smile, suit pants, and carefully styled hair — and constantly fiddling with his mobile phone — he could easily be mistaken for a 26-year-old in Germany, France, or America. But the comparisons with the West come to a screeching halt when this doctor of law begins to speak…
“There’s a constructive opposition and a destructive one,” says Borovikov. He believes that Vladimir Zhirinovsky, for example, the far-right leader who has threatened the West with a “third world war,” is constructive. “He advocates sensible positions and remains within the framework of the law,” he says.
Politicians critical of the Kremlin — such as Ryzhkov, former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov or the opposition party Other Russia, led by Garry Kasparov — belong, on the other hand, to the destructive category. “Their actions are directed against national interests,” Borovikov says.
Sound ridiculous? Well how about encouraging people to get busy and get pregnant at their summer training camps as a method of “reversing the demographic problem?”
Even Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov dropped by, calling for the group to have more babies to help solve Russia’s demographic problems.
The camp also hosted a mass-wedding for 30 couples, with red tents prepared for the couples celebrating their wedding night. “Who out there is pregnant?” went the call from the megaphone. “I’m pregnant!” the crowd shouted back. The lodgings for those attending the camp were not separated by gender.
At the same time, the group is also involved in charitable volunteer work like blood drives and renovating childrens’ homes with their own time and funds. However, it kind of strikes the tune of Russia’s foreign policy- provide food aid to victims in Sudan and then block the UN resolutions that might contribute towards actual peace and, also, sell weapons to the Sudanese government. Not to mention, it is not as if this movement was created simply for the volunteerism. It acts as political support to Putin, and even moreso, as intimidation to Putin’s opposition, be it domestic or international. As far as it’s concerned, all opposition is international or at least internationally sponsored. They’re just as likely to intimidate Rada member Vladimir Ryzhkov as they are British Ambassador Anthony Brenton.
The Nashi website didn’t shock me after reading more about the organization itself (Sorry the links are only in Russian, but I think you know why). It’s sprinkled with articles about Putin’s quips on Russia’s democracy not being like Iraq’s and they seem especially fervent with hatred towards Estonia, even though the Soviet statue was moved over six months ago. They’re still a little sore about that. However, what was surprising (and kind of funny) were the reference links at the bottom of the homepage, some leading to Live Journal sites of Nashi members. Live Journal? As in the journal/blogging community created in the U.S.? Odd.
Well, and of course, this all has a connection with Ukraine. For multiple reasons, including the timing of the creation of Nashi, it is believed the group was organized in response to the Orange Revolution, which had significant youth involvement and leadership.
Orange, of course, is code in Russia — code for “treason” within Kremlin circles. Ever since the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, politicians and authorities have been deeply concerned that something similar could take place in Russia.
And if Ukrainian political leaders could get their act together and move forward, I think it would be even more of a distinguishable threat to power concentration by its neighbor. We’ll see what happens with the new Parliament though. Of course, if Nashi has it their way, Ukraine won’t be it’s own independent entity anymore.
Former Soviet countries like Ukraine, Georgia and the Baltic countries of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania still belong to Moscow’s empire in the eyes of nationalist Russians. These countries’ desire to follow their own democratic path is of no consequence. “From a geographic and ethnic perspective, Ukraine and Russia belong much more closely together than Ukraine and the US,” says Nashi leader Borovikov.
Is he interested in fiddling with the region’s nation-state borders? Borovikov smiles and thinks about it for a bit. Then he says with a clear voice: “We are not interested in revisiting the borders drawn after World War II.” In other words, Russia should once again be as large as it was during Soviet times.
He goes on saying that many Russians and Ukrainians would be happy were the border between the two countries abolished. “But we have to see what the future brings,” he says. “Maybe one day we’ll live in a single nation once again.”
That may be the turning point for winning over the hearts and minds of Ukrainians though. For as indistinguishable as Ukrainians are to Russians by Westerns, they seem to value their independence.
