Buffalo Expatriate

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 entering the sixth month of my Fulbright in Ukraine. Technically, I have four left to go, but I submitted an application for an extension of two months for my project so I may be here until the end of August.

The extension project will be related to migration, although not necessarily directly to human trafficking. My proposal is to conduct the necessary interviews and gather research on the rise of xenophobic violence and attitudes in Ukraine in order to produce a single, encompassing document that provides the reader with statistical data as well as the sociological research that has been following the rise of xenophobic attitudes, especially among the youth. I would be working with many of the organizations and actors in the Diversity Initiative, a coalition of the International Organization for Migration, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Amnesty International, the Congress of Nationalities of Ukraine, Youth Human Rights Movement, the East European Development Institute, and the Security Liaison Officers in Embassies in Kyiv. The coalition now has 30 member organizations who are combining resources to identify the problem, come up with possible solutions, and present these findings and solutions to the government.

Their efforts have already yielded some results, including the creation of separate task forces in the Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). In fact, just yesterday it was announced that the Ministry of the Interior is initiating creation of an inter-agency working group on fighting xenophobia and racism. Ironically, I couldn’t find the article in English, but for my Ukrainian-reading friends out there, here it is in Ukrainian. Basically, these government offices that have started work or are involved in combating xenophobia and racism will become part of this encompassing interagency group that is supposed to serve as a “mechanism.” Hopefully this will result in some hard steps such as actually prosecuting someone who commits these crimes under Article 161 of the criminal code, which provides for punishment for hate crimes. Despite the rising occurrence of racially-motivated crimes, not one person has been prosecuted under this law, and it is often swept under the rug as “hooliganism.”

That was a huge divergence, but essentially my project would be to combine the available studies and statistics with original research in order to produce a report that will make this information useful as it will be collected in one document. And I would have two months to do it. I should find out towards the middle or end of March whether or not I got it.

As far as my current research, it has been an exciting month. From February 13th to the 15th, the United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking held the Vienna Forum at the Austria Center in Vienna, which I was fortunate enough to attend. I completed a seven-part series on the sessions I attended for The Human Trafficking Project- they will be posted over the course of the next week so if you’re curious about the information I was able to obtain while being at the Forum, it’s all there. Here are some pictures from the conference:

This was the last session I attended on Friday on gatehring statistical data about human trafficking, which is one of the biggest challenges of the field for many reason. I actually had to break the post on the session into two parts because there was so much interesting information from the panelists.

This was the reception on the first night of the conference at the Hofburg Palace, which was absolutely beautiful inside, as you can see. About 1,500 people attended this conference and came from many fields and regions.

Ok, one more picture from Vienna and this is mostly for fun. When I was at the airport while I was waiting to return to Kyiv. I was sitting with a colleague of mine of the OSCE in Kyiv, when she looked over and said,

“Elise, you follow Ukrainian politics, right?”
Me- “Yes, of course.” (a snarky comment about Ukrainian politics being the bane of my academic existence for the last two years may not have gone over too well here, so I held it back)
Tetyana- “Look over there”

And so I turned my head, and low and behold, Oleksandr Moroz was standing there with his assistant (well, at least I think she was his assistant). Now most of you probably have about zero interest in this guy, but Moroz was the once popular head of the Socialist Party here in Ukraine (different from the Communist Party). He provided some key support to Yushchenko during the Orange Revolution, but then after a fallout and a controversial deal with the Regions Party after the 2006 elections brought him to become Speaker of the Rada that year, he lost a lot of influence. In fact, his party did not make the 3% threshold in the last elections and so he is no longer in the Rada. But I marched right up to him and in my best teeny-bopper-meeting-Justin-Timberlake over-excited bumbling Ukrainian, I asked him for a picture, which he agreed to, probably relishing in feeling famous again. He actually flew coach too, which is either a testament to his socialist principles or to his dwindling bank account.

The following day was the competition for the Telders International Law Moot Court Team that I have been coaching since October. It was held at the Supreme Economic Court of Ukraine, which is quite an impressive, modern building not far from my apartment. These students had been working extremely hard on their presentations, and they blew the other teams out of the water when it came to presenting their oral arguments. They were professional, polite, and as the head judge commented to me later, unshakable. Their score was enough to earn the team the prize for Best Oralist for Respondent, but, unfortunately, combined with their score on the written memorial, we fell into second place by just three points. We were really disappointed, but seeing as how this was my first time coaching and this was their first time competing, I think we did alright.

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.

Last October, four Asian tourists were not lucky enough to get one of these warnings.

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.

This article was written a year ago in RFE/RL:

Russia/Ukraine: Analyst Says Racial Violence On The Rise

State Of Ukraine

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.

In case you’re curious to get some outside perspective on the US presidential elections, here are a few foreign media sites that provide full coverage:
The BBC: US Elections 2008
Al Jazeera: Focus US Elections 2008
Xinhua Chinese News Agency: US Presidential Election 2008
New Zealand Herald: Race for the White House
International Herald Tribune (Paris): US Elections 2008 (section on right side of screen)

Yes, I did post about the article in today’s Buffalo News regarding the victims of trafficking at massage parlors in Western New York. I was glad to see the article, but not so happy about the way it was written. Nonetheless, the link to the post is here- Massage parlor arrests in Western New York

When I said I was off hiatus, I probably should have mentioned the high amount of deadlines I have scheduled for this month regarding my research and activities here in Ukraine. Unfortunately, it has left me at a difficult place to be posting and thus, I have been slacking on my duties as a WNY Media contributor. I apologize.

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.

Chornobyl and Pripyat Trip

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.

I’ve never toured a postwar area, but if I were to imagine what it would look like, the town of Pripyat, Ukraine in the Chornobyl exclusion zone would give me the perfect inspiration. A town, formerly populated by the workers of the Chornobyl Nuclear Plant, is completely abandoned. I went there today, along with a small group of Americans, one Ukrainian tourist, and our four Ukrainian tour guides and driver. Pripyat.com runs tours to the exclusion zone, the sarcophagus, and some of the neighboring villages- some abandoned, some reinhabited. Originally, I was supposed to go there with the Fulbrighters last week, but overslept my alarm (or rather may not have set it properly) and missed it. Sergiy Mirniy, the head of the trip, was kind enough to offer me a chance to join this group. One of the group member’s daughter works for the UN and has toured with Sergiy to Chornobyl before, which is how they ended up taking the tour with him.

After the first checkpoint, we stopped in this small village of Opane, which was been abandoned and left in such a state that Wes Craven himself couldn’t replicate it in his wildest fantasies. I walked into one of the houses, and it seems just as the story goes- a family is told they have to evacuate immediately but will eventually be allowed to return so they pack the valuables, and leave the rest behind. But they never returned. There were still old newspapers from 1986 that hadn’t been moved. Anything worth selling has been looted. And this small village housed about 3,000 people.

Now transfer that to the town of Pripyat, once inhabited by around 48,000 people. The town is full of schools, stores, apartment buildings, a hotel, restaurants, the cultural building- all completely abandoned and looted. The roads are overgrown and cracked. Our driver had spent two years driving for the Soviet Army in Afghanistan so this wasn’t much of a challenge driving-wise, but he was very nervous about being in the zone itself.

It looked like a war had happened in the town, but it was a war that had left no bodies behind. Most windows were shattered, the walls and ceilings crumbling, dolls and books scattered all over the floors. We walked over broken glass, building material, ceramic, metal, etc. This definitely isn’t a trip for the light-hearted traveler.

Two things struck me the most:

1.) Sasha. This young man accompanied us to his former apartment in Pripyat that he lived in as a child before the explosion. His manner seemed detached until we were looking around the apartment and his old toy closet was open with some of his old stuff laying inside. He said its the first time he had seen it since he evacuated, and it was quite moving to watch him pick up some of the pieces. He also had various remnants of his life which appeared throughout the town. Apparently, his mother was quite a famous Soviet poet.

2.) The cultural building. At one point, we walked into the gymnasium where people had played handball and volleyball. All the huge windows were shattered, and you could see an abandoned ferris wheel outside. There were still gym shoes scattered across the floor, and the prints from the balls hitting the wall were still there. It was a blip on the radar of history, frozen.

On the way there, we were shown a video of Pripyat before the explosion- the green boulevards, the people, the square, the cultural building, etc. Not even for a moment while walking around could I picture the way it was before the explosion. Often, when you’re out doing historical sight-seeing and the guide is explaining to you what happened, why this spot is important, etc., you can picture in your mind what it looked like. The town lacked a presence of life, even though there was vast, untouched evidence of human existence there. From the top of the tallest building in Pripyat, you can look out across the entire town, and see all the apartment buildings and the plant in the far background. If you want to truly understand the nature and human impact of nuclear catastrophe, this is one solemn way to go about it.

The sarcophagus was especially depressing. We were brought to the building just near it that has a small display including a model of the reactor showing what it looks like inside the sarcophagus. The area has various devices monitoring radiation levels outside the building. The structure itself is just huge. And it’s rusting like crazy. The woman who heads up the international affairs of the office kindly, but passionately spoke with us about the current situation of the reactor, its impact, and its future. It was her birthday, by the way. Supposedly, within the next few years, a multimillion dollar project will begin to completely enclose the existing structure in a new structure that will last for hundreds of years, and considering how long the danger will be present, it seems more like buying time until a future generation will have to find a solution.

But part of what Sergiy wanted us to take away from this was not just the devastation of the accident, but also the hope that was awoken in its aftermath. He said, back then, when he was a commander of the radiation reconnaissance crew and platoon inside the zone several months after the explosion, he never would have imagined having this sort of exchange with Americans. He delighted in showing us evidence of the resilience of nature- a green plant sprouting from the door frame of the cultural building, a tree that grew in the crack of concrete and had fallen over but was still sprouting green branches.

I’m sure you’ve gotten an idea of how great Sergiy really is. I appreciated the second chance he gave me to go on the trip when he just as well could have told me “too bad”. Just a little more about him:

He was the officer, responsible for management of the company’s radiation reconnaissance missions, and was cited for bravery and heroism by the Commander of Kiev Military District. He has an MSc in physical chemistry and an MSc in environmental sciences and policy, complemented by courses in the social sciences and humanities (history and literature). Now he is an expert in Chernobyl and the mitigation of radiation and ecological disasters, the author of a scientific monograph on the actual state of the Chernobyl mitigation workers’ (liquidators’) health and several important international generalizing papers on Chernobyl and regularities of contemporary disasters. He also wrote several books of Chernobyl prose, already translated into English and Hungarian, and two screenplays, decorated at prestigious international competitions Koronatsija slova [Crowning the word] (Kiev-2005) and Kinostsenariy [Screenplay] Magazine Competition (Moscow-1997).

Needless to say, I felt very lucky to have had him as my guide. His heart is in all the right places for this sort of thing. He even rescued two puppies of the checkpoint guard’s dog and brought them to people who lived in one of the reinhabited villages. We were actually able to meet one woman who evacuated, but came back to this village not long afterwards and has lived there ever since.

This will be a Christmas Eve that I never forget. Strangely enough, I thought I had posted this yesterday before I went to the airport to find out my flights got screwed up. Well, luckily, most of it was saved and my taxi is picking me up in an hour to go back to the airport for take 2 of this fiasco. There were many great pictures from the trip that I will have to post to a Picasa album as posting only a few here will not do the trip justice.

Map from the BBC

As of today, The Schengen Zone of the European Union has expanded to include nine additional EU countries including Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, and Malta. Three of these countries border Ukraine. The Schengen Zone is the area of the EU that has eliminated internal border controls so once you’re in one country, you can essentially move freely to the next within the zone. The NYT/Reuters and BBC articles talk about the extension itself as well as the celebrations that took place including the symbolic joint removal of border equipment between old and new Schengen countries. A bit is mentioned about the EU’s neighbors who are neither in the European Union nor have any near prospects of joining like Ukraine, Moldova, etc. but hardly enough to get a good picture of how people are feeling.

It seems that although this move is generally good for the Schengen Zone, especially it’s new members, people on every side of the border (or lack there of) are feeling a little tense. As examples, Germans and Austrians seem to fear what might slip into the Schengen zone through its new members, Poland fears losing business from its close neighbors, and Ukrainians are concerned about their newest limitations in crossing into Europe, especially Poland.

Surprisingly, there were more articles in some of the main Ukrainian news sites about the latest moves of Tymoshenko’s goverment (yes, she did finally get elected Prime Minister) than there were about this expansion that affects pretty much the entirety of the western border of Ukraine. This article breaks down the new rules of Ukrainians traveling to Poland. Some Ukrainians will still be able to apply for visas to the new States free of charge, but ordinary Ukrainians will now have to pay 35 Euros for Schengen visas, at best. If the agreement between the EU and Ukraine on the new visa regime isn’t ratified by January 1, 2008, then the fee will be 60 Euros, I guess. And I’m not quite sure about these national visas Poland will continue to or has already issued.

MSNBC/The Financial Times had a great article on how it seems to be impacting both sides, although it seems the people they picked to quote were pretty random.

Just beyond the new red and blue border post in Vysne Nemecke marking the frontier between Slovakia and Ukraine, the Pannonian plain runs along the Carpathian Mountains, and one of Europe’s largest remaining old-growth forests.

As of Friday, those forests and mountains mark the European Union’s exterior boundary following the entry of Slovakia and eight other countries into the passport-free Schengen zone…

This heavily forested corner of Europe has long been a haven for smugglers and illegal migrants, seeking access to some of the world’s wealthiest economies. In past years it was relatively easy to walk through the forest from Ukraine. But, thanks to European Union funding, the 92km border now bristles with patrols, thermal sensors and more than 250 cameras…

North of Vysne Nemecke, on the other side of the forest, lies the Polish border city of Przemysl, where Poland’s imminent entry into the Schengen zone is viewed with trepidation by both Poles and Ukrainians who make a living by trading across the border. They fear the visas, which will be more expensive and harder to obtain for the Schengen area, will make it difficult for Ukranians to cross the border for work…

“There is no work at home, we have to come here to make any money,” says Ludmilla, a greying woman in her 50s selling a carton of cigarettes and a bottle of vodka next to a display of cheap scarves and plastic Chinese toys. “The new rules are bad for you and bad for us.”

The article immediately took me back to last year when I traveled a few times from Chernivtsi to Przemysl to visit my relatives in Poland. The first time I went, we stopped in Lviv and about a half dozen of these “greying 50-something women” got in my wagon and immediately started unpacking and rewrapping cigarettes, sneakers, and bottles of vodka; some they put in bags and others they wrapped around their bodies with mailing tape. I was in absolute amazement, but these women were just chatting and taping each other, having a good old time. No one was stopped or questioned at the border. The second time I went, two of these women helped me carry my overstuffed luggage to the other side of the train station to catch my train to Milicz. Don’t ever underestimate them :-). I have a feeling these women will be traveling over the border much less now.

This border between Slovakia and Ukraine is also the subject of much debate among the refugee and migration community as thousands of migrants and asylum-seekers are now being spotted, sent back and detained in Ukraine at this border. Mark Mardell’s Euroblog has an excellent piece on the situation of the detained asylum-seekers near the border. Ukraine’s approach to these refugees has been considered somewhat less than positive by the IOs that monitor it.

A Transitions Online article I found on the situation of Schengen’s new neighbors was much more grim. The concerns were as follows:

The citizens of other countries will have to bear the full visa costs. For example, the hapless citizens of Belarus will have to pay about one-third of their average monthly salaries in order to visit neighboring Poland or Lithuania, doubtless to the delight of President Alyaksandr Lukashenka, a tyrant who thrives on his people’s isolation.

I thought the authors suggestions under the section “A Better Neighborhood” were interesting. I assume he’s making reference to the Neighborhood Policy, which the EU operates with its immediate non-EU or non-applicant neighbors.

The EU should adopt and make public a set of common standards for visa applicants, as has been proposed by the European Commission. The new standards should ensure that visa procedures are not humiliating to applicants.

Seems reasonable, and much less confusing.

Research has shown that a number of EU consulates apply discriminatory criteria toward certain groups of applicants, such as young women, who in some consulates in Ukraine have visa-refusal rates in excess of 80 percent. Common standards should define clearly the situations in which a visa can be refused and provide for a right of appeal. The standards’ application, along with the implementation of the visa-facilitation agreements, should be monitored regularly by the Commission and by independent watchdog organizations.

This does make things a little tougher for me, particularly as I study human trafficking and am looking into how it is that traffickers are able to forge documents to get visas, etc. If the visa facilitation in turn facilitated things like trafficking, Schengen citizens, Ukrainian citizens, and basically the whole of humanity loses. Monitoring by watchdogs? I should hope so.

A big step toward visa facilitation could be achieved through consular cooperation among EU member states, whereby a country with consular departments on the ground could undertake to service applicants wishing to travel to any other Schengen member. One such initiative is already underway: the Hungarian consulate in Moldova will be empowered to issue visas for Austria, Denmark, Iceland, Latvia, Estonia, and Slovenia.

A single EU visa-issuing center is also planned for Serbia, and this solution should be emulated elsewhere. It would make a vast difference, filling the gaps in national consular networks and setting high service standards.

Also makes sense, at least for Schengen member states. I’ll be interested to see how it works out in Serbia.

It is high time to put the question of lifting visa requirements on the agenda of the “enhanced” European Neighborhood Policy for Eastern Europe, which was launched by the German EU presidency in the first half of 2007. Roadmaps should be drawn in partnership with interested “neighbors” and the western Balkans, setting out clear conditions that the countries have to meet in order to have visas abolished.

There it is! The ENP, something I’ve kept my eye on ever since EuroSim 2005. I understand where the author is coming from, and I think the EU has done a little too much promising and not enough delivering, but I also understand this is an extremely difficult process and Ukraine has quite a few security problems compounded by corrupt practices in enforcement that it needs to nail down first before expecting the EU to open its visa regime. Nonetheless, the Schengen Zone is now at Ukraine’s border, making the EU closer and more closed off at the same time. I’m sure more reactions will be pouring in as Ukrainians actually experience the restrictions.

Should you feel compelled to voice your opinion in support of stronger EU-Ukrainian cooperation on the visa issue, Open Ukraine Foundation, International Renaissance Foundation, and the Centre for Peace, Conversion and Foreign Policy of Ukraine initiated an appeal online that you can sign, available in English and Ukrainian.

Four more days until I immediately run to Gabriel’s Gate for a house brew, a veggie souvlaki salad and a single order of barbeque wings. Not that I’m counting.