Shadow of Anti-Semitism over Ukraine's
Disputed Election
by British Helsinki
Human Rights Group
BHHG, 24 November 2004
www.globalresearch.ca 26 November 2004
Back to Alternative Reader Index
Western television
viewers and newspaper readers are being fed on a diet of propaganda about
the current crisis in Ukraine. The orange flags and uniforms of the
opposition fill our screens and decorate the front pages. “People power”
and Western-orientated democrats are on the march against evil
ex-communist oligarchs. Good is battling against evil for the soul of
Ukraine.
Sadly it is not so
simple. Western media and governments may have edited out the
manifestations of extreme nationalism and anti-Semitism which disfigure
the Ukrainian opposition’s rabble-rousing but history will record that in
the run up to the disputed presidential elections, key opposition leaders,
including Viktor Yushchenko, Julia Timoshenko and Alexander Moroz,
defended anti-Semitic publications and accepted the backing of neo-Nazi
groups as well as US and EU and so-called “civic society” NGOs. Nor were
the anti-Semtic apologetics of the Ukrainian opposition unknown to key
OSCE observers and EU parliamentarians who nonetheless ignored the dark
shadow across Yushchenko’s campaign preferring instead to abuse his rival.
A key media outlet
which has backed Viktor Yushchenko’s long march on the Ukrainian
presidency published an extraordinary anti-Semitic rant in 2003 which
claimed that 400,000 Jews fought alongside Hitler’s invading army in 1941!
Inserted as an
advertising feature, “Jews in Ukraine Today: Reality Without Myths,"
appeared in Silski visti (Village News). The newspaper was one of the
largest in Ukraine with a circulation of around 500,000. It was a
prominent backer of Viktor Yushchenko and his Our Ukraine party.
In late 2003,
Alexander Shlayen, the head of the Ukrainian Anti-Fascist Committee and a
prominent member of the post-Holocaust Jewish community in Ukraine,
initiated a prosecution of the newspaper, Silski visti for promoting
inter-ethnic discord in the country which was the site of the infamous
Babi Yar massacre along with countless other Nazi atrocities against Jews.
On 28th
January, 2004, the court ordered the closing of the newspaper but it
defied the ruling with the vocal backing of the opposition Our Ukraine
party and its allies. In August, 2004, Alexander Shlaven died suddenly and
unexpectedly.
In an interview with
JTA (Jewish Telegraphic Agency), the paper's editor, Vasily Gruzin,
defended the newspaper's decision to publish the piece: "Although we
published the Yaremenko article as a paid advertisement and not as a
position we ourselves endorsed, I happen to believe the figure of 400,000
Jews taking part in the German invasion of the Ukraine is not far from the
truth," he said.
"I personally have
nothing against common Jews, but rather against a small group of Jewish
oligarchs who control Ukraine both economically and politically. I believe
the point of Zionism today is Jewish control of the world, and we see this
process at work in Ukraine
today."
Shortly after this anti-Semitic diatribe by Yaremenko, Victor Yuschenko –
who our media always apostrophises as “the pro-Western presidential
candidate” and who enjoys the open support of the Bush administration --
and another prominent opposition leader, energy oligarch Yulia Timoshenko
and Alexander Moroz of the Socialist Party issued a statement headed
"Hands Off Silski Visti”!
[
http://www.ncsj.org/AuxPages/092104JTA_Ukraine.shtml]
Mr Moroz has been a
prominent figure on the opposition in tribune in Kiev and as recently as
21st September, 2004, he insisted, "I have defended Silski
Visti and will continue to do so," Moroz said. "I personally think the
argument of the author of the article, Vasily Yaremenko, citing 400,000
Jews in the S.S. is incorrect, but I am not in a position to know all the
facts." [http://www.ncsj.org/AuxPages/092104JTA_Ukraine.shtml]
What kind of ally of
the West needs to learn more about the Nazis to refute Yaremenko’s claims
about a Jewish-Nazi alliance? Yet this is the sort of politician who gets
unconditional backing in Washington and Brussels.
One of the so-called
“independent” election observers whose denunciation of the Yanukovich camp
for fraud has been a central part of the propaganda battle is the British
Conservative MEP, Charles Tannock, who has appeared in recent days on
opposition platforms egging on the protestors. Before the elections Mr
Tannock wrote several articles openly backing Viktor Yushchenko’s
candidacy, but Mr Tannock’s best known intervention in Ukrainian politics
before the disputed presidential election was his criticism of the courts
for banning the anti-Semitic newspaper, Silski visti.
Like Viktor
Yushchenko and Julia Timoshenko, MEP Tannock condemned the ban saying in
an interview in the Our Ukraine party newspaper on 12th March,
2004: “the closure of the newspaper went a step far too far” according to
Mr Tannock’s own web-page. He goes on to admit that as a backer of Our
Ukraine “I don’t think it does your party any good to be associated with
extreme [emphasis added] anti-Semitic articles”! [
http://www.charlestannock.com/pressarticle.asp?ID=360 ]
Sadly the Silski
visti affair was not unique.
In western Ukraine in
particular (as in Britain and North America) there is an aging cohort of
elderly veterans of the Waffen SS’s Galician division. They are anxious to
revise their country’s history and re-habilitate their wartime service on
behalf of the Third Reich. In Ukraine these old Nazis parade protesting
their patriotism and demanding equal rights with Red Army veterans. A
younger more aggressive and openly racist and neo-Nazi cohort of
historical revisionists has also appeared. They have their “intellectual”
spokesmen whose anti-Semitic and white supremacist writings have produced
scandal in Kiev not only in Silski visti.
In western Ukrainian
towns like Ivano-Frankivsk, the uniformed bully-boys of the UNSO movement,
so-called Ukrainian Self-Defence forces, act as enforcers for Our Ukraine
in effect. Mr Yushchenko scored well over 90% in western regions like
Ivano-Frankivsk – results at least as improbable as any for Mr Yanukevich
in the east of the country. How much does Mr Yushchenko’s near unanimous
support in western towns depend on the storm troopers of the Ukrainian new
right?
It is shocking that
any link could exist between such neo-Nazi muscle men and their
propagandists and politicians usually presented in the Anglo-American
media as the harbingers of Western democracy and universal humanitarian
values in Ukraine. Even more bizarre than the defence of the right of an
anti-Semite to disseminate his wares by “pro-Western” Ukrainian
politicians like Yushchenko, Julia Timoshenko and Aleksandr Moroz is the
fact that Mr. Yushchenko’s candidacy for president of Ukraine is openly
backed by the famous American billionaire philanthropist, George Soros,
himself a survivor of the Holocaust.
Although ten years
ago in 1994, Mr. Soros put his influence and money behind Leonid Kuchma,
the democracy-promoting philanthropist has since turned against the
outgoing Ukrainian President and his preferred successor as candidate for
president, Viktor Yanukevich. As far back as 1st March, 2001,
the American billionaire had written an editorial page piece in the
Financial Times making his support for Yushchenko clear when he demanded
, “If Mr Kuchma cares about Ukraine’s survival as an independent
democratic state, he must take responsibility for his actions and hand
over duties to the prime minister, [i.e. Yushchenko] the constitutionally
designated successor, pending the results of the investigation. The West
must take a clear position, denouncing Mr Kuchma’s behavior and his
actions. There is no way for the international community to continue to
do business with Mr Kuchma until an impartial investigation [into the
Gongadze murder case] has been completed and those responsible are held to
account.”
Mr. Soros’s concern
for human rights and due process does him credit, but his tone does not
suggest the assumption of innocence! Moreover at precisely the same time
in early, 2001, his own local Ukrainian foundation was supporting media
which were the antithesis of democratic decency. In Germany, Neue
Solidarität’s Roman Bessonov reported from the western Ukrainian city of
Lvov on 4th April, 2001, that a Soros-funded “Renaissance”
foundation was backing the nationalist monthly, “Derzhanist”
((“Independent Statehood”) commenting “Whoever reads it would conclude
that Kiev is the Fourth Rome and that Babi Yar wasn’t where umpteen
thousands of Jews were murdered by the Nazi SS but rather where the
Chekists murdered Ukrainian patriots.”
[See
http://www.bueso.de/nrw/Aktuelles/ukraine.htm]
In Ukraine, in the
presidential elections, Soros’s people back Yushchenko but he is also
supported by Andrei Shkil’s ultra-nationalist UNSO. Vyacheslav Likhachev
of the European-Asian Jewish Congress noted the unsettling links between
Mr Soros’s preferred candidate for Ukrainian president, Yuschchenko, and
the neo-Nazis there after the 2002 parliamentary elections
“the
former leader of the UNA-UNSD Andry Shkil was elected to the parliament in
a single-ticket election in the Lviv region, with the support of Our
Ukraine, led by Viktor Yuschenko (Victor Yuschenko is a former prime
minister and one of the quite probable presidential candidates). At the
time elections were held, the leader of the nationalists had been in jail
for a year, accused of organizing mass anti-government riots. Having been
elected, Andry Shkil was granted immunity to criminal prosecution. Thus,
the moderate national-democrats form unions with the radicals.”
[See
Vyacheslav Likhachev,
“Anti-Semtism in Ukraine”,
http://www.eajc.org/program_art_e.php?id=10]
Some idea of Mr Shkil’s pro-Western
reform-minded ideas is available on his web-page: ““Inside,
an article appeared, entitled “Nationalism in the World: Past, Present,
Future,” written by Andriy Shkil’, editor-in-chief of Natsionalist,
chairman of the Dontsov Supporters’ Club, and head of the Lviv branch of
UNA. Mostly devoted to the New Right, it also mentioned their precursors,
including Gobineau, and “his worthy student Walter Darre, who developed
the idea of artificial selection [eugenics] to improve the human race.”
Mein Kampf and its author (whose name is not given) are praised for
“re-examining these ideas on the highest level.” Several of Darre’s ideas
are applied to the Ukrainian situation: Christianity’s mistaken view of
the equality of human beings, the necessity for the revival of paganism as
an essential spiritual feature of the nation and as a precondition for the
creation of a new national elite, with eugenics as a means of cleansing
and renewing the people.Thus, the UNA values the experience of the
European Right, and other radicals regardless of their political
orientation.”
[See
http://www.una-unso.org/av/mainview.asp?TT_id=17&TX_id=402 ]
Belatedly in the run-up to October’s
presidential elections, Mr Yuschchenko tried to distance himself from
radical nationalists like Shkil _ at least in the English-language version
of his web-page. [ See “Yushchenko advises
«fascist thugs» to support Yanukovych”
15:25,
2 July 2004
@
http://www.yuschenko.com.ua/eng/present/News/838/
] But they were not prepared to denounce
him: “It was reported that last Saturday
in Kyiv there was a «parade» of the «UNA-UNSO» party that has nothing in
common with the «UNA-UNSO» organization headed by Andriy Shkil, YTB
member. During this meeting Kovalenko’s «UNA-UNSO» declared the support of
Yushchenko with the fascist signs, «SSS» symbols and gestures in Hitlerite
manner.”!
[See
http://www.una-unso.org/av/mainview.asp?TT_id=17&TX_id=402 ]
Bulatlat
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