JOHN MARONE, KYIV
UKRAINE’S BAND AID MEMORIALS
Perhaps nothing better illustrates Ukrainian authorities’ inability to deal with their country’s most serious problems than their inordinate occupation with monuments.
Instead of healing deep national wounds or preventing them from being inflicted again, the authorities often prefer to cover things up with an inexpensive slab of stone, a Band Aid for all occasions.
Monuments are supposed to be erected so that we don’t forget the significance of a past event, usually a tragedy or an instance of heroic human sacrifice.
In Ukraine, however, they are just as often put up to make people forget – why something happened, and, more importantly, who’s responsible.
Like grave stones, monuments are also supposed to signify a sense of finality, that an issue has been put to rest. That’s why they’re usually set in stone.
But in Ukraine, a memorial always seems subject to removal by someone eager to reopen the wound.
Two memorials currently in the works will remind Ukrainians of the country’s famine in the early 1930s, and last year’s crash of a Russian airliner in Donetsk Region.
The Ukrainian famine, or Golodomor, is a classical example of a historical event that a nation might want to preserve in the minds of its posterity.
Millions of Ukrainians reportedly starved to death as a result of forced collectivization under Joseph Stalin.
Shared tragedies of such proportions often mould a people. But they also divide nations, if there is disagreement over who’s responsible.
Ethnic Russians scattered across the former Soviet Union have had their fill of being accused of all the former empire’s ills.
Those living in Ukraine, along with Russianized ethnic Ukrainians, would rather not disturb the ghosts of the past.
Although a Golodomor monument will acknowledge a past injustice, it won’t lead to national reconciliation.
Conflicting perceptions of historical justice exist in many nations, including stable ones like the United States. But before making Martin Luther King’s birthday a national holiday, Americans openly struggled through the civil rights movement.
A memorial being prepared for the victims of last year’s tragic plane crash in Donetsk Region is of less epic proportions. As much as they horrify us, plane crashes are neither historic nor uncommon.
Nevertheless, what’s wrong with remembering the 170 souls who tragically perished? Nothing, as long as the memorial is accompanied by compensation to the victims’ relatives and an investigation that seeks to prevent another accident of this scale.
As it stands, the victims’ law suit against the insurance company is still in court, so it remains to be seen whether justice will be served. As for future safety, the accident was blamed on the pilot, and we can only hope that whoever trains them has taken the disaster to heart.
Only four years earlier, Ukraine had witnessed the Sknyliv air show disaster, the world’s worst date, when a fighter jet plunged into a crowd of spectators killing over 70. A monument was erected on the site of the crash, but high-ranking military officials and organizers avoided punishment, while relatives of the victims have still yet to receive adequate compensation.
A clear misplacement of a memorial in Ukraine, however, has got to be the one recently dedicated to slain investigative journalist Georgiy Gongadze.
After publishing a series of articles that implicated top Ukrainian leaders in criminal activities, Gongadze was found beheaded in a wood outside Kyiv in late 2000. To this day, the people who ordered his killing have yet to be tried. In fact, the authorities, then and now, seem to have done everything in their power to hamper and derail the case, despite widespread condemnation at home and abroad.
Yet, on March 20 this year, Kyiv Mayor Leonid Chernovetsky laid the corner stone of a future monument to Gongadze in the center of the capital. Gongadze’s murder had set off mass street demonstrations in Kyiv in 2001, nearly toppling Leonid Kuchma, the president at the time.
The journalist’s mother has spoken out against the dedication of the monument until her son’s murderers are brought to justice.
Ukraine is not alone in showing inordinate importance to monuments. The former Soviet Union is a museum of memorials to Communist rule, which evoke different feelings depending on one’s ethnicity, nationality and even age.
When the authorities in Tallinn, Estonia, moved a controversial bronze Soviet Army soldier from the center of town in late April, young ethnic Russian launched violent demonstrations and were supported by harsh rhetoric from the Kremlin.
Moscow is still smarting over the loss of its empire, just as many of the citizens of former Soviet republics and the Central European satellite states resent past Russian hegemony.
Ukraine is as divided as ever.
It didn’t take any time at all for the Tallinn monument hysteria to hit Ukraine, with local officials in the country’s Russian speaking south and east vowing to protect bronze statues of Russia heroes, while the city council in western looking Lviv was accused by the Russian Foreign Ministry of trying to follow Estonia’s example in its civil planning.
The volley of indignant statements exchanged in the media was yet another storm in Ukraine’s political tea cup. But the country’s divisions along geographic, linguistic and geopolitical lines were exposed once again.
Unable to resolve the more serious issues that define Ukraine’s relations with Russia, such as the price of gas or the future of the Black Sea Fleet in Crimea, diplomats engaged in recriminations of who did what to each other’s monument.
It was as if both sides knew each other’s sore spots and went about yanking at the Band Aids that covered them.
As long as Ukraine’s leaders are unwilling or unable to deal with the country’s real problems – such as energy, investment and a coherent foreign policy – monuments will always play an important role in covering up the nation’s sore spots.
John Marone, Kyiv Post Senior Journalist, based in Ukraine.
June 18, 2007
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