Response to Peter Pan - my first angry person
You can link to the article I am responding to here.
Well Peter, thanks for being my first angry person. I was a little worried I wasn't going to be cut out for the harsh ridicule many bloggers submit themselves to, but the softballs you're throwing me should make for a very good warm-up.
"Those sorry revolutioners, Yuschenko and Timoshenko, are just hungry for power and US dollars, which by the way were used as the reward to lure the people to Maidan."
I repeat the phrase I've mentioned before: I have never met or even heard of a Yanukovych supporter who has worked for free, nor have I ever met a Yushchenko supporter who is working for money. I was in the middle of Yushchenko campaign headquarters, and the staff couldn't wait to tell me how they were volunteering. "That's how we beat the Yanukovych people, they are working for money." If you give me your word that you are giving Yanukovych good press for free, then I'm willing to chalk you up as the first unpaid Yanukovych supporter I've met.
> They were offered a meeting (by Yanukovich) to disscuss the situation but don't go, as they simply have nothing to say.
What "situation"? Do you mean the obvious and well-documented falsification on the part of Yanukovych? He denied it, he still denies it. On the other hand, the OSCE, the EU, Canada, the US, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the International Helsinki Foundation, the Committee of Voters of Ukraine, the Razumkov Center, the Ukrainian Parliament, the Ukrainian Supreme Court, three of the Central Election Committee members, the taped conversations of his immediate staff, and all the other people I've forgotten have said it was a fraud. When Yanukovych admits that Yushchenko won the election, then they may have something to talk about.
"The number of people at that square may not be more than a few thousand (most likely, 8-10) - it's just the space limitation."
Oh for goodness sake, look at it: http://www.orangeukraine.squarespace.com/display/ShowPicture?moduleId=88636&pictureId=92938&galleryId=8267
I didn't manage to count them all myself, so I took the word of the Kyiv Post: "An estimated million opposition protesters are clogging central Kyiv," Bloomberg said there were already a million the day after the election. A widely circulated AP article said there were 200,000 on Monday, and the numbers rose all week. Every news source agrees there were at least hundreds of thousands: AP, BBC, The Globe and Mail, Yahoo!, CNN... So if there were only a mere eight hundred thousand people out there instead of a million, what point of yours would it prove?
"Those people instead of working interfere with the work of other people (like your Andrei, who comes to be from a family of troublemakers, probably blaming everybody but themself for their problems)."
That's what protests and strikes are for - interfering with other peoples' work. Specifically, they are meant to interfere with the work of Yanukovych and his officials to steal an election they could not win with a legitimate vote. I don't know who Andrei might blame his problems on, because he didn't talk about his personal problems with me. He spent most of his time talking about the massive fraud he and all his fellow observers witnessed in eastern oblasts.
"The actions of Yuschenko &Co lead to crizis, "
Yanukovych tanked the budget with his campaign expenditures, a quadrupling of the budget to make a one-time-only monetary gift to older people, and sent investors scurrying with promises to do things like give cars to every veteran. Ukraine was already in a crisis when Yanukovych stole the vote.
"and he doesn't care about ukrainians (as it was his initiative to prevent voting by ukrainians, living in Russa at these elections). And Russia, by the way, have the largest in the world community of ukrainians, living on its territory. Do you call THIS democracy?"
I assume you mean Yushchenko's opposition to the opening of additional voting booths in Russia. According to Zerkalo Nedeli, the expected voter turnout at all foreign voting booths worldwide was 300,000, one percentage point of the 30 million total Ukrainians that voted. In Germany, with its large Ukrainian population, 5 polling stations were set up. Worldwide there were 113 polling stations, but, for a time, there was a proposal in the Ukrainian Parliament to set up SIX HUNDRED AND FIFTY polling stations in Russia to meet the desperate need of the fraction of 1% of Ukrainian voters that live there. That is what Yushchenko objected to and what I call it is common sense.
"Timoshenko is a grand thief, as well as most of oligarchs you mention with such an admiration. So please, don't paint them as saints. They are just a bunch of dirty politicians who don't care about Ukraine."
What oligarchs have I talked about? Oh, you mean the glowing praise I've heaped on Akhmetov, the richest oligarch in Ukraine and owner of much of Yanukovych's native Donetsk. I am not sure what pro-opposition oligarchs you are talking about, but they've got to be pretty clean to have survived the repeated tax inspections and police searches and sudden shutdowns that have overwhelmingly plagued pro-opposition businesses since at least last Spring. I never claimed she was a saint, I said she'd made a lot of money in the gray zone after the fall of Communism, and linked to a Guardian article in the comments which showed every sketchy detail. If you've got a cleaner politician to contrast her with, I'd love to see your candidate.
Ultimately, Peter, you wrote this in response to my personal account of visiting the people living in tents on Khreshchatyk, The Order in Tent City. The article wasn't about the opposition leadership. It was hardly about politicians at all. I would assume you are accusing me making up the whole thing, except you also accuses Andrey from Luhansk of being a troublemaker. So I'm afraid I don't know what lies you are accusing me of. Thanks anyway for taking a fairy dust flight in from never-never land to comment my site.
You can link to the article I am responding to here.
Dan McMinn
8 Comments
Reader Comments (8)
I came across your site from a Google Alert, and have forwarded the link to it from many different friends from Bejing to Montreal. Unlike the news reports people see on the news or read in the regular press, these lack some of the intimacy you provide in the material you have added to this site.
I too have tried to provide some of the inside track for friends of mine scattered over the face of our planet. I've been living in Ukraine since 1999, and since 1990 I have made regular visits, having met many people along the way I have maintained contacts with them gained their trust. For the first two years here I worked with NGOs on democracy building and anti-corruption education issues, spent a year and half working in journalism here, and now work at a local law firm as head of its information services department.
During the first week after the second round of elections I spent a great deal of my time after working hours facilitating journalists with interviews in the "tent city" that sprung up on Khreshchatyk on November 22, and at the end of it I was off to London on the 26th of November. This departure came after returning home at 6:30 in the morning totally exhausted and due to turn up at the Canadian Embassy to get my new Canadian passport. When I arrived at 9:30 I was told that the person who was supposed to give me my passport was not there and only due back close to 11:00. "Great!" I thought. I still had a flight to London at 14:15 and I still had to get home, pick up my things and get to the airport. Nothing like a little stress to add to my exhaustion.
At about 11:20 I had my passport in my hands and headed out the embassy door, and called my trusted friend Pasha, who I always depend on to drive me to the airport. "Hello Bill," he said, and then asked where I was. "Meet me at L'viv" square in 3 minutes then we will head to your place to pick up your bags," he added. Easier said than done. In what usually a 10 minute drive, it took us close to 25 minutes having to circumnavigate the crowds that were blocking the Cabinet of Ministers building, and many of the other government buildings within blocks of my apartment. But the site of orange, and of these people who had within the last weeks, grown spines, and were no longer going to tolerate irresponsible government, or the fact that their votes had been stollen, warmed my heart. With my bags in the car I was happy to be on my way to London to get my new Ukrainian visa and to attend an online conference.
Arriving in London later that afternoon, and with a number of hours before my host was to arrive home, I decided to make my way to the Ukrainian Club in London's Holland Park district. Upon my arrival, there were a handful of people watching TV 5 "Ukraine's channel of Honest News". By 18:00 more people started to fill the Club, and much to my surprise I met up with an old friend Yarema Ronish from Montreal who was now living and working in London. Coincedently, Yarema lives in the neighbourhood where my host lives, which facilitated my travel into North London for the first three nights, prior to checking into my hotel on Monday November 29.
During my week in London, I spent every night at the Club watching TV5 and attending the demonstrations organized by the British Ukrainian Community. On Sunday November 28, there were about 3,000 people who had gathered to denounce the electoral fraud and supporting Victor Yushenko as the people's president. Suprisingly enough, by Thursday December 2, even the bobbies who were on patrol near the demonstration were well aware of the situation in Ukraine and were able to explain to passersby why the demonstration was going on.
The following morning I was up at 4:45 to head to Heathrow with a 8:05 flight bound for Kyiv. While my batteries were recharged, I was excited to be heading back to the "Orange Evolution". True, some have called it the "Orange Revolution" though since an interview I conducted with a young man in the tent city on Khreschatyk on Saturday December 4th, the word evolution seems to be much more fitting to what has been going on since November 22. Ukraine, has truly become a nation, thanks to people like Leonid Kuchma the incumbent president and his cronies who seem to think that the reason they are in power is to line their pockets.
Upon arrival in Kyiv, I had to quickly get oriented on what had transpired during my absence. I called my Kum Vasyl Boychuk. Kum is a term used in Ukrainian to denote that there is a godparental relationship between us. Having been involved in the early student movements in the early 1990s, he along with another handful of old friends of ours, had taken up leadership positions in the camp set up by Pora on Khreschatyk during the first week. He told me that the morning I had left for London, a decision had already been taken to set up a camp near the Parliament buildings, and he was made the camp's Commandant, but rather than heading straight to that camp I decided to head down to Khreschatyk, and to the Drum, a well known haunt of opposition journalists, to grab a bite to eat.
The place was packed, and everyone was awaiting the Supreme Court of Ukraine's decision regarding the Central Election Commision's premature announcement of Victor Yanukovych as the victor in the second round. The court nullified the second round, making it necessary for a third round. While the opposition and Victor Yushenko considered this a victory, the incumbent president Leonid Kuchma was clearly unhappy with the decision. He had been mum, in the last week, but clearly voiced his opinion in stating, "Where in the world you have three rounds of elections!" It was here, that I first met Chris Mota, a Montrealer who had been in Kyiv over the last week with a journalist from "La Presse", a Montreal-based French language daily newspaper. You can read Chis Mota's reports here: http://www.UkrainianTime.com/news.html
Later that night I headed back up to the upper camp. I entered the tent with Vasyl, and old friend Ruslan who had come in from Western Ukraine, and a former student leader was being interviewed by a group of four journalists, we shook hands, and I was invited to sit down at the table with them. When one of the journalists proded Ruslan for the answer to one of his questions, Ruslan said, "I'm going to defer that question to Kotsiuruba!" I looked to the end of the table. There sat Ihor Kotsiuruba, who in the late 1980s and early 1990s was a student leader from L'viv, who often wrote and recited poems critical of the Soviet government and of a system that he and many others despised. I hadn't seen Ihor for over ten years, and he had aged quite a bit, I would have never recognized him on the street. After the journalists left, I had to jog his memory a little to remind him when we had met. We embraced like old friends here do when they have not seen each other for long periods of time. To say the least I was extremely happy to see him, and over the next few days when we would meet we would both break out into smiles, but not once would we mention the loss of some of our close friends who had originally brought him and I together in the summer of 1990.
By noon on Saturday I was up and about and headed off to Khreschatyk, and made some of the phone calls necessary for the interviews Chris said she would like.
As I walked along Khreshchatyk I ran into an aquaintance who told me of how Pora had blockaded President Kuchma's dacha in the posh district of Koncha Zaspa south of the capital. "It was quite comical, a friend took a bandage off of his finger and covered the camera of the front gate, and when official cars arrived and they could not be identified they had to head back to where they came from!" He then related to me the continued lies that are being spread by different media outlets. "I got a call from a friend in Minsk," he said with a tone of what was leading to sarcasm. "He told me to pack my things in Kyiv and get to Minsk as quickly as possible, because the "orange facists" are taking over the capital." My reply to him was, "What are you calling me an orange facist?" But this wasn't the only disinformation he told me about. "A friend in Donetsk called me and told me that they were using video footage that was a year old, to show people that there was simply nothing going on in Kyiv, showing empty streets and a few cops walking along Kreshchatyk," he said with disgust in his voice.
Prior to meeting Chris I headed up to the tent city to meet with Vasyl, and a young New Zealander who he had wanted me to meet, and who had been living in the upper camp. After our introductions we sat down to have tea with Vasyl the Commandant and to exchange views on the history that was in the making. Jonothan explained to me how he had been working in a small town south of Kyiv, and how he brought some of the kids from the youth group he was working with into Kyiv to see just what was going on and to treat them to a day in the big city. He asked the Commandant, what they would be doing with the tents after the protests, and said it would be nice if the group he was working with could acquire some of them for a week long camping trip he and his group were planning for over a 150 kids next May. "If I can tell these kids from different regions of Ukraine that we will supply the tents, we will have a much better turn out," he said. We discussed this with the Commandant a little further, then I had to run off to meet Chris for our first appointment.
First we met with Rostyslav Pavlenko a PhD candidate in Political Science and Director of Programs of the School of Policy Analysis at the National Ukrainian University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. He gave us his views on a number of issues that have come out of these elections, which we hope will be broadcast on Ukrainian Time in Montreal this coming Saturday.
From there Chris and I hit the lower tent city, the one that is on Khreschatyk. We made our rounds to get some vox pop from those who were living there. These kids were very welcoming, offering us to sit with them next to the fires they had going to stay warm, as the wind would shift, smoke would get in our eyes but they would continue to recount their reasons for be out in the tent city. One young man, who's name I don't remember told us that he didn't want to call this a revolution, but an evolution. "Ukraine has grown up since the second round of elections," he added. He explained that while he didn't live in the tent city, he told us he felt obligated to come out and support his friends, at the end of a day's work, and on weekends. Two other students had come from Odesa, and had been in the tent city for the last 4 days, while one said he would be stating here until it was necessary, while a young woman mentioned she would head back to Odesa in a couple of days.
After a little coaxing Chris agreed to walk up Hrushevsky Street to the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine's Parliament, to meet with Vasyl the Commandant of the higher camp. As we walked up the hill, Chris joked that anyone coming to Kyiv would have buns-of-steel after walking around this city for a week. As we walked past the Cabinet of Ministers, we could hear the the chants supporting Victor Yuschenko, and sylablic rythym of tams in time with the pronounciation of Yu-shchen-ko! We were immersed in this sound for the next ten minutes as we slowly made our way between the hill upon which the drummers were standing and the towering Cabinet of Ministers, the echo of the tams rang out, over and over.
Upon arriving at the upper camp and after our credentials were checked we were let into the compound surrounded by park benches. Smaller tents lining the perimeter on the side of Mariiansky Palace and the VR, there were a few large MASH-style army tents, used as the command post and a place for storing supplies.
We passed through an alcove, closed the outer flap and then opened the inner flap of the tent and stepped inside. Unlike the tent city on Khreshatyk, this tent city seemed very sedate, though at the same time we were welcomed with hospitality. I young women named Olia who was in her late teens or maybe early twenties asked us if we would have tea or coffee. I had been introduced to her the night before, and her eyes glowed with passsion for the cause she, like so many others, have undertaken since November 22. Vasyl, whose voice had grown raspy in the last week, spoke softly as he explained how society has changed since his participation in the student strikes of the early 1990s. "When students went on a hunger strike on Majdan in 1990, demanding new elections, the resignation of the Masol government, and that consciptees server their military service on the territory of Ukraine, we were in our early twenties, and we were seen as fringe element of what was then Soviet society. What is happening here, and particularly down on Khreshatyk has no generational boundries," he explained. "This is, I hope the culmination of what we started back in 1990, even though I now have a family with 18 month old twins, I'm here for them and all the others who I want to live in a democratic country, in which the rule of law comes first," he concluded.
Sometimes it takes an outsider to see things that one takes for granted. I have known Vasyl for over ten years and to me he is simply my Kum and one of my best friends, but Chris mentioned to me that she felt that the students who were occupying the upper camp had a very strong reverence for Vasyl, particularly Olia who had become his personal assistant. I believe that this young woman, will learn a great deal from her experience over the next days or weeks. I recall how Vasyl and another good friend, Orest, had taken a young man by the name of Vladyslav Kaskiv under their tutelage during the events of the early 1990s. Now, Vladyslav is a coordinator with the Pora civic movement, and he regularly can be seen at press conferences and on TV5. I truly hope that the experience Olia receives will never have to be used in another such protest in order to bring about change in her country after we have elections on December 26, but one thing for certain, both she and this country will clearly never be the same after these last two tumultous weeks.
Twenty-four hours had gone by since I had returned from London, and while I was refreshed from the trip, I know that there were and will be a number of such meetings with Commandant Vasyl Boychuk, as I hope to introduce other journalists to him, and the many other individuals I have met who have made this "Orange (r)evolution" possible.
All the best from Kyiv!
Vasyl
I figure that later on I can get persnikity about the definitions, now just go with the flow. Your story is great though, thanks for sharing!
First, I did not accuse you of taking money, as you can easily see in my response to you in The Order in Tent City. Second, since elsewhere you say "I am not a supporter of Yanukovych, I'm an opponent of Yushchenko", then, logically, you do not fit into this category.
Peter Pan has not responded to me, but in the intervening time I have at most learned that someone I know is a Yanukovych supporter. A friend of mine asked him why and he said it was because "Yushchenko is like Hitler, he wants to kill all Russians". However, I have not been able to speak with a Yanukovych supporter personally this whole time.
One of my stories in Tent City Stories, and one of my postings in the Journal of Election Madness are each about trying to meet Yanukovych supporters and failing. I have sent you an email; I hope we can meet, I would be very interested to hear your side of things.
I lived in the Ukraine all my life and left the country in 1995. I come back every Summer to either work or just spend a couple of months with my friends in Kiev. When I was working in Kiev this Summer, most of the people were against Yanukovich....well, not necessarily against him, but just making fun of the fact that he was jailed before. But let's not forget how Timoshenko got her money - net very legal either. The only gifference is that she didn't get caught in time. now, Yushenko, who is an asshole (lived under his prime minister regime and hated every second of it), is Tioshenko's puppet and can't do anything himself. I am ok with the Ukraine entering the EU, but seeing this orange bastard licking Poland's and US's asses is just embarassing for me to consider myself a Ukrainian. Even though he was just elected president, I will never consider him my president.
Personally I spent few days and nights blocking presidential administration on Bankova st.
Some people still think we all were earning US dollars standing there. They can't beleve that words "freedom", "justice" can be reason for standing feezing nights (it was -8 deg.C or 17 deg.F) under guns of SWAT directed on us.
Some people still think we were occupated by militaries and that's why were spending nights in camp. lol
Some people still hate me knowing I was there.
You can't imagine how hard it was to face offence from all sides. We were like enemies of nation (at least we were shown on TV like that)
Do you think it was a game?! Do you think we went there for fun?!
I arrived in Kiev on November, 25-th. Everybody was sure the war will start.
I thought so too.
But I went there. Why? Maybe freedom means for me more than for others who still hate me.
You who think it was an "Orange disaster" just know NOTHING about that.
As this site is in English, I hope many people from all the world will read it. More than half of Ukr population were against this revolution. Now, we usually call the participants of that revolution as "Maidauns" - the derivative from Down illness. They eated Oranges with LSD and many other poisons. This was disgusting revolution. Wholy agree with Peter Pan.