[Ohio UZO News] Ukraine: AP; State Department; WoE

[Deychak, Orest]

Associated Press

IMF eases Ukraine loan conditions 

By MARIA DANILOVA 

Associated Press Writer

27 February 2009

 

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - The International Monetary Fund signaled Friday
that Ukraine was making progress toward receiving a second crucial
installment of a $16.4 billion emergency loan after the aid program was
frozen earlier this month.

The IMF said it was ready to reconsider its loan requirements and allow
Ukraine to run a bigger budget deficit after the financial crisis grew
worse.

The IMF had previously insisted that Ukraine trim the 2009 deficit from
3 percent to 1 percent of the GDP. But Ceyla Pazarbasioglu, the head of
the IMF mission to Ukraine, said Friday that a balanced budget was
impossible given the economy would contract by 6 percent or more this
year and said the country could run a deficit as long it secures
external funding.

"A balanced budget given a sharp decline in revenues does not seem
feasible at this point in time," Pazarbasioglu told reporters in a
conference call. "We are fully supportive of the authorities' efforts to
raise additional funding from multilateral and bilateral creditors."

Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who is reluctant to cut social spending
and upset voters ahead of elections this year, has turned to G-7
countries and Russia to help close the budget gap.

The IMF aid is critical to Ukraine, exposed as one of the most
vulnerable to the global financial crisis.

Industrial output has slumped by over one-third and Ukraine's currency
has lost nearly half of its value against the dollar. The hryvna
continued falling Friday, closing at 8.7 to the dollar Friday, down 46
percent from 4.9 in September.

The crisis has been exacerbated by constant feuds among Ukraine's
political leaders.

On Friday, however, Tymoshenko, President Viktor Yushchenko, and
parliament speaker Volodymyr Lytvyn pledged they would work together to
come up with anti-crisis measures and policy changes in the coming days
and present them to the IMF.

Pazarbasioglu praised the effort. "The authorities are putting together
their own anti-crisis package and measures and that is very
encouraging," she told reporters

U.S. Department of State

2008 Human Rights Reports: Ukraine 

Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor

2008 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices
<http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2008/index.htm> 

February 25, 2009

 

Ukraine, population 46 million, is a republic with a mixed presidential
and parliamentary system, governed by a directly elected president and a
unicameral parliament (the Verkhovna Rada) that selects a prime
minister. Parliamentary elections were held in September 2007; according
to international observers, fundamental civil and political rights were
respected during the campaign, enabling voters to express their opinions
freely. Five political parties and blocs held seats in the 450 member
parliament. Civilian authorities generally maintained effective control
of the security forces.

The police and penal systems continued to be sources of some of the most
serious human rights concerns. They included instances of torture by law
enforcement personnel, harsh conditions in prisons and detention
facilities, and arbitrary and lengthy pretrial detention. The judiciary
lacked independence and suffered from corruption. The government
continued to be slow to return religious property. Societal violence
against Jews continued to be a problem, as did anti Semitic
publications, although their number and circulation declined during the
year. Serious corruption persisted in all branches of the government.
Societal problems included violence and discrimination against women,
including domestic violence and sexual harassment in the workplace, and
against children, as well as increased violence against persons of non
Slavic appearance. Discrimination against Roma continued. Trafficking in
persons continued to be a serious problem. Workers continued to face
limitations on their ability to form and join unions of their choice and
to bargain collectively.

During the year the government closed the long criticized Pavshyne
migrant detention facility and opened two migrant detention centers that
comply with international standards. The Ministry of the Interior
established human rights monitoring departments in all regions to
monitor human rights performance by police during the year. 

For full report, see:
http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2008/eur/119110.htm

 

Window on Eurasia: To Counter Ukraine Charges of Genocide, Moscow Admits
to Mass Murder

 

Paul Goble

 

            Vienna, February 26 - In order to counter Kyiv's insistence
that Stalin carried out a genocide in Ukraine in the 1930s, an
insistence that is at the core of the definition of the Ukrainian
nation, Moscow has released new documents suggesting that the Soviet
dictator engaged in a criminal campaign of mass murder across the entire
Soviet Union.

            Yesterday, Vladimir Kozlov, the head of Russia's Federal
Archives Agency, told a Moscow press conference that the famine in
Ukraine and elsewhere in the USSR was "the result of [Stalin's] criminal
policy" but that "of course, no one planned any famine" or singled out
any ethnic group as its victim
(rian.ru/society/20090225/163170651.html).

            Instead, he said, "the famine was the result of the errors
and miscalculations of the political course of the leadership of the
country in the course of the realization of collectivization." And he
insisted that he and his researchers had not found "a single document"
showing that Stalin planned "a terror famine" in Ukraine.

            Instead, Kozlov said, "absolutely all documents testify that
the chief enemy of Soviet power at that time was an enemy defined not on
the basis of ethnicity but on the basis of class," in this case the
peasantry which Stalin wanted to force to join collective farms
throughout whatever means he could.

            Kozlov's comments came as he presented a new collective of
documents, entitled "The Famine in the USSR," and a DVD which contained
a selection of those documents and others, which he said will total some
6,000 items, to be published in three volumes that are to be published
this year. 

            The Russian archivist and others in Moscow said they were
convinced of two things, first, that these documents undercut all
Ukrainian claims to the contrary and, second, that the evidence these
documents provide about the much broader but class rather than ethnic
based crimes of the Soviet regime are not a problem for the contemporary
regime. 

            But despite t his self-confidence, it is almost certainly
the case that they are wrong. On the one hand, the extent of regime
violence that these documents show is likely to energize rather than
demobilize Ukrainian views about the way in which Stalin attacked the
core of their nation nearly 80 years ago.

            And on the other, the evidence the Moscow archivists provide
is likely to lead others, including Kazakhs, Belarusians and many ethnic
Russians to see that their communities too were the victims of mass
murder, an act of violence that at least some of these groups are
certain to view as directed against their nationhood and thus to see as
genocidal whatever Moscow says. 

Because that seems so likely, the arguments advanced yesterday by Valery
Tishkov, an academician who heads the Institute of Ethnology and serves
in the Russian Social Chamber, that the Ukrainian arguments will
collapse, almost certainly will prove to be without any sustainable
foundation. 

And the reason for that conclusion is that Russians, Ukrainians and
indeed the rest of the world are almost certain to be struck by one of
the fundamental weaknesses of the position that Kozlov and Tishkov
advance: Somehow they appear to believe that everyone will accept their
notion that mass murder is somehow not as serious a problem as genocide.

That such an argument may convince some is beyond question, given the
political use to which deaths in the past are often put, but that it
will convince all is highly improbable. Indeed, when a regime kills as
many people as Stalin's did, most people of good will, including many
Russians, will question Moscow's latest effort to politicize history in
this way. 

Indeed, it is virtually certain not only that this latest compilation by
Russian authors will not dissuade Ukrainians from their view that their
nation was a victim of the Soviet system but also will lead many others,
including ethnic Russians, to dismiss Moscow's current efforts to
restore the image of Stalin as a wise and effective manager.

Consequently, this latest Russian effort to downplay the human tragedy
of collectivization will have at least three effects, none of which
Moscow will want.  First, it will lead many to see that Ukrainians, as
one Russian put it, "deserve respect" for focusing on this tragedy
(www.vedomosti.ru/newspaper/article.shtml?2009/02/16/181822)..

Second, it will call attention to the ways in which Moscow is
manipulating history for its own purposes even more than the Ukrainians
are.  After all, despite the enormous number of documents put forward,
there will inevitably remain questions about what documents were NOT
published.

And third, this Russian effort will call attention to something that
many would prefer not to confront: Mass murder is wrong whether
conducted in the name of ethnic cleansing, the class struggle or
anything else. The dead and their memory call out for a human response
very different than the political one Moscow offered yesterday. 

 

 

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