Parliament speaker shows true colors
A military parade on Kyiv’s main Khreshchatyk thoroughfare, the central showpiece in celebrations to commemorate the seventh year of Ukrainian independence.
Though modest, the parade was Ukraine’s largest military show since Ukraine declared independence on Aug. 21,1991, days after the failed hard-line Communist putsch in Moscow.
‘The seven years that have passed since that day are a whole epoch during which we have created all the elements of statehood,’ Defense Minister Oleksandr Kuzmuk told the troops from a podium he shared with President Leonid Kuchma, Prime Minister Valery Pustovoitenko and parliament speaker Oleksandr Tkachenko.
They watched some 5,000 soldiers march through the recently renovated, chestnut-lined Khreshchatyk. Children waved small blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flags and marchers in historical Cossack dress stood at attention as 129 military vehicles and mobile rocket launchers made their appearance.
The military displayed Giatsint-B artillery pieces, 11-meter long R-300 missiles that can hit a target 300 kilometers away, Osa anti-aircraft missiles and the S-300 anti-aircraft rocket launcher. Of particular interest were the Ukrainian-made precision tactical Tochka (Point) missiles, which entered service in the mid-1990s.
Later in the day there was an open air rock concert in the center of the capital featuring some of Ukraine’s most popular performers. That was followed by one of the most ambitious firework displays since Ukraine became independent.
Most Ukrainians questioned by the Post said they were glad their country was independent despite the economic hardships of recent years.
But some, mostly elderly, Ukrainians still pine for the communist times. Socialist leaders held a small rally Monday next to a Lenin monument.
The previous day, at a gala concert to commemorate independence, Speaker Tkachenko did his best to dampen celebrations by turning his keynote speech into an extended apologia for the Soviet Union and asked Ukrainians ‘not to be ashamed of over 70 Soviet years of our history’.
Tkachenko’s address, broadcast to a nationwide audience on the state television channel UT-1, gave scant acknowledgement of Ukrainian independence and emphasized in-stead the importance of Soviet achievements.
‘We are now having to pay for the senseless or deliberate ruination of what was created and defended by previous generations,’ said the speaker. ‘Without those [Soviet] years, there would be no sovereign Ukraine.’ As well as invoking Soviet glory Tkachenko took a few swipes at Western financial institutions which have underwritten Ukrainian debt and financed restructuring, leaving Ukraine, he said, ‘naked and barefoot’.
Although the speaker did make pro forma invocations of the importance of Ukrainian sovereignty, his speech read like a veiled lament for the dissolution of the Soviet empire and talked in touching terms about a historical unity between Belarus, Ukraine and Russia, describing them as ‘twins’.
Tkachenko attacked those Ukrainians who used their political positions and contacts to personally enrich themselves at the public’s expense. He omitted to mention that in 1992, he himself, as a former Minister of Agriculture, took a $70 million loan from an American bank which he failed to repay. As the loan was guaranteed by the Ukrainian government, it had to repay the loan plus interest.
Tkachenko then became the biggest individual debtor to the Ukrainian government. In July of this year when Tkachenko was elected speaker ,the government wrote off part or all the loan. Tkachenko has never given a public explanation of what he did with the $70 million.
Many in the audience, who included former political prisoners during the Soviet era, did not applaud the speech which received a lukewarm response. Former President Leonid Kravchuk, who led the country to independence in 1991, gave three ironic claps after Tkachenko finished speaking. Many parliamentary deputies from the non-leftist parties expressed repugnance at the speech.
One woman, whose sister was executed by the communists, said: ‘Tkachenko’s speech was disgusting. He represents that contemptible breed of person who cannot forget the days when they had power while the majority of their countrymen lived in fear of the Communist Party. They long for the return of those days. It’s as if some senior German politician was extolling Hitler during Germany’s national day celebrations. Luckily, they are yesterday’s people.’
