Sufficient language legislation has long existed in Ukraine that offers generous guarantees to those whose speak Russian.
The 1996 constitution sets conditions for the use of Russian, alongside Ukrainian, in state organs and enterprises. It allows citizens to address state organs and enterprises in Russian, and for these institutions to respond in Russian. Russian has thrived during Ukraine’s 20 years of independence.
This all begs the question of why Ukraine’s pro-presidential and ruling Party of the Regions, with its parliamentary allies, on June 5 cast 234 votes in favor of controversial new language legislation, which experts predict would further increase use of Russian and other “minority” languages. It was sponsored by alleged 2004 election falsifier Serhiy Kivalov and provocateur-for-hire Vadim Kolesnichenko, who has made a career out of denigrating the Ukrainian language and culture.
The Regions Party has lost significant support among its electorate, particularly with such maneuvers as passing an oppressive tax code and cutting social payments to war veterans and Chornobyl clean-up workers. Indeed on the very same evening that parliament approved the first reading of the language bill, it voted on another bill that creates the opportunity to cut such social payments even further in 2013. Not a bad distraction, eh?
Then there’s the economy. The National Bank of Ukraine can’t sell enough five-year notes, despite interest rates of close to 14 percent. It also burned through $1 billion of its international reserves in May alone, cutting them to $31 billion. Most recently, Business Insider ranked Ukraine as among the world’s five governments most likely to default.
The Regions Party has turned to the sensitive and volatile language issue as its last trump card to activate its core support base of pro-Russian radicals. Ironically, their leaders claim to embrace European values, alleging their position is in line with the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, a document whose letter and intent was to defend weak languages from extinction and to ensure their speakers retain the minimum of rights.
Yet Ukraine is unlike any other contemporary European nation since the state language happens to be the lesser spoken tongue as a result of the native people’s post-colonial, post-genocidal and post-totalitarian 20th century history. The same can be said for the Crimean Tatar language.
The law on the books is the last remaining safeguard for the Ukrainian language. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian Constitution calls for the Russian language to coexist with the Ukrainian language, according to several court rulings that interpreted Article 10.
Violating this principle, the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko bill creates the architecture for Russian to replace Ukrainian with its 10 percent rule, requiring state institutions to accommodate languages in a given population center that are spoken by at least 10 percent of its residents.
The legislation claims to defend such minority languages as Crimean Tatar or Bulgarian, yet there’s no chance that state organs – often lacking funds to pay heating bills or to buy floor cleaning soaps – can accommodate each minority group. Conflicts will become inevitable between the various minorities and the default language will be the majority language in most regions, which is Russian.
Political experts are increasingly drawing parallels between the Russian government’s current approach to Ukraine and Adolf Hitler’s Anschluss policy. In this context, the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko bill has a few new clauses that deserve particular attention, such as defining one’s native language as “the first language that an individual mastered in earlier childhood.”
Russian-speaking citizens who make up the vast majority of urban residents have long indentified Ukrainian as their native tongue in surveys, despite speaking Russian on a daily basis (at least in public). That’s typical of a post-colonial society.
The new legislation seeks to redefine as native Russian speakers those who would typically categorize themselves as native Ukrainian speakers. This strategy was employed in the Republic of Georgia, where more than 85 percent of the population of South Ossetia was extended Russian passports, in large part on the basis of them being native Russian speakers. Subsequently in the 2008 South Ossetian War, the Russian government defended its actions by claiming the duty to protect its citizens, wherever they may be.
The groundwork for Anschluss is already being laid in Crimea, whose residents are being propagandized by mass media, schools, and even summer camps into thinking they are ethnic Russians (with Ukrainian surnames) with loyalties to Moscow (instead of Kyiv). Many are reported to have Russian passports in their possession, despite Ukrainians laws forbidding dual citizenship.
It’s up to Western leaders, both in the private and public sectors, to realize that the Ukrainian language is just as much about geopolitics as it is about culture.
Not only do their future business prospects hang in the balance, but so does the future of Ukraine as an independent state based on Western, European values.
Zenon Zawada is the former chief editor of the Kyiv Post.
