Was the verdict against Tymoshenko a verdict against Ukraine? Yes, wrote Vasyl Tuhluk from Kyiv in a lead article in Nova Hazeta, a Ukrainian-language weekly in New York, published by a new group, not the same as the “entrenched activists” of the Ukrainian National Association and its two papers in New Jersey.
To put this into perspective, the latter two publications, to their credit, have joined the worldwide chorus of support for Tymoshenko when she was put on trial — long after editorially denouncing her political stance during the critically charged summer of 2009. Only one of them, The Ukrainian Weekly, lukewarmly endorsed her candidacy in the runoff presidential elections in 2010. The other one, Svoboda, in a longstanding trance under the Viktor Yushchenko tent, nine days before the election editorially castigated Tymoshenko for a plethora of deficiencies.
The point is that the US Ukrainian diaspora, presumably the Olympus of patriotic wisdom, has collectively, dismally failed to comprehend and anticipate the unmitigated disaster that would strike Ukraine in case of Viktor Yanukovych’s election as president. Let me put it this way: They should have been praying for anyone who could vanquish the Regions Party crowd.
If one takes a view (as does this writer) that Ukraine is now occupied by its own regional foreign power, the interpretation of the verdict against Tymoshenko, as stated by Vasyl Tuhluk, needs no belaboring.
And so, if Yulia Tymoshenko indeed has become or is on the way of becoming a modern symbol of Ukraine in prison, one may ask, despite her detractors and her faults, has she achieved a political sainthood as a victim of a corrupt occupation regime?
Chances are she is on the way of getting there when the epilogue is written — much more so because Ukraine has no other leader of the same weighting in the aftermath of the 2004 Orange Revolution, in which Yulia Tymoshenko was the spark that galvanized the crowds at Maidan. In an opinion from a group of Polish parliamentarians who were in Kyiv at the time and later commented on the spat within the Orange camp, “there could have been an Orange Revolution without [ex-Foreign Minister Petro] Poroshenko, but not without Tymoshenko.”
Tymoshenko was not physically destroyed by Ukraine’s enemies — not yet – not like Joan of Arc, who was burned at the stake in Rouen by historic enemies of France. But the political analogies are all there.
First and foremost, Ukraine desperately needs a modern-time heroic symbol on its landscape of moral collapse and corrosion, as did the early 15th century France. That country had a virtual leadership vacuum at that time, and was on the brink of political and military collapse, as the marauding Englishmen occupied its northern part in the Hundred Years War, and besieged Orleans, the gateway to the south.
Joan of Arc, a peasant girl from Domremy, believing that she was acting under divine guidance, led the French army in a momentous victory at Orleans in 1429 that repulsed the English attempt to conquer France. In the same year she secured for Louis VII the throne of France with all the required regalia of legitimacy and ritual..
Her achievement was a defining factor in the later awakening of French national consciousness.
Well, perhaps Tymoshenko didn’t perform quite the same miracle when she boosted Yushchenko to the top on a throne that soon crumbled under the weight of his own incompetence.
In return she received the scorn and later spurious accusations of treason from President Yushchenko — accusations which, according to cynical judicial gurus of the present Yanukovych regime, have become the basis of charges brought against her this year. .
Ironically, when Joan of Arc one year after her memorable victory was captured by the enemy — the English and their French collaborators, the Regionaires of Burgundy — the people, her king, and her church abandoned her.
After a year-long farcical trial presided over by bishop of the Catholic Church, she was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1431 at age 19.
Twenty years later the verdict was overturned by Church authorities. Joan was canonized as a saint in 1920, more than 400 years later.
The very slow and tepid show of support for unjustly imprisoned Tymoshenko in her own country is not unusual by historic measures.
But tardiness and complacency is not a badge of honor, especially when victory that had been achieved in the Orange Revolution has turned into shambles and is now being defaced by the stains of endemically shameless behavior in the nation’s political outhouse where votes and coalitions are traded for private gain and personal favors .
This contamination goes back many years and it has continued during the cadence of President Yushchenko, who had no vision for change that was demanded by the multitudes at Maidan.
It is crucial to stress that the notion of “stability” embraced by Yushchenko meant, in his own words, the sanctity of private property, which included all big-ticket assets, by then all in the oligarchs’ hands, except those not yet plundered out of the government’s possession.
The power of money in those assets is what has become the base of organized political power of the Party of Regions, in addition to its regional voting strength. For these moneyed strata, the notion of Ukrainian national consciousness is nothing more than a fetish. That’s how it has been pictured over the centuries of foreign overlords’ presence and ownership of Ukraine’s land, its historic resource.
Tymoshenko’s attempt as prime minister in 2005 to loosen and in some cases reverse the oligarchs’ control of the nation’s principal assets was condemned as “populism” by Ukraine’s president and, yes, in Washington, where in the last 30 years America’s wealth and economic leverage has been increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The US embassy in Kyiv later chimed in with an opinion that “Tymoshenko lacks economic fundamentals” (courtesy of WikiLeaks), shortly before the 2010 presidential elections. The timing is interesting.
On many occasions, Tymoshenko had graphically described, in her own words, the destructive economic power of the oligarchs and their connection to the present government. Kyiv Post quoted her in an editorial (“Don’t Cave In”, October 20), from an earlier interview:
“They (the oligarchs) don’t see Ukraine as a country….. They see it as a mega-corporation of their own, and it’s a joint stock closed company. And all the resources and population are their assets.:
Many Ukrainians understand it, and many need to catch up. Changing the system requires leadership. That’s why opposition leaders are locked up. There is a longstanding Ukrainian expression: “Koly by znattia” (If I only knew!).Then perhaps some would have voted differently in February 2010 — in the last honest election.
Boris Danik is a retired Ukrainian-American living in North Caldwell, New Jersey.
