A few quick videos to watch to start out your work week. The first is from PBS NewsHour: Nearly 8 Years After the ‘Orange Revolution,’ Ukraine Runs Into Reversals and the other from Maidan: Ukraine. A Banana Republic Forever?! (about Members of Parliament who’s votes are submitted for them along party lines while in absentia). Enjoy!
Saturday at 4pm at the Revue Cinema of Roncesville (just south of Dundas West TTC station), UNF is showing an encore of the Ukrainian dancing documentary Folk!:
Folk! is a documentary that explores the unique underground and acrobatic world of Ukrainian folk dancing through the eyes of narrator/filmmaker Roxy Toporowych. Featuring the legendary ballerina and choreographer Roma Pryma Bohachevsky and the Syzokryli Dance Ensemble of New York, “Folk!” is relevent to anyone trying to balance ties to one’s heritage and culture. Also featuring the Virsky National Dance Company of Ukraine, the Kashtan School of Ukrainian Dance in Cleveland and The Voloshky Dance Ensemble of Philadelphia, Folk! is the first film to be a joyful embracement of Ukrainian culture and dance in North America today.
You can get more information on their Facebook page
Also a quirky video coming out of the internets, as someone in Ukraine claims to have identified the legendary Big Foot:
MSN doesn’t allow embedding of their videos, click the picture to go to the video
The BBC investigates the closing down of the Maidan (Independence square) by the Yanukovych government – the home of the Orange Revolution and recently protests over unfair changes to the tax code:
BBC doesn’t allow embedding of their videos, click the picture to go to the video
While the video addresses Maidan square and even interviews Yanukovych about it, for some reason it is described (as many others on the BBC news site) as being about the Ukrainian people’s disillusionment with the Orange Revolution! The Revolution ended over a year ago, but the BBC editors for some reason do not place the spotlight instead on the current Yanukovych government leading the country into the bottom third of the world’s most corrupt countries.
While this one slipped through the cracks of the news cycle a few weeks ago it’s certainly still worth mentioning – from the New York Times:
President Viktor F. Yanukovich of Ukraine announced Wednesday that a national award bestowed on one of the most divisive figures in the country’s modern history — a leader of the Ukrainian partisans during World War II — had been officially revoked.
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The award dispute reflects the longstanding geographic schism in Ukraine and its impact on the nation’s politics. Mr. Bandera, who was assassinated by the K.G.B. in 1959 in West Germany, where he lived in exile, is revered in western Ukraine as a patriot who led the struggle for independence from the Soviet Union and Poland. But he is reviled in other, more pro-Russian regions as a Nazi collaborator. European and Jewish groups have called him a fascist who condoned massacres of Jews and Poles.
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Mr. Bandera’s supporters have argued that he never had a close relationship with the Nazis, pointing out that he was later detained by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp.
Mr. Yanukovich had the award canceled through the courts, not through a presidential decree, apparently deciding that such a method would be less provocative. In Ukraine, as in much of the former Soviet Union, the judicial system tends to have little independence, and typically follows the will of the executive branch.
With support from the new president, a Ukrainian lawyer last spring convinced a court to revoke the award, and subsequent appeals courts have upheld the decision, officials said.
On Wednesday, Mr. Yanukovich’s office indicated in a statement that the judicial process had ended and that the award was formally annulled.
The statement did not offer further comment. But Mr. Yushchenko’s party, Our Ukraine, denounced Mr. Yanukovich for “attempts to rewrite the history of Ukraine and to belittle — in order to please Moscow — the heroes of the Ukrainian people.”
While Ukrainian Christmas is less than a week away, an early Christmas present has arrived as the Stalin statue erected in Zaporizhia last May at the Communist headquarters was blown up last night:
"By a pure chance there were no casualties. Most probably the explosive was filled with the metal items," lawmaker Oleksiy Baburin, head of the Zaporizhia Communists told a press conference.
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The local police said in a statement that according to its information a group of several people passed the monument just a few minutes before the explosion.
"One of them climbed over the fence and fastened to the monument a shopping bag which evidently contained the hand-made explosive device," the police said, adding that those behind the blast were currently being searched.
Not all good news from this event though, as police have used it as an excuse to harass local groups:
Meanwhile, the nationalist Svoboda (Freedom) group reported that the police had already arrested its head in Zaporizhia, Vitaliy Podlobnikov, and his deputy on the youth issues, Yuriy Hudymenko, on charges of causing the Stalin monument destruction.
The same statue had been badly damaged last week in a blast claimed by Nationalist group Tryzub (Trident) which denounced Stalin as "the executioner of the Ukrainian people and an international terrorist."
Then, there had been some doubt over the true state of the statue as the Communists had draped it in a large white cloth to prevent the extent of the damage from being seen.
However there was no mystery on this occasion as pictures showed that the bust had been completely destroyed by the blast, leaving only the plinth in place.
Stalin is a hate figure for many in Ukraine who blame him for intentionally allowing the deaths of millions of Ukrainians in a 1930s famine known as the Holodomor that nationalists regard as a genocide.
I was also sent a video of the statue supposedly being decapitated a few days earlier:
Thanks http://ucrania-mozambique.blogspot.com
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