UKRAINE: Controversy over Ukrainian World War Two nationalist Stepan Bandera still torments Ukrainian society

Record ID: 562068

  • Title: UKRAINE: Controversy over Ukrainian World War Two nationalist Stepan Bandera still torments Ukrainian society
  • Date: 26th April 2010
  • Summary: PEOPLE BUYING SOUVENIRS. DETAIL OF T-SHIRT WITH BANDERA'S FACE VARIOUS T-SHIRTS ON DISPLAY
  • Embargoed: 11th May 2010 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Ukraine
  • Country: Ukraine
  • Topics: War / Fighting,Domestic Politics
  • Reuters ID: LVAD3FTMHOZGYNBPPNULKUXE3DU8
  • Story Text: Despite being dead for more than 50 years, the flawed legacy of Ukrainian World War Two nationalist Stepan Bandera still torments Ukrainian society and complicates ties with friends and neighbours.
    Controversy has raged since former President Viktor Yushchenko conferred the status of Hero of Ukraine posthumously on Bandera in January in the dying weeks of his presidency.
    He, in effect, tossed a grenade into the lap of his successor, Viktor Yanukovich.
    And it may fall soon to Yanukovich to try to defuse the furore without further dividing public opinion or alienating powerful partners like Russia and Poland.
    Inside Ukraine, Yushchenko's move touched-off an impassioned debate on the nature of the Ukrainian resistance, which fought for independence in western Ukraine during the turbulence leading up to World War Two and beyond -- well into the 1950s.
    Much of western Ukraine was Polish territory before the war and the region became a massive battlefield involving opposing Nazi and Soviet forces, with Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) fighters often swapping sides between the two.
    Apart from Ukrainians, tens of thousands of Poles and Jews died in the slaughter.
    Yushchenko's award prompted anger from Russia, where Bandera is regarded as a fascist and from Poland, where he is blamed for being behind the mass killings of Poles.
    The Simon Wiesenthal Centre, an international Jewish human rights organisations dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism, terrorism and hatred, expressed "revulsion" and denounced Bandera and his followers as Nazi collaborators responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews.
    The European Parliament deplored the award.
    Bandera's wartime role as ideological leader of the nationalist fighters, who became known as the "Banderivtsi" (people who belong to Bandera), has divided east from west in Ukraine and complicated Yanukovich's task of uniting the country after a bitterly-fought election.
    Yanukovich's power base is in the Russian-speaking east, near the border with Russia. Many Ukrainians in that area view history through a Soviet prism and so, see Bandera as a terrorist.
    But in western Ukraine, where his followers opposed Soviet rule well into the 1950s after the defeat of Nazi Germany, he is lionised as a hero of Ukraine's independence struggle.
    "For Ukrainians, the name Bandera has long been a synonym for resistance. So this resistance is what the new Ukrainian authorities are afraid of -- they are afraid people can stand up for their dignity, can stand up for their honour and can stand up for the very right to be Ukrainian," said Stepan Lesiv, curator of the Stepan Bandera museum located in Bandera's home town of Stary Ugryniv.
    "I think they cannot take from him something they did not give. He was given it by the people. People gave him the status of a hero and only they can take it back," Lesiv added.
    A popular tourist haunt in Lviv, western Ukraine's regional capital, is an underground restaurant called the 'Kriyivka' -- the Hideaway -- which is constructed entirely on the UPA motif.
    The walls are plastered with UPA wartime insignia -- one poster, applauding Yushchenko's award, shows Bandera's thin, pinched face peering out below the words: "At last, it's come!"
    "I believe Bandera is the most controversial figure. There is no figure in Ukraine, in Ukrainian history, that divides Ukraine or different Ukrainians into different parts. He is the most antagonising figure," said local historian Yaroslav Hrytsak, who is a professor of history at the Ukrainian Catholic University.
    "For most Galicians, they think about Bandera as the epitome of the anti-Stalin struggle. They don't see any other stories - any stories about the Holocaust, about the extermination of Poles, about collaboration (with Nazis). For them they are marginal, or they don't even remember them, so to say. For them Bandera is an anti-Soviet hero, so this is very important," he added.
    Yanukovich may feel he is under pressure from his own political lobby to rescind Yushchenko's decree after a regional court in Donetsk, his stronghold, ruled on April 2 Yushchenko's award was illegal and should be rescinded.
    That would suit Russia, with whom Yanukovich wants to smooth relations and secure cheaper gas, and European Union (EU) member Poland whom Ukraine values as the patron for its aspirations to join the EU.
    But for Yanukovich's critics, it has become a touchstone issue of his real values.
    He is conscious of the pro-Moscow label that has been attached to him in the past. If he tries to scrap Yushchenko's decree, he will be accused by his critics of compromising Ukrainian values in the interests of appeasing Moscow.
    Hrytsak is divided on his judgement of Bandera, who was killed in Munich by a KGB assassin in 1959.
    He points out that Bandera was in a German prison-of-war camp throughout the war and could not have played a direct part in mass killings attributed to him.
    "Bandera was arrested in 1941 and he...was kept in prison until the end of the war, so he never had any access to what was going on in this territory," Hrytsak said.
    "If we are to condemn somebody for these crimes against the civil population it was not him directly. It was rather those who were commanders of the army. But the irony is that this army was created under his name and had a kind of shortname as "Banderivtsi" - the people who belong to Bandera. And that's actually, this is how the link has been (established), which does not mean to say that if he had been leader of this army he would have behaved differently -- most probably he would have behaved the same way, because his concept of Ukraine was very mono-ethnic, without any special minorities," he added.
    A recent survey of people suggested they would be ready to take to the streets in Lviv and surrounding areas and protest any such decision by Yanukovich.
    Bandera and UPA were demonised by Soviet propaganda, mainly not for their violations of human rights and because of their opposition to Stalinist rule.
    According to a study by Alexander J. Motyl's, a professor of political science at Rutgers University in Newark, nationalists suffered over 150,000 casualties, while inflicting over 30,000 on Soviet troops and police units in the period between 1944 and 1955. Hundreds of thousands of nationalist sympathizers were also deported or imprisoned in the Gulag.
    The post-war nationalist resistance movement enjoyed vast support among the Ukrainian population of western Ukraine, precisely because it stood for opposition to Stalinism. Over the years, as Soviet rule became more entrenched, active popular support dwindled, but Bandera nationalists continued to symbolize the cause of national liberation.
    In 2008 Stepan Bandera surprisingly came third in a nation-wide mobile text vote conducted by a TV show.
    "The Greatest Ukrainians" saw indisputable historical figures like Hetman Bogdan Khmelnitsky and poet and national hero Taras Shevchenko come behind Bandera in ranking.
    Meanwhile, some sources close to Yanukovich said he was likely to take the bull by the horns and repeal Yushchenko's decree by May 9 -- the day that officially marks the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany.
    That would certainly please Moscow ahead of a scheduled trip to Ukraine by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in mid-May.
    In the western part of Ukraine many would consider such an action by as an affront to Ukrainian pride.
    "Bandera is a hero for a very big number of Ukrainians and I think if our current President really wants to unite Ukraine, he does not have to touch a subject which is so sensitive for Ukrainians. On the contrary, he has to find a way to unite East and West of the country, but not to divide them," said Volodymyr Novostavsky of Lviv.
    Another Lviv citizen, Anna Buryk, said Yanukovich's action would be politically driven.
    "Well, if Viktor Yanukovich wants to please some other country, like our eastern neighbour, he will do it for political reasons, but from a human point of view - is Yanukovich a Ukrainian? He is Ukrainian, so how can he cancel the hero status of Bandera? I think he should not do it!"
    There is still the possibility that, because of the risk of a sharp reaction in western Ukraine, Yanukovich might take cover behind the Donetsk court ruling and take no further action.
    Stephen Bandera, the Canadian grandson of the nationalist leader, was the one to receive the contested award from the former Ukrainian president.
    Speaking by telephone from Toronto he said he had been officially informed of the Donetsk's court ruling but "I've not had a letter saying 'Please give it (the award) back'".
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