By:
Patrick Cockburn
The Independent
United Kingdom, July 2, 2001
LVIV IS a beautiful city
full of evil memories. I have always liked cosmopolitan places
and, at first sight, the blend of Italian, Austrian and Slavic
architecture in the heart of the unofficial capital of western
Ukraine gives a pleasing sense of national diversity.
That is a deeply misleading
impression. Lviv owes its architectural riches to its position
on one of the main political, ethnic and religious fault lines
of Europe, where cultures met and clashed over hundreds of
years. Once a largely Polish and Jewish city, it is now wholly
Ukrainian. In its placid way, the city is a monument to ethnic
cleansing and the destructive power of nationalism.
People in Lviv have understandably
cultivated a certain amnesia towards the past. Stalin transferred
many Poles living in Lviv and western Ukraine to the parts
of eastern Germany he added to Poland at the end the war.
That is not the only reason
the Poles left. Over the past year, Poland's National Remembrance
Institute has been investigating the massacre of 35,000 Polish
villagers by west Ukrainian nationalists in 1943.
It is a delicate subject.
The Ukrainians I questioned said they had never heard of it.
When I asked Wincenty Debicki, an official at the Polish consulate
in Lviv, about the killings and the impact of the investigation
on Ukrainian-Polish relations, he did not reply directly but,
instead, gave a piece of personal biography.
"I myself was born in Lviv,"
he said. "I remember as a small boy having to hide from Ukrainian
nationalist groups with my father in 1944 because we were
Poles."
The Ukrainian woman translating
his Polish interjected to ask in surprise: "But surely you
were frightened of the Germans and Soviets as well?" After
a slight hesitation, Mr Debicki agreed to this more politically
correct explanation.
There are other signs that
historic rivalries have not ended. Traditionally, the Polish
gentry were the landowners and the Ukrainians the peasantry
in west Ukraine. After years of Austro-Hungarian rule, the
region became part of Poland after the First World War. But
the cemetery at Lykachiv below a wooded hill on the outskirts
of Lviv, where Polish and Ukrainian soldiers killed in 1918-19
are buried, has a curious monument that illustrates the longevity
of national sensitivities.
The monument is a piece
of rock with nothing written on it. It was originally intended
to be the tomb of the Unknown Polish Soldier. An appropriate
epitaph was written. It said the Polish soldier had died "in
defence of Lviv". The Ukrainians objected strongly. They said
this implied Lviv should be Polish. The Poles amended the
wording to read that the soldier had died for an independent
Poland. Again, the Ukrainians said that, since the Polish
soldiers had died on Ukrainian soil, they could not accept
this. In the end, the tomb was left without an epitaph.
These differences were
put to one side last week when Pope John Paul II visited Ukraine.
It was a strange visit.
In Kiev, President Leonid
Kuchma, who had invited the Pope, was desperate to milk the
visit for all the legitimacy it could give to his notorious
corrupt administration. His police were almost ludicrously
determined that nothing should go wrong. People were told
not to wave from balconies, throw flowers or even wear raincoats,
apart from clear plastic ones, in case they should be concealing
weapons.
The furious reaction of
the Russian Orthodox Church at finding the Pope on its territory
shows a battle for influence between Russia and its western
neighbours is under way. The Russian ambassador did not turn
up to greet the Pope at Kiev airport. Russian journalists
chortled at the low turn- out of the followers in the Ukrainian
capital. One of them suggested that many of the faithful had
only come to eat the shish kebab available after prayers and
added, with ponderous humour, that "the tantalising aroma
of barbecued meat was much stronger than that of incense".
But in Lviv there were
signs that the old Ukrainian-Polish rivalry, which has shaped
the history of much of this part of Europe, is coming to an
end.
Not only did people wait
for five or six hours in the rain for a Polish Pope. There
is also a new player on the stage, in the form of the Greek
Catholic Church, the strange hybrid, which follows Orthodox
rituals and whose priests are allowed to marry, but also recognises
the Pope as supreme leader.
In a country where every
political institution is discredited, the Greek Catholic Church,
with five million members, has emerged alone with credit from
the Soviet era. It survived almost half a century of persecution
under the Soviet Union. The Pope beatified its martyrs this
week. Its priests are young and its seminaries are over-subscribed.
"The government in Ukraine
exists quite independently of the people," Vladimir Khrushchak,
of the local newspaper Express told me. "It is as if they
lived on two different planets." He says Ukrainians are politically
passive because they are wholly alienated from the state.
This gives the church great influence. For the first time
in its history, west Ukraine is close to being ethnically
and religiously united.
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