Posted on 01/19/2006 7:49:37 AM PST by x5452
Crimean Tatars Call On Kyiv To Restore Their Rights 12 December 2005 -- Members of the Crimean Tatar Congress gathered in the main Crimean city Simferopol said yesterday that Ukraine's integration with the West should not go forward until Kyiv restores Tatar rights.
Congressional delegates, issuing a statement at the end of the three-day session, accused Ukrainian authorities of disregarding the rights of Crimean Tatars, who were deported en masse by Soviet leader Josef Stalin in 1944.
RFE/RL's Tatar-Bashkir Service reported that congress member Timur Dagci was among the voices calling for Kyiv to recognize the deportation as genocide:
"Our problem -- the problem of Stalin's genocide of the Crimean Tatar people -- is an undeniable fact, so I believe all countries, the United Nations, and the European Union will recognize it and will decide that it was indeed genocide," Dagci said.
Many Tatars have since returned to Crimea, but have been unable to reclaim valuable land and property that was theirs before the deportations.
The Tatar Congress delegates called on the Council of Europe and the European Union to make Ukraine's possible membership in the EU and World Trade Organization contingent on their recognition of Crimean Tatar rights.
(RFE/RL's Tatar-Bashkir Service/Interfax)
Yushchenko is a facscist. He's also a close ally of George Soros and runs one of his NGOs funneling baby killing dollars into Ukraine.
I'm not Russian, as I've posted time and time again I am ethnically mostly Irish, and part Native American.
Further you folks continue to white wash genocride at the hands of Polls and Turks.
The ethnicity of the leaders of the soviet union has been posted time and time again, the upper eccelons of the soviet elite were filled with non Russians. Further yes there were numerous Ukranians amoung those enforcing the famine.
Here's a whole bunch of interesting articles:
http://www.anti-orange.com.ua/
Yushchenko is not a ture ukranian he's foreign funded, has a foreign wife, and millions of foreign dollars.
There are no Russian invaders in Ukraine ethnic Russians have been in east Ukraine far longer than Lvov has.
My Polish friend from Lutsk in WEST UKRAINE hates Yushchenko. The Ukranians who still have any faith in the Orange love Tymoshenko and hate Yushchenko who used her for cash in the election then threw her away so he could get started running the economy into the ground.
Yanukovich will end up winning because half the orange revolution only cares about foreigners.
Uk those were the exact words of my Ukranian freind whose 'right to choose' you CLAIM to support.
Her name actually. She's 55 and doesn't need a Pole to explain to her what a Soviet is. She lived through it. Lived through soldiers putting salt in the church to get people to stop going. Lived through chernobyl (and other shady experiments that resulted in them telling villiagers not to go outside for a few days because the air was bad).
Unlike you she knows a rat when she sees one. Yushchenko.
Which is exactly why Ukranians think of her as a rich foreigner.
It is exactly why she is so painful for you. Reagan, Bush it is way too much for you.
As I've already mentioned I was quoting my Ukranian freind.
You Poles keep insisting that you are for Ukranian choice, and yet you suddenly do a 180 when the evidence disagrees with you.
My freind from west Ukraine, hates Yushchenko and the fact he's backed by foreigners. (She does like Tymoshenko)
BTW did you miss that his son trademarked the orange revolution? Now he get's royalties. Some revolution.
You are making contradict statements, your mysterious friend is once Polish and later Ukrainian. Beside nobody here seriously believe what are you talking about. Let me remind you, that recently you claimed that you lived in El Mari Republic in Russia. In your post you always referring to different kind of foreign friends, completely unsourced statements. Your reliability is ZERO!
I have never said my freind from west Ukraine was Polish.
I did in fact live for one winter in Mari-El I do not now. (If you want I can even post scans of recepts at the local supermarket applsin).
The fact that I actually have hands on experience in the places of conversation and all you have is Polish arrogance that Ukraine should be a good dog and take whatever leader the Poles give them.
Further my freind, from Lutsk, used to drive to Poland on a pretty regular basis (work related), so I'd say she's heard enough of the Pole's opinions.
An apparent typo, she's Ukranian, not Polish.
I have numerous times told of the Poles killing Orthodox Belarussians, Lithuanians, and Ukranians:
(from unicorne.org)
There is probably no other single issue in Church history that evokes sharper reaction and comment than the history of the Union of Brest'-Litovsk.
In the years following its signing in 1596, Church leaders and others produced many apologetical and even combative religious works to either praise or attack the "Unia."
Meletius Smotrytsky is probably one of the most interesting examples. Appointed Archbishop of Polotsk in Belarus in place of the Greek Catholic incumbent, Josaphat Kuntsevich, Meletius was well known for his defence of Orthodoxy.
As a result of a number of factors, Josaphat was killed in 1623. Some Orthodox commentators sympathetic to Meletius say that he took this event personally, as if his writings led to it. Over time, and as if to assuage his guilt, Meletius, they say, became an Eastern Catholic himself and began to write in support of the "Unia" he had earlier attacked.
After the death of Meletius, the Greek Catholics initiated canonization proceedings for him at Rome. An icon of him was painted, but his cause at the Vatican did not advance. The Orthodox, on the other hand, continued to honour his memory and his many services in defence of the Orthodox Church. His "going over" to the Unia was again something that was understood to have taken place for personal, and not doctrinal, reasons.
Another example of the terrible divisions that occurred as a result of the events of 1596 is the simultaneous veneration by Catholics and Orthodox of two persons, each of whom was killed by the other side in this affair.
Athanasius Filipovich, Ihumen of Brest, did not initially opposed the "Unia," according to Metropolitan Ilarion Ohienko.
But when he saw the Polish gendarmes go into the villages to enforce the recital of the "filioque" in the Creed, Athanasius reacted against what he understood as the clearly political motivation of the Roman Catholic colonial masters of his people.
Taking copies of the miraculous Icon of Kupyatitsk with him, he distributed these to the Members of the Polish Seym or Parliament. He then warned them of the Divine retribution they would be inviting on themselves if they didn't stop forcing the Union on the Orthodox people.
During one of the first victories of the Kozak armies of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnitsky over the Poles in 1648, Athanasius was taken prisoner by Roman Catholic prelates and tortured for his condemnation of the Union. He was then led by military personnel into the forest where he was forced to dig his own grave, was shot twice in the head and was buried alive . . .
Athanasius was glorified a Saint and Venerable Martyr of the Orthodox Church. His Shrine and pilgrimage became opportunities for Orthodox Christians to prepare themselves to maintain Orthodoxy and combat the Union.
Josaphat Kuntsevich became the Eastern Catholic Archbishop of Polotsk and, as such, promoted the Union among the Orthodox. Even Catholic historians have suggested that his perspectives were not always the most diplomatic.
Josaphat was murdered by a mob angered by his activities, including the arrest of one of their number. He was beatified by Rome soon afterwards, largely under the impetus, however, coming from the Polish Royal Court in the first instance.
To become a "Greco-Uniate" or an "Orthodox in union with Rome" in those times meant very little in terms of outward liturgical change.
The Creed was, initially, not tampered with. When it was, the early Eastern Catholics, many of whom still believed they were in the Orthodox Church, simply added that the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father "Istynno" or "truly." This was a play on the Slavonic word for "Filioque" translated as "I Syna."
The Roman Pope was initially never commemorated by the local bishops and priests, but only by the Metropolitan of Kyiv in union with Rome. Today, of course, the Pope is commemorated not less than four times during the Ukrainian Catholic Liturgy . . .
The Greek Catholic clergy were married, the Julian calendar was maintained, and the Byzantine-Slavonic Rite was scrupulously kept.
The Polish kings later abandoned the Union as a way to Latinize their western Ukrainian and Belorussian subjects by steps: They decided to do it wholesale, at once.
Most of the Ostrozhky Princes, apart from Constantine, Alexander and their sainted ancestor, Theodore, became Roman Catholic and, therefore, Poles.
Religious identification was not separate from national identification. To be Orthodox, was to be "of Rus'" and to be Roman Catholic was to be Polish. Orthodox identity in Eastern Europe implied, at one and the same time, that one was of an East Slavic national identity. This is why the going over to Catholicism of the western Ukrainian Princes meant, in and of itself, "denationalization."
Both Ukrainian Catholic and Orthodox Churches suffered Latinization, however. Ukrainian Orthodox, desiring to combat the "brain drain" of their aristocracy through the introduction of Catholicism, went to western European universities to learn about the philosophy behind the Church that, as it must have seemed to them, spread like a destructive cancer throughout the national body of their country.
In so doing, they brought back with them a number of Latinisms, in theology and religious practice that obtain to this day.
It was only in the latter part of the twentieth century, after the Greek Catholic faith had "settled in" with the people of Galicia, that the possibility appeared of establishing a Ukrainian identity that did not necessarily imply a colonial influence as far as culture was concerned.
Metropolitan Andrew Sheptytsky, as Metropolitan Ilarion states, was of the "Byzantine" camp in the Ukrainian Catholic Church. He initiated the movement to "Easternize" his heavily Latinized Church. He was opposed by a number of his fellow bishops, however, and by Roman Catholic bishops. The divisions and problems that resulted still plague the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church to this day.
Roman Catholic historians themselves have said that the Union of Brest'-Litovsk was a mistake on their church's part. It divided a nation, even though there are now, of course, better relations between Ukrainians on the basis of their national identity, as opposed to their religious confessions.
One individual once wrote that the "good" to have arisen from the Union was that a "great literature" developed in its aftermath. That literature was the various books and pamphlets written for and against the Union. It served to weaken Ukraine as a whole. How anyone can say that that was "good" is really beyond all telling . . .
The sad episodes of the Union is also a reminder about the fact that true Church unity is a matter of the heart and inner conversion. It is about faithfulness to the Fathers of the early Church and to Apostolic Tradition. Finally, it is about humility and not triumphalism of any kind.
It is my view that by cancelling the Union as a model of unification, the Roman Catholic Church has also, in theory at least, cancelled the underlying principles on which the existing Greek Catholic Churches are based.
If the Roman Catholic Church takes seriously its own views on "Sister Churches," then the only way for the Greek Catholic churches to proceed is by reintegration with the Orthodox Churches they came from.
This will only be possible through prayer and repentance, along with mutual love and understanding. Metropolitan Basil Lypkivsky, in his sermons about Ukrainian Catholics, said that, in its time, the Union could be understood as having some justification for its having come about. That does not obtain, he said, today.
It is time, I believe, for all Ukrainian Catholics and Orthodox to make the necessary steps to achieve real unity with Kyiv as their true Patriarchal Centre. Full unity will, in the final analysis, be achieved as God would have it, and not as we would have it.
Dr. Alexander Roman alex@unicorne.org
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