The Washington Post - USA (2022-05-24)

A10 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.TUESDAY, MAY 24 , 2022

The World

UNITED NATIONS

Displaced people t op 100M for 1st time

The number of people forced to flee conflict, violence, human rights violations and persecution has crossed 100 million for the first time on record, propelled by the war in Ukraine and other deadly conflicts, the United Nations’ refugee agency said Monday. “One hundred million is a stark figure — sobering and alarming in equal measure,” said U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi. “It’s a record that should never have been set. The refugee agency said the number of forcibly displaced people worldwide approached

90 million by the end of 2021, propelled by new waves of violence or protracted conflict in Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Myanmar, Nigeria, Afghanistan and Democratic Republic of Congo. Since then, the war in Ukraine has forced more than 6 million people to flee the country and an additional 8 million have been displaced within the country. The 100 million figure represents more than 1 percent of the global population and comprises refugees and asylum seekers as well as people internally displaced by conflict — a figure that the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center recently put at 53.2 million — the refugee agency said in a statement.

“The international response to people fleeing war in Ukraine has been overwhelmingly positive,” Grandi said. “Compassion is alive and we need a similar mobilization for all crises around the world.” However, he pointed out that ultimately “humanitarian aid is a palliative, not a cure.” — Associated Pres

THE CAUCASUS

Armenia, Azerbaijan take step toward deal

Armenia and Azerbaijan each announced Monday that they had set up a border commission, a potential step toward ending a dispute over the ethnic Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh

that has festered for three decades. The leaders of both countries had agreed in Brussels on Sunday to work on a peace plan, despite a wave of protests in the Armenian capital fueled by opposition claims that Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan is giving too much away. A simmering dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous territory inside Azerbaijan controlled since the 1990s by ethnic Armenians, flared in 2020 into a six-week war in which Azeri troops regained swaths of territory. European Council President Charles Michel said after a meeting with both Pashinyan and Azeri President Ilham Aliyev that they had agreed to advance

discussions on a peace treaty, with respective commissions on delimiting their interstate border to meet on the border itself within days. — Reuters

Egyptian democracy activist sentenced to 4 years: An Egyptian court sentenced a democracy activist to four years in prison for disseminating false news, a lawyer said. The Cairo court convicted Yahia Hussein Abdel-Hadi, a co-founder of the Civil Democratic Movement, an opposition coalition of liberal and left-leaning parties, of “deliberately disseminating false news inside and outside” Egypt, according to lawyer Khalid Ali. Similar accusations have often been made against those critical

of the government.

Ugandan opposition figure urging protests is detained: A Ugandan opposition figure who is calling for street protests over rising commodity prices is being detained inside his home by police. Kizza Besigye, a four-time presidential candidate, has been unable to leave his home outside the capital, Kampala, since May 12, with police pitching camp nearby to enforce his apparent house arrest. Police routinely detain opposition figures inside their homes, insisting they can impose preventive arrest to maintain public order. Besigye is a serial campaigner against the government of longtime President Yoweri Museveni. — From news services

DIGEST

BY FREDRICK KUNKLE AND SERHII KOROLCHUK IN DNIPRO, UKRAINE

S

erhii Sternenko says he has executed several daring nighttime missions against Russian targets since armed conflict broke out in 2014 between Ukrainian nationalists and Mos- cow-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, including a raid a few months before Russia invaded. The targets, though, were statues. He and his friends tore down one Soviet military commander, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, several years ago and vandalized another, Gen. Ivan M. Tretyak, just before the war. “The monuments of the Soviet regime and the Russian empire remind people of all the atrocities that Russia and the Soviet Union did to the people of Ukraine,” said Sternenko, a YouTuber with near- ly 900,000 followers who has posted some of his exploits on- line. “When I see a monument of Catherine the Second in Odessa it seems for me like a monument of Hitler in Israel.” The onset of war has hastened Ukraine’s efforts to remove the names of famous Russian and Soviet figures from metro stations, streets and landmarks. There’s even an app. The only reason more Russian statues ha- ven’t been toppled lately, Sternen- ko said, is that Ukrainians have been too busy fighting a war. “After we win the war, we will have time and we will clear all the Soviet and Russian imperial monuments from Ukraine,” said Sternenko, a former regional head of the ultranationalist mili- tant group Right Sector who said his sights are set on a monumen- tal statue of Catherine the Great in his hometown, Odessa. Ukrainians have seized on the importance of asserting their own historical legacy with more urgency since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the war on their country Feb. 24. The Ukrainian reckoning has echoes in the debate over remov- ing Confederate statues, reap- praising American colonial history and ditching racist vestiges of the past, from professional baseball team mascots to Aunt Jemima’s syrup. “This is an interesting charac- teristic of our time in general, that we began to comprehend history so sensitively,” said Anton Drobovych, head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory. He said that for Ukraine, however, the process of unearthing its history from under years of Russian and Soviet rule is relatively new. Reminders of Russian and So- viet dominion can be found almost everywhere in Ukraine. A street in Bucha is named after Alexander Pushkin, a poet re- vered by Russians as their Shake- speare. The 19th-century novelist Nikolai Gogol — who was born in Ukraine but claimed by Russia as one of its greatest authors because he wrote in Russian — overlooks one of Dnipro’s main boulevards from a pedestal. The boulevard itself — though renamed years ago for a prominent Ukrainian historian — still has at least one stone plaque showing that it had once been Karl Marx Avenue. Yaroslav Hrytsak, director of the Institute for Historical Stud- ies of Ivan Franko National Uni- versity of Lviv, said that when he was growing up, the ubiquity of Russian and Soviet markers be- came a kind of imperial wallpa- per. “I accepted it as a dull Soviet landscape,” Hrytsak said. It was as if street by street and square by square, the Soviet Union had all but lobotomized historical memory in Ukraine and other former republics, he said. “Ukrainians were denied any kind of memory that would make them different from Russians,” Hrytsak said. “The politics of the

tory,” said Drobovych, with the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory. “The things he says have nothing to do with actual history. We, as an institution, do not falsi- fy the past in our process. We try to show the past as it was, without imposed myths and fakes.” Drobovych’s institute has led efforts to recover Ukraine’s history by digging through KGB ar- chives and elevating the stories of Ukrainians who were persecuted or silenced. The institute has also been evaluating Russian figures such as Pushkin and compiling a list of Ukrainians and Ukrainian things that might take their place in memorials, particularly lesser- known Ukrainians. The list includes the late Holly- wood star Jack Palance — he of the one-handed, Oscar night push-ups — whose parents were from Ukraine. It also includes “Oi u Luzi Chervona Kalyna,” a patriotic Ukrainian song that Pink Floyd recently sampled to show support. As a child growing up in Soviet- controlled Lviv in the 1970s, Hryt- sak hoped a day like this might come. He said he even had a swap in mind: “Lenin down, and John Lennon in his place.”

Sudarsan Raghavan and Anastasia Vlasova contributed to this report.

Soviet Union toward Ukraine was a total amnesia.” The effort to recover Ukraine’s cultural heritage has picked up speed in recent weeks. The mayor of Mykolaiv announced Saturday on Telegram that a Pushkin memorial had been removed because, he said, it needed protection from vandals. Earlier this month, Kyiv Metro said five stations will be renamed, including the stop at Leo Tolstoy Square, while Kharkiv’s city government voted to rename three streets and an entire neighbor- hood. A commercial breadmaker, Kyivkhlib, said this month that it had renamed its popular, cus- tardy dark bread from Belorus- sian to Otamanskyi in a nod to the Zaporozhian Cossacks who ruled the lower Dnieper River basin (though the Cossack past includes its own dark chapters, including one of the largest po- groms ever carried out against Jews).

A new social media tool called “What did Pushkin do to you?” offers mini-tutorials on why vari- ous Russian figures should stay or go. Tap Puskhin’s name, and the Telegram bot spits out a verdict writing him off as a “Russian chauvinist” who glorified czarist imperialism. It says much the same about Russian novelist Fyo- dor Dostoyevsky. Mikhail Bulgak- ov, the Soviet author of “The Mas- ter and Margarita,” is also a “ni” (the Ukrainian “nyet”) because — though born in Kyiv in 1891 — he maligned Ukraine’s national aspi- rations and had the gall to dispar- age its mother tongue. Two other giants of Russian literature — Leo Tolstoy and An- ton Chekhov — get passes because of their humane and empa- thetic approach to almost every- thing they wrote. But the bot says it still wouldn’t be a bad idea to phase them out for Ukrainian historical and cultural figures. Who might those be? Ukraini-

ans such as Vasyl Semenovych Stus, a poet who died in a Soviet gulag while on a hunger strike in

Or Levko Lukianenko, an-
other Soviet dissident who spent
years in prison and wrote modern
Ukraine’s Declaration of Inde-
pendence. Or Myroslav Skoryk, a
composer whose lyrically mourn-
ful work includes inflections of
folk music. Or even the late Israeli
leader Golda Meir, who was born
in Kyiv.
A mirror image of the process
has also been unfolding in east-
ern Ukraine, where Russian sepa-
ratists argue that their culture
has been oppressed by Kyiv and
westernized Ukrainians.
A video posted on Telegram
last week shows Russian singer
Yulia Chicherina in the Russian-
occupied Donetsk region for the
unveiling of a bust of Alexander
Zakharchenko. He headed the
self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s
Republic before his assassination
in 2018.
“The issue of historical memo-

ry in Ukraine is extremely politi- cized,” said Elise Giuliano, a polit- ical science professor at Colum- bia University’s Harriman Insti- tute. She said ridding Ukraine of most vestiges of its Soviet and Russian past has sometimes been divisive, and not just in the break- away east. Many Ukrainians, especially older people, embrace patriotic narratives around the Soviet Union’s role in the victory over Nazi Germany, Giuliano said. She said there have also been intense battles over how — or whether — to memorialize Stepan Bandera, whose Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists fought for independ- ence against the Soviets but also collaborated with Nazis. Worrying about street names and monuments may seem quaint with a war going on, but scholars say the stakes are high as Ukraine seeks to unify. False history and myth helped lead Russia into war, they argue. “Putin has weaponized his-

Goodbye, Pushkin: Ukrainians purge

Russian monuments and street names

PHOTOS BY ANASTASIA VLASOVA FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: A statue of 19th-century novelist Nikolai Gogol overlooks one of the main boulevards in Dnipro, Ukraine. He was born in Ukraine, but he wrote in Russian and Russia claims him as one of its finest authors. The statue is one of the many reminders in Ukraine of past Russian and Soviet control. An empty pedestal once held a statue of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin in front of the Palace of Culture in Chasiv Yar in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region. A tram travels on Dmytra Yavornytskoho Avenue, formerly Karl Marx Avenue, in Dnipro. It was renamed years ago to honor a Ukrainian historian.

The Washington Post - USA (2022-05-24)

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