POLITICAL AGE OF TRANSITION
The eleven people, who occupied last Thursday the Communist Party of Ukraine Central Committee premises in Kyiv, vacated them on March 10 at about one a.m. This group of young people calling themselves members of the Samostiina Ukrayina (Independent Ukraine) youth organization put forward demands to ban the Communist Party, withdraw from the CIS, pull out the Russian Black Sea Fleet from the territory of Ukraine, and pay off back wages, pensions and other social payments.
“This violates common sense and comprehension,” KPU leader Petro Symonenko thus commented on the action. We cannot but agree. It remains to hope this is only the extreme manifestation of teenage stupidity so justly feared by all parents whose kids have reached the teen age.
Samostiina Ukrayina, to which the participants of the action ascribe themselves, has not shown itself in anything up to now. As was announced by the Kyiv chief police department PR center, those detained are students at Kyiv universities and colleges. Obviously, nobody had ever explained to the young people that, by embarking on the road of extremist actions, they behave exactly the way the odious Bolsheviks did. For it is the Bolsheviks who rejected the evolutionary way of state development as soon as they formed their party. It is the Bolsheviks for whom the end always justified the means. And it is the Bolsheviks who always not only justified but also elevated to a heroic status terrorist acts in the name of revolution.
On the other hand, it is common knowledge that youth quite willingly follows bad examples, especially those shown on television from the Verkhovna Rada building and justified with some higher state-related necessity.
And, as to the achieved result (of course, if this was not the provocation of their older comrades), the effect was just the reverse of the desired one.
People’s Deputy Oleksandr Lavrynovych briefly summed up this political action as “mostly or exclusively in the interests of the Communist Party of Ukraine.”
The juridical conclusion: all members of this group, who stayed in the Communist Party CC premises, including one girl, were taken to the Podil district police station. The occupants have been indicted for violent occupation of a building (the Criminal Code provides such punishment as up to five years imprisonment or up to two years community service) and causing bodily harm (imprisonment up to two years or community service up to three).
The pedagogical conclusion: let us hope the Deputy will be the example of law-abidance rather than the ability to seize what is not his or hers.
The political conclusion: Rukh deputy chairperson, People’s Deputy, Olena Bondarenko, looks upon the occupation of the KPU CC office by a group of radically-minded young people as a political action, not a criminal offense. She stressed that Rukh thinks it necessary to solve all conflicts peacefully, but “this conflict compels us to ponder” whether all is well with democracy in Ukraine.
Chairman of the Kyiv city Rukh organization, Oleksandr Chornovolenko, has said his faction is ready to read out the demands of those detained from the parliamentary rostrum and to cooperate with the government in fulfilling them. Mr. Chornovolenko reported that among the detained are four Rukh members who joined the party after the death of Vyacheslav Chornovil. According to Mr. Chornovolenko, the young Rukh members did not break the party statute, so no disciplinary actions will be leveled against them, Interfax-Ukraine reports.
INCIDENTALLY
“From the March 9 noon, when the students occupied the KPU CC office, and almost until dusk, the action was going on very nervously,” eyewitness Vilhelm Smoliak says. “The riot police were flexing their muscles, the snipers demonstrated readiness to ‘neutralize’ the plotters who leaned out the windows, firemen were unfolding and folding up their equipment. Although the students put out gasoline cans on the window sills, poured it on the entrance door, and were prepared to set all this ablaze in case of police assault, chief of the Kyiv police chief Mykhailo Korniyenko told journalists he did not rule out the use of force.”
As the saying goes, all’s well that ends well. However, we cannot but recall the obstructionist behavior of the Communists during the parliamentary debate on a bill on the use of force, which, among other things, describes in detail the actions of all security elements in extraordinary situations like this.
