Concern Remains Over SBU Interference with Lviv University

Kyivpost.com.ua

Natalia A. Feduschak

LVIV – The U.S. State Department and Canadian lawmakers have expressed concern about a rollback of Ukrainian democracy and issued a warning to the country’s new leadership that the West will closely monitor developments at Lviv’s Ukrainian Catholic University after the country’s security services tried to intimidate its rector, Father Borys Gudziak, last month.

In a statement, Philip J. Crowley, assistant secretary at the State Department’s Bureau of Public Affairs said that in a June 2 meeting with the Charge d’Affaires of the Ukrainian Embassy, Washington raised “issues related to freedom of speech and association in Ukraine, including reports of recent contact between security service officials and the rector of Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. We expressed concern about actions that could be interpreted as restricting basic freedoms…Ukrainians should be proud of their democratic progress, and we hope that progress will continue.”

Canadian parliamentarian Boryz Wrzesnewskyj said in a statement on May 28 that “not since the days of the Soviet Union has the Ukrainian Catholic Church, its institutions, priests and students been menaced in this way. We will not stand by and watch as (Ukraine’s) democracy and statehood is methodically disassembled by the current regime.”

Concern about the university and its rector began after Gudziak issued a public letter stating that on May 18, an agent from Ukraine’s security service, the SBU, had called him on his cell phone and requested a meeting. Twenty minutes later, the agent showed up at Guzdiak’s office, asked him to read and sign a letter addressed to him from the service and warned him about measures that would be taken against students participating in protests. Gudziak declined to sign the document. He said since the SBU refused to give him a copy of the document, he would not even look at it.

Since Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych took office, Lviv has become a hotbed of dissent. In recent weeks, thousands of students from Lviv’s various universities have protested government policies they say are undermining democracy and pulling Ukraine back into Russia’s orbit. They have also voiced discontent over the appointment of Dmytro Tabachnyk as education minister, a man they say has belittled Ukraine in academic works and interviews.

Demonstrators, many of them young people, took to the streets on May 27 to protest Yanukovych’s increasingly Russian-friendly policies when the president visited Lviv for the first time since taking office.

Since news of the SBU visit to UCU broke, the reaction of Ukrainian officials has been divided.

Hanna Herman, the assistant head of the presidential administration, criticized the SBU and called the episode “wildness,” the Religious Informational Service of Ukraine, which is affiliated with UCU’s Institute of Religion and Society, reported on May 28.

The next day, Herman said Yanukovych had ordered SBU chief, Valeriy Khoroshkovsky, to investigate the situation.

“The head of the state asks that all questions that are connected to maintaining human rights, democratic principles and standards be dealt with responsibly,” she said.

Gudziak told the Kyiv Post Herman had called him to say Khoroshkovsky was ready to meet with him to discuss the SBU visit, but no time frame was discussed.

The U.S. State Department said it welcomed “the public offer” by Khoroshkovsky to meet with the rector.

For his part, in an interview published on May 31, Khoroshkovsky told the Komersant-Ukrainy newspaper he felt the UCU incident was overblown.

“Preventing criminals, this is the sacred responsibility of any government protective organ,” he said. “Generally, don’t you think this situation is a trifle overblown and is reminiscent somehow of a ‘technology’? I have the deepest respect for professionals in any business, in this case, the director of the university. And I am sincerely ready to explain to him the position of the service. But I stress that nobody and nothing will get in the way of the SBU fulfilling its work. This is without exception.”

The foreign words of support come at a particularly important time for UCU.

Gudziak told the Kyiv Post since the SBU visit, students have been worried about voicing their opinions in blogs for fear of being targeted by the SBU. At least one father approached the rector and said his daughter heard the university was about to lose its license. The university will be undergoing a process of licensing and accreditation in the next several weeks.

“Ukraine was profoundly traumatized in the twentieth century. Like any living being who has been beaten and abused, Ukraine’s population flinches before the blow,” Gudziak said. “I don’t believe the Ministry of Education will blackmail the university into submission by depriving young people of educators. We’re trying to work for dignity in society, education that is avant-garde, conducting research, working with the handicapped and deaf…We are, however, concerned that the tax authorities or financial controls might be used to make life difficult for us.”

UCU is a private institution that is not affiliated to any political party. Many of its students are poor.

Myroslav Marynovych, UCU’s vice rector who was a co-founder of Ukraine’s Helsinki Group and for this spent 10 years in a Soviet gulag, said he is worried some authorities may try to undermine the university’s reputation.

“We have the impression that this comes not so much from the Ukrainian authorities, but from Russian authorities. There is the impression that a few in the Ukrainian government are trying to fulfill a plan set out by (Russian president Vladimir) Putin that any opposition is to be liquidated.”

International donors who were in Lviv on May 29-30 to participate in fundraising efforts and to survey plans for UCU’s expansion said they were shocked by the SBU incident, but would remain vigilant, including lobbying Washington to keep pressure on the Ukrainian government to ensure democracy and media freedoms remained on the front burner of U.S. foreign policy.

“Many of the students have parents who lived through the hell days of the Soviet Union. We are concerned about another generation living through this,” said Bohdan Kurczak, president and chief executive officer of the Self-Reliance (NY) Federal Credit Union, which is a major donor to UCU.

“Any rollbacks in democracy need to be vigilantly monitored and those people who are rolling back democracy need to be held accountable,” added Marta Kolomayets, chief operating officer for the Ukrainian Catholic Foundation. “The students don’t understand the repression of the Soviet times. They grew up in the spirit of the Orange Revolution and a free and independent Ukraine. Now they are actively fearfully that those freedoms can be squelched.”

Kyiv Post staff writer Natalia A. Feduschak can be reached at [email protected]