Poles living in Ukraine demand autonomy. Ethnic Poles living in Ukraine demand a referendum in the Zhitomir Region to create a Polish autonomy with broad self-governance rights. They also insist that the Polish language be granted the official status along with the Ukrainian language. Poles in the Zhitomir Region want to form autonomy with broad self-governance rights on the territory of Ukraine. According to the statements made by some representatives of that ethnic minority, over the last decades they have been going through difficult times being prosecuted and discriminated against by the Ukrainian authorities. The Polish authorities support the idea to unite with their historic homeland. Over the past few years they have been freely handing out Polish passports on Ukrainian territory anyway. With Warsaws approval the Ukrainian Poles started to demand that the authorities in Kiev give back TV broadcasting in Polish, revive the Polish street names in Zhitomir Region and open kindergartens and schools with the Polish language. Nationalists in Poland itself also came alive. The radical nationalist party of Ruch Narodowy together with the Hungarian Jobbik Party has published a joint statement demanding autonomy for the Poles and Hungarians living on the territory of Ukraine. In Warsaw maps are being published that show parts of Ukrainian territory as “originally polish”. According to Albina Noskova, an expert at the Institute for Slavic Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences, despite the apparent friendship between the Polish and Ukrainian nations, these ethnic groups rather have a love-hate relationship. The Poles can still not forgive their neighbors for the 1943 massacre in Volhynia and the subsequent inclusion of the Polish territories in Ukraine. In reality, the Ukrainian territories that used to belong to Poland have turned into a base for the Ukrainian nationalistic movement. The Poles do remember that, as the issue of the Volhynia Massacre is very difficult. The Ukrainians started the massacre in early 1943. It was a vicious killing of the Polish population, including children and women. The figures of the Poles killed back then vary: from 50-60 thousand to 80-100 thousand victims.
Posted on: Fri, 25 Apr 2014 12:00:10 +0000
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