Kyiv anti-left laws threaten vital freedoms
LABOUR MP Paul Flynn and his parliamentary colleagues are to be congratulated on the early day motion condemning the ban on the Communist Party of Ukraine (CPU).
Last December’s ruling by the Kyiv District Court rests upon the spurious legal basis of a series of anti-communist laws and decrees promulgated last year.
They branded the former Soviet Union as a “criminal” entity that pursued a policy of “state terror.”
Left-wing propaganda and symbols were declared illegal, including use of the five-pointed red star used on the mast-head of our own paper.
As a direct result of this legislation, scores of Ukrainian cities, towns, villages, streets and squares are being renamed, hundreds of statues pulled down and several million signs replaced.
At the same time as the Soviet Union and its Red Army, which fought and defeated four-fifths of the nazi war machine to liberate Europe from fascism, are being traduced and reviled, all veterans of the “struggle for Ukrainian independence” have been awarded special legal status.
It is now specifically a crime to denounce the fascist Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army which terrorised and murdered Jews, Poles, Czechs and Russians in the 1930s and ’40s and whose leaders collaborated with their country’s nazi occupiers.
No wonder, then, that these anti-democratic laws were immediately criticised and condemned by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe and former president of Poland Bronislaw Komorowski.
In July 2015, the process began to criminalise the CPU and two smaller left-wing parties, despite the CPU having won 2.7 million votes and 32 seats in the last genuinely free all-Ukraine parliamentary elections in 2012.
As a democratic and constitutional party, the CPU had opposed the coup backed by the US, EU and neo-nazi paramilitaries to depose elected president Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014. While upholding national unity, the CPU also refused to support the state and fascist military assault on popular militias in eastern Ukraine who rose up against the post-coup regime and its anti-Russian and “de-communisation” policies.
These principled stances led to violent attacks on the party, its members and premises, including the disgraceful yet unpunished thuggery aimed at CPU leader Petro Symonenko in the parliamentary chamber last May and July 2014. It also confirmed the determination of Prime Minister Yatsenyuk to outlaw the party, arresting the first judge who stood in his way.
The ban on the CPU has since been condemned in the strongest terms by Amnesty International and the Venice Commission, which advises the Council of Europe on constitutional matters.
Flynn’s Commons motion therefore deserves the signature of every MP who believes in democratic freedoms of speech, assembly, organisation and publication.
Morning Star readers should contact their elected representative and urge them to lend their support.
That would send the clearest message to the British government, the European Union and — above all — the regime in Kyiv that Ukraine’s steps down the road to fascism will not go unopposed.
As a burning desire for EU membership provided the pretext for Yatsenyuk and his fascist allies to carry out their coup in the first place, a special responsibility falls upon pro-EU governments, parties and politicians to demand sanctions against the Kyiv regime unless and until it restores fundamental democratic freedoms.
Not only should Ukrainian membership of the EU be taken off the table; the country’s partnership status within the “European Neighbourhood Policy” should be terminated forthwith.