Maidan 2.3: Yushchenko Reports for Duty, Calls for Opposition Unity
The third edition of this year’s Maidan became Yushchenko’s debut. The President came to talk to us about his faith in new elections.
With a sharper-toothed decree, which reschedules them and reinforces his case in the Constitutional Court, he projected optimism, if not confidence. The people who gathered at Yevropeiska Ploshcha, many of them from other towns, responded gladly. (Click here to watch the video.)
My batteries started dying on me, and I had to give them frequent rests to keep them alive. Yet, amid high attendance, that mishap didn’t affect my mood.
The President’s message to the opposition: Bury the hatchet. Build a single bloc. Don’t cannibalize each other’s ratings.
As the rally drew to a close, it started raining lightly. A group of opposition supporters headed for the Counter-Maidan and streamed past it unobstructed, with 0.0 casualties. Sorry, Mr. Yanukovych, no civil war. Just a civil walk.
Sunday, April 29, 2007
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18 comments:
I am SO happy you loved it! Thank you for photos and video. And it is great that people are coming out in large numbers as they should because it is their country, their very lives, and their children's lives at stake.
And if it has to be done ten, twenty more times, so be it. It simply has to done and redone and redone until completed.
Luida
Please can I put your video up on youtube???
Luida
I think Estonia has shown why it is so important that protestors be firmly committed to non-violence as violence done in self-defense can escalate easily with disastrous effects.
Keep the posts coming!!!
dlw
FOUND NEW EXCITING IDEA:
http://Web-Maidan.com
great post on blogosphere in Belarus...
dlw
Sat. address - Pres. Yushchenko is in so much better health - glad to see this. Stronger than before. (Kick ass :)
Luida
Here's a great MP3 by John M Perkins, an African-American whose writings on local community development I hope to get my denomination to translate into Russian and shared in Ukraine.
He is an incredible speaker for someone with only a 3rd grade level of education. Though, his accent might be hard to understand sometimes.
dlw
More decent news...
Taras - did u see the following?
http://www2.maidanua.org/news/view.php3?bn=maidan_free&key=1177749065&first=1177802009&last=1177775742
I saw it thanks to abdymok.
Luida
Happy May Day:)!
Luida, it’s our job to do it as many times as it takes. No one will do our job for us. Otherwise, all we get is “Mir, trud, Maybach!” It’s a type of social contract in which the former two are reserved for us, the people, and the latter one for them, the rulers.
Feel free to use “Mir, trud, Maybach!” (a spoof on the Soviet slogan “Peace, labor, May!”) as your guide to Yanukovych’s "stability.":)
And feel free to use my videos:)
David, don’t forget that in Ukraine we speak Ukrainian too:))) You’re not a Regionalist, are you;)?
Quite frankly, I’ve always felt uncomfortable when addressed in Russian by foreigners who assumed that using the Soviet lingua franca would be the best way to communicate. Such unwelcome advances always raised a red flag in me — a person equipped with a strong sense of Ukrainian identity:)
When I was younger, I simply couldn’t find the words to express the cultural dissonance boiling in my heart. I guess I felt misidentified and neo-Russified, even though I speak Russian a lot, and I know they meant no disrespect. So every time it happened to me, I saved myself from further anxiety by switching to English:)
In summer 2001, a couple of American Mormon boys surprised the hell out of me when they hailed me in Ukrainian:)
I’m very well attuned to Black English, both spoken and written:) Moreover, I’m often inclined to draw parallels between the treatment of Ukrainians in the Evil Empire and that of African Americans in segregated America. From 1996 to ‘99, I enriched my teenage love of RnB and hip-hop with a cross section of African American literature. By the way, do you have a downloadable version of the recording?
Luida, thanks for the link:) I was a frequent visitor of Maidanua.org during my off-duty Orange Revolution hours, and now I’ve bookmarked it again.
For the Web Maidan to work, it needs to generate a critical mass of faces — to create the bandwagon effect. Unfortunately, the people of Maidan II are less energized and more afraid of having their faces tagged and catalogued.
David, one day Belarus will be free, and the blogosphere will be part of it. Some folks will blog Lukashenka’s escape to Siberia, provided that Russia is still willing to accommodate him after the recent pricing dispute.
As a Ukrainian, I envy Estonian living standards and NATO membership, but I don’t approve of everything the Estonian government does. Can anybody let me in on why the Baltics should be helping Russia elect another Putin? And why should the Russian community cast itself in a bad light?
I’d never be the first to use violence, but if violence was used against me and those dear to me, I’d make full use of my right to self-defense. The best recipe against violence, I’m convinced, is not to use it first.
Some see Tymo as being seduced by Yanuk with the idea of early presidential elections.
I wanted to do the translation into Ukrainian, but others suggested that with Russian, it would get a wider reading potentially. But I think it'd be best to try it out first with Ukrainians in their heart language.
We will see...
I liked the attitude to violence embodied in Clive Owens character in the movie "Children of Men". He does use violence some, but the overall focus of the movie is on how much more than violence is needed to break the vicious cycle and give birth to hope again.
So I can see violence being used individually for self-defense, but when one is protesting in large numbers, I think violence by the protestors must be resisted strenuosly because it can so easily escalate into serious destruction.
I blogged a bit about JPerkins when he was coming to MN.
here
and
here
and
here
sorry for so much info, you also might really like the article on Barack Obama that just came out...
dlw
David, I’m glad you’re making progress on linguistic issues:)!
I’ve read your reports on Perkins. So you two actually talked?
Back in the fall of 1990 or ’91 — I don’t remember exactly — I shook hands with traveling astronaut-evangelist Charles Duke, the tenth man to walk on the moon. He landed within fifteen minutes walk from our apartment:)
For a dystopia freak like me, “Children of Men.” sounds like a movie worth watching. I’ll watch it as soon as I have it on my computer. I've also started reading the New Yorker article on Obama.
Yes, I talked with John Perkins. I also met him when I was an undegrad more than ten years ago now. I remember having lunch with him in the past. He had a big impact on me then. I spent my summer between my junior and senior year of college, working with a church in the inner-city(worse neighborhood) of Detroit in Michigan and then my senior year of college living in the worse neighborhood in Minneapolis, Minnesota at the time. They were important experiences for me. Though, I think I'm better suited for life as a private liberal arts college professor than an urban activism/missions.
I am glad you read the stuff on John Perkins. He is better than Martin Luther King Jr in some ways, as his general approach to reform is more holistic and locally-focused. He emphasizes more the importance of building local committed leadership than getting more money that way when the money does come around, it will be used well.
Children of Men was a hard movie to watch, but a very good movie. There's a scene in it that I think expresses very well the importance of the incarnation as a rebirth of hope in a modern-day context.
blessings,
dlw
Your video is up on youtube.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJosSdio4aI
Luida
So you’ve seen quite an eyeful of the hard-knock life, I guess. Leadership and money, that’s the question. I, too, would put leadership first. But in the end, of course, we can’t accomplish much of the first without the second, and vice versa.
Thank you, Luida:)
You’ve added value to an otherwise nondescript video:)
How dare you?!? It is MOST certainly NOT a "nondescript" video. It is history in the making.
Alright I could argue about camera angles and setting up the shot, etc. but it is live video and CRUCIAL and VITAL and IMPORTANT, in a world that receives a very lop-sided view and understanding of Ukraine. Based on reportage, in the Western english speaking world the protesters in Kyiv were only there for Yanu and the Pres's actions had no support. This was later ammended but the damage was already done.
Keep the info. coming, keep the videos flowing, it is of MAJOR SIGNIFICANCE and does not have to be "Oscar" worthy, just real.
Luida
"Bury the hatchet. Build a single bloc. Don’t cannibalize each other’s ratings."
This is NOT going to happen and it is because of Yulia and her determination to go it alone and for her, with good reason!
"Тимошенко не хоче ні з ким блокуватися"
http://www.samooborona.in.ua/exp.php?ni=748&type=2
Luida
Luida, thank you so much for your encouragement of my humble endeavors:)! I’ll try to make the best of my candid camera in illuminating the world on events in Ukraine. Keep your eyes peeled:)
I think you’re absolutely right on Yulia. Check out my latest post:)
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