WASHINGTON, May 1 (RIA Novosti), Lyudmila Chernova – Anti-Semitism has been a continuing and growing problem in Ukraine ever since the regime in Kiev seized control of the country, says Edward Dox, a Kiev-based reporter with the Voice of Israel.
“The new government does not dissociate itself from the Nazi or Bandera,” Edward Dox said at a roundtable discussion hosted Wednesday by the House Republican conference in Washington DC.
Dox said those in power, especially from groups including Svoboda and Right Sector parties, frequently use anti-Semitic rhetoric.
The journalist has been working in Ukraine and watched the crisis unfold. In his view, the anti-Semitism issue is intensifying.
“During the Maidan [protests] in Kiev, Jews were subject to numerous attacks,” Dox said. “Many report having been followed after they left Synagogues,” – and not only being followed, but being watched and kept under close observation with people taking notes on them.
Dox, Babi Yar Massacre survivor Mikhail Sidko and journalist Leonid Zaslavsky came to Washington DC to urge the US government to raise its voice against the growing threat of neo-Nazism in Ukraine.
Sidko, who lived through the massacre in Kiev in September 1941, told the Representative from North Carolina, Mark Meadows, and staffers of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, that those killings were committed by the Ukrainian Nazis.
“Although the Germans gave orders, it was the Ukrainians who executed them,” he emphasized. “Nowadays, we are again seeing the rise of anti-Semitism in this country.”
Zaslavskiy accused the interim government in Kiev of justifying Ukrainian nationalists. “Ukrainian Ambassador to the UN dared to say that the charges brought by the Soviet Union against Ukrainian nationalists at the Nuremberg trial were falsified,” he said. “And that’s the people in the government there, that’s where it all begins.”
US Representative Meadows said that Congress is taking the situation very seriously, but that the truth was difficult to ascertain.
“The reports we are getting are very conflicting, and it’s difficult to judge if it’s real anti-Semitism acts or propaganda,” Meadows said. “We need some specifics and real examples of what’s happening there to address the issue and condemn it.”
With the presidential campaign in Ukraine in full swing, a slew of Ukrainian presidential candidates have been actively propagating their far-right views. Presidential hopeful Oleh Tyahnybok is an active promoter of the ultranationalist ideas of Stepan Bandera, who collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II in the wartime ethnic cleansing of Poles, Jews and Russians. Dmitry Yarosh, who is also one of the presidential candidates, heads the Right Sector radical nationalistic movement, which was an important force at the Euromaidan protests in Kiev.
