Hope [update] I posted this ten days ago but because of whats still happening in Kiev and elsewhere Ill post it again. bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25176191 theguardian/world/2013/dec/01/ukraine-largest-street-protests-orange-revolution irishtimes/news/world/europe/tens-of-thousands-gather-in-kiev-for-further-protests-1.1613508 The Orange Revolution in Ukraine began nine years ago today: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Morning_first_day_of_Orange_Revolution.jpg The following summer we were in Crimea and caught an overnight train from Simferopol to Odessa. The other person in our little compartment – there was one cancellation – was a young law student on his way back to Odessa University. He was of Tatar origin. We shared – in broken Russian on both sides – his family story. His grandparents had been part of Stalin’s ethnic cleansing programme when 200,000 Crimean Tatars had been evicted at gun-point, given half an hour to pack and sent on cattle trucks to Uzbekistan, during which nearly half of them died. His parents had lived in Uzbekistan under Brezhnev and his successors, desperately wanting to go back home and with no prospect of doing so. Now he himself had a chance to study. His professor had been out in the street, leading demonstrations; he could at last believe that something good might happen in Ukraine. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tatars M and I got into our bunks and slept. S lay in his bunk reading a law-book; he had an exam the next week. I woke up in the middle of the night. The train was old and rattling; you could see the track through the holes in the floor. Outside was the vast darkness of the Ukrainian lands that had been fought over so bloodily during the war. The little reading lamp lit up S’s face. His grandparents had suffered under one of the world’s cruellest dictators at a time when there was no law; his parents had tried to live under a regime in which law was a fiction. I couldn’t help looking again and again at S’s expression as his eyes moved over the page; he trusted that law might one day come into being. I have rarely been so moved. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:73_Odessa_railway_station.jpg
Posted on: Mon, 02 Dec 2013 08:25:20 +0000
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