Category: Ukraine

by Paul Ben-Itzak Copyright 2022 Paul Ben-Itzak

“I had a great life, and I’m ready to finish.”

–Anastasia, 28, a singer patrolling Kiev, Kalashnikov in hand, interviewed earlier this week by Radio France chain France Inter.

SAINT-CYPRIEN, France (Dordogne) — For a quarter of a century, the criterium of this column for venturing beyond the cultural realm has always been whether the attention being paid to a particular subject in the general media seems to be scanty or non-existent. This time these questions revolve around race, principally whether White, largely Christian, European refugees are being treated differently today than Black and Brown refugees have been treated for the past eight years. (For the case at hand, by and in Europe, but the question could easily be extended to the United States, where Haitian migrants were recently corralled like cattle in a Fort Worth quarter-horse competition by horse-bound Texan border guards and Brown-skinned migrants have been habitually separated from their children.) First, though, I think it’s relevant to describe some of the atrocities the Russian army has been perpetrating on a civilian population for two weeks now, as this is the principal engine which has driven more than 2 million Ukrainians to flee their homeland, a figure which doesn’t take into account millions more internally displaced persons. An additional ten million are either too old or too handicapped to flee.

On Wednesday, Russian forces bombed a children’s hospital in the besieged port city of Mariupol, killing three people, including a young girl, and injuring 17 others, according to the World Health Organization the 19th health organization they have attacked. Because of attacks on the power grid, most of the country’s hospitals are unable to treat people anymore.

Also yesterday, the power reportedly went off for a short period in the disabled Chernobyl nuclear plant (they switched to generators) where managers are now working at the point of Russian guns.

Most of the following incidents and interviews have been recorded by the courageous reporters of Radio France, as audited over its France Inter chain. (Reporting from Russia has diminished since the government decreed any reporting not to its liking — my term — might get you 15 years in prison, and closed down the remaining independent television chains. At least 4600 Russians have been arrested for protesting the invasion.)

On Tuesday, Russian soldiers killed at least 21 civilians, including at least two babies. Another child died of thirst while stuck in a destroyed building. (The mayor of Mariupol claims 1200 civilians have been killed.)

The Russians have also repeatedly bombed civilian safe conduct or exit corridors to which they’d previously agreed, according, notably, to Mariupol’s mayor, who said Wednesday that of the 200,000 civilians endangered, he is only able to get out 6,000 daily.

After Russian president Vladimir Putin earlier offered supposed safe conduct corridors which would allow civilians to flee … to Russia or its vassal Belorussia, French president Emmanuel Macron — who during this crisis has exemplified the justly vaunted French tradition of diplomacy, always willing to talk to Putin — rightly denounced the Russian president’s “moral and political cynicism. I don’t know many Ukrainians who have the desire to take refuge in Russia; it’s a hypocrisy.”

“Everyone here is ready to die,” Elena, an English professor patrolling the streets of Kiev with her Kalashnikov, told Radio France earlier this week.

“I had a great life, and I’m ready to finish,” Anastasia, a singer also patrolling Kiev, declared. Anastasia is 28.

At the beginning of the week, the Russians bombed an industrial boulangerie, killing 13 civilians.

On Thursday in Odessa, a young mother of 19 was killed by the Russians while running across a street to retrieve her 6-month old baby in their home.

As more and more pharmacies in Kiev have closed or run out of supplies — as of this morning, Russian troops were 15 kilometers from the Ukrainian capitol — insulin is difficult to find. A woman named Titania was out Tuesday looking for heart medicine for her 85-year-old mother, who has had three heart attacks. When one person in line outside a drugstore said he was looking for “calmants to be able to sleep” among the rocket fire, another suggested, “If you have trouble sleeping, try reading Marx’s ‘Das Kapital.'”

A resident of Kharkov named Olga told France Inter: “They fire on women, children, residential buildings, houses, hospitals, lines of people waiting for water… It’s an attack on a civilian population. The Russians who have been captured say they came here to kill people.”

(Some of the most poignantly telling witnessing — and radio producing — has come from Ukrainians in Kiev, on the road in flight from Kiev, and elsewhere, whom France Inter producer Caroline Gillet asked to record their daily lives on their cell phones, with, importantly, no intervention by a reporter. This kind of raw, unfiltered and unedited testimony — Gillet does not just select the most dramatic soundbytes, nor does she edit out background sounds like babies chattering in the back of a fleeing car, the effect being that these sound like friends making us homespun tape-recordings — is not frequent in French public radio journalism, which sometimes sounds like a pastiche of soundbytes, the reporter seemingly more interested in hearing his own voice than exposing his listener to the voice of the news source. (It may be the same on American mainstream radio, but this is what I listen to.))

(There was also this inspiring interlude yesterday morning, reported last night by Inter: The Kiev Classical Orchestra organizing a 15-minute concert on the Place Maidon, playing the “Hymn to Joy,” its director explaining the importance of maintaining culture and that “Music stops war.”)

This is the war Putin practiced for in Chechnya.

It’s the war he perpetrated on Syria. (Interviewed on France Inter Wednesday morning, former president Francois Holland blamed Barack Obama for drawing a line in Syria in 2014… and then moving it back.)

Justement, Syria.

The author (right) and his brother with their great grand-mother, Sarah Nemovitch Winer, born in Kiev in 1886, in Miami, Florida, in July 1964.

Yesterday I Facebook chatted with an American relative. I was trying to get the low-down on the origins of my grandma on my mother’s side Shirley Wise, specifically to confirm that she was born in Odessa, Ukraine, about 115 years ago. (Which could make me 50 percent Ukrainian, depending on whether one considers that the Ukrainian capital was Ukrainian or Russian when my great-grandmother Sarah, on my Dad’s side — that’s her in the photograph with my brother and me — was born there in 1886. The best my French encyclopedias can come up with is that both are true: Kiev has been the capital of Ukraine for about 1200 years, but Ukraine has been the property of Russia for most of that time, including when my great-grandmother Sarah Nemovitch was born and up to the end of the second World War, when a Ukrainian independence movement, lead by the anarchist Nestor Makhno and others, broke out against the tsarist, white, and red Russian armies.) He was able to confirm that Shirley’s parents Isaac and Eva (my mom’s name), my great-grandparents, were born in this most cosmopolitan (and Russophone, to further complicate things) of Ukrainian cities. As a principal seaport, Odessa may be — according to Ukrainian president Zelensky– the Russians’ next target. My relative (I’m not using his name because this was a private discussion) in turn had two questions for me:

** What about Putin’s claim that he wants to ‘deNazify’ Ukraine (my relative didn’t put it exactly this way)? And which supposition seems to contradict President Zelensky’s being Jewish. (Or as a France Inter news anchor put it Wednesday morning, “of Jewish origin (race)” — bizarre for a French journalist, given that the general rule here since 74,000 Jews were deported from France during the Occupation, regardless of whether they were practicing Jews, for being Jewish, including the Kiev-born novelist Irene Nemirovsky, is to avoid describing being Jewish as a race.)

** What about reports that (legal) Black (or African) Ukrainian residents seeking refuge are not being treated the same as white Ukrainians (by either Ukrainian or Polish officials)?

For the first question, before Wednesday morning I would have said that French media having pooh-pooh’d Putin’s claims as so ludicrous they’re not worth investigating, what I know I know from the American news program Democracy Now, which has noted the existence of extreme right-wing paramilitary groups in Ukraine with Nazi leanings. But on Wednesday, for an extraordinary (if, helas, all-too-brief) segment on France Inter about the current Jewish population of Odessa (30,000 to 50,000), half of whom are fleeing, the courageous correspondent interviewed a rabbi at one of the city’s four remaining synagogues who claimed that the city’s recently elected governor had fought with right-wing militias in the Donbas region in 2014 (against what has been described as “Russian separatists,” supported by Putin), and that these groups were associated with neo-Nazi elements.

This does not mean, however, that Putin has any credibility when it comes to calling out supposed Nazis. Last week, his forces bombed the memorial in Baba Yar, where 30,000 Jews were killed in September 1941, prompting President Zelensky to point out that anyone who pretends to know Ukraine’s history — and be concerned about Nazis — would not have done this.

** Answering the race, or potential racism question, particularly when it comes to comparing the reception in Europe for refugees from various wars and economic travails from countries across the Middle East and Africa since 2015 and that accorded to the Ukrainians is, as the French like to say, “complicated.” (For the immediate question posed by my relative — whether legal residents in Ukraine from African countries or of any non-white color fleeing Ukraine are being treated differently than white Ukrainian refugees — I suggest listening to this eye-witness testimony broadcast on Democracy Now. )

On Wednesday, Robert Menard, the mayor of the Southwestern French city of Beziers, a frequent alley of the extreme right wing National Front (officially re-dubbed the “Front for National Assembling” several years ago), and the former director of Reporters Without Borders, delivered an extraordinary mea culpa (or maybe not so extraordinary, when one recalls that Menard once protested the welcoming of a Chinese premiere in Paris by climbing up the Eiffel Tower and hoisting a protest banner where it was sure to be seen along the welcoming parade route).

“I plead guilty,” Menard said on France Inter. “I said, wrote, and published a certain number of things during the time of the combats in Syria and Iraq and the arrival of refugees (from those countries) that I regret. It was a fault. Because there are not two sorts of refugees, European Christians on the one side and refugees from the Middle-East on the other. I was wrong. We need to protect both.” (On the French ‘excuse’ scale, ‘fault’ is as strong as it gets.)

On the other hand, in the Channel port city of Calais, where thousands of refugees have set up impromptu camps for years in the hopes of crossing to Britain, the contrast was jarring: Where, as one French militant claimed, some of these camps have been razed 21 times in recent years by the authorities — and French associations are even prohibited by law, she said, from distributing food and water at the points where these migrants from Afghanistan and elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East congregate — Ukrainian refugees who have been turned back from the UK in recent days because (!) they didn’t have visas are being put up in hotels while their cases are sorted out. (In fairness, here it needs to be highlighted that these African and Middle-Eastern migrants are not seeking refuge or political asylum in France — which theoretically would enable them to enter that process — despite French government encouragement to do so, but want to go to the U.K., which doesn’t want them. So a) France has been saddled with a problem that is the U.K.’s responsibility, and b) the government really doesn’t have the option of sending them to refugee centers to be processed, because this offer, and even housing, is usually refused, the refugees finding their way back to Calais.)

Last year, after the bodies of 27 migrants attempting to make an illegal crossing were found in the Channel waters, a survivor claimed that their telephoned pleas to both French and British coast-guards had gone unheeded, both essentially telling them they were in the other’s waters.

And Poland, which has admitted one million Ukrainian refugees so far, last year reacted to Belorussia’s trying to unload (‘unload’ because in Belorussia’s eyes they were a weapon) 5,000 Black and Brown refugees on the country by turning their hoses on the migrants and building a wall in record time to rival Trump’s. (Some local Poles living in the border region did Yeoman’s work to welcome and hide the migrants.)

And at least three of the 12 candidates in France’s upcoming presidential election have been fear-mongering around Muslims and/or what the least extreme of these candidates calls “out of control immigration.”

On Tuesday, there was even the irony of the (otherwise admirable and commendable, particularly on his outstanding handling of the Covid crisis) French prime minister choosing the Porte de la Chapelle in Northern Paris to welcome Ukrainian refugees (some 7,000 of whom have so far fled to France) — the same Porte de la Chapelle were migrant camps have been repeatedly raised in recent years (albeit for sound, health and safety reasons, with the State doing its best to relocate them to housing or indoor migrant centers). The same Porte de la Chapelle where local residents have pleaded for years with authorities to do something about the camps of crack addicts besides moving them to neighboring towns.

All this said, it needs to be pointed out — to ‘demine’ the question, as it were — that, whatever the prejudices of some East European countries and some fear-mongering politicians may be against migrants of color, the comparatively enthusiastic welcome Ukrainian refugees have received (often being offered work papers right away) is not because they’re white and Christian.

It’s because — and unlike the vast majority of the refugees who have sought sanctuary or better economic opportunities in Europe since 2014 — they are European.

Vlad the Impaler’s attack on Ukraine is an attack on Europe, and on the model of Democracy it treasures.

The rare unanimity of the European Union’s 27 member states over economic sanctions and Defense measures to aid Ukraine makes this sentiment clear.

The overwhelming generosity — not because the refugees are white or Christian but because they are European — of the material and sentimental response from ordinary citizens here in France and across Europe makes this clear.

I feel this identification viscerally myself.

I have spent the better part of the past 21 years in France.

I love French literature.

I love French art.

I love certain epochs of French cinema.

I love the variety of political perspectives and choice we are exposed to here, even on the mainstream media. (Those 12 presidential candidates — who run the gamut from what’s described here as the extreme right to the extreme left, the latter including three Communist-oriented parties — are guaranteed by French law equal access to the media. In the U.S., by contrast, all but the Republican and Democratic candidates are blocked out, with even Democratic senators and cabinet officials, usually of color, excluded from some of the 2020 primary debates because they hadn’t raised enough money.)

I am a predominantly French cook.

I usually have an easy initial rapport, and chemistry, with French women.

I share the French sense of humor. (Even if they often don’t get irony.) (Kidding!)

As a translator, I have put myself in the head, thought, feelings, politics, poetic sentiments, perspectives, life stories and trajectories, and allegiances of French writers and thinkers, female and male.

And yet I have never felt particularly “French.”

Like many French (more than half of whom voted against an amendment to the E.U. constitution in 2005), prior to this crisis I had my issues with the E.U. bureaucracy (or “Brussels” as it’s often referred to by its detractors). If in theory Robert Schumann’s dream of a united Europe was fueled by the desire to prevent another European war, in practice it has often seemed more to be a means to allow European capitalists to better compete with American capitalists.

An over-abundance of E.U. regulations has made it hard for many, particularly farmers, to eke out a living. (There have even been those, over-burdened by environmental regulations expensive to apply, who have committed suicide.)

And yet this crisis, which has finally united Europe over the issue of Defense — as uncomfortable as it might be for a pacifist weaned on the anti-War marches of San Francisco in the Sixties to admit this — has made me finally feel like I am a European.

While it also incited me to investigate my own Ukrainian roots, these roots aren’t why I feel European; it’s more like I feel I need them to demonstrate to others (not that they’ve demanded this) that I have standing, or street cred., on this question. (A passing sentiment that it might seem absurd for a Jew whose ancestors were hounded out
of Ukraine by pogroms to feel a specific fidelity to that country was somewhat reassured by reading Isaac Babel’s stories of an Odessa Jew with at that point Bolshevik allegiances — Babel — joining a Cossack regiment invading Poland and in which the narrator’s stereotypical descriptions of some of the Jews he comes across in the occupied Polish villages, except the rabbis, sometimes rival Maupassant’s.)