BRAMA, August 21, 2001, 1am ET

Ukrainians - Spanning the Globe: The Third World Forum of Ukrainians convenes in Kyiv and what a sight/site it is!
R.L. Chomiak for BRAMA
8/19/01

KYIV -- It is an Internet pow-wow. No, it's not virtual. It is real. But it is Internet -- this Third World Forum of Ukrainians in Kyiv August 18-20.

Click: A mezzo soprano, in a Ukrainian costume with slight Eskimo features, from Komi Republic -- that's way north in the Russian Federation, the same latitude as Yukon. She is singing about Mother Ukraine in Ukrainian.

Click: A young businessman from Perm, once known for one of the harshest Soviet gulag camps. He manages the Ukrainian Home, a combination cultural and business center in the city of Perm. He came to Kyiv with a camera crew to shoot today's Ukraine for the Perm TV station, and with letters from Perm businesses to potential partners in Ukraine.

Click: A Hutsul dance ensemble, with trembitas and topirtsi (axes) from BA (as in Buenos Aires, Argentina).

Click: A representative of a million-strong Ukrainian community in huge, but sparsely populated Kazakhstan, is talking about the forthcoming visit of President Leonid Kuchma of Ukraine to their country.

Click: A song and dance group in Don Kozak costumes from Krasnodar (Russia) performing the numbers of their ancestors -- in Ukrainian, of course.

Click: A delegate from Tyumen, Russia's main source of oil and gas, in Siberia, is being interviewed by Ukrainian television, and he is speaking in clear, unaccented Ukrainian. In the old Soviet days, Ukrainian engineers and technicians formed the nucleus of the Soviet petrochemical industry, and tens of thousands of them still live and work in the Tyumen region.

More clicks brought Australians, Canadians, Americans -- Ukrainians all.

It's a humbling feeling for a "diasporan" from the US to realize that Ukrainian diaspora is much, much bigger than Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, Toronto, Winnipeg, with a dash of Buenos Aires and Melbourne. There are many of us, all over the globe, especially in the "one-sixth" of the globe that had been little know, purposely covered up these last eight decades. Ukrainians there are coming into their own. The existence of Ukraine as an independent country has provided them an anchor that they can throw in and control the drift.

This is especially noticeable in a country like the Russian Federation, that is huge and that can no longer be micromanaged from Moscow. Ukrainians in the far reaches of Russia can and do come to an agreement with the local authorities and get their Sunday schools, community centers and businesses. Their leaders now come from the new generation, without inhibitions or fear, that kept their parents and grandparents from requesting or demanding their rights.

Many of them come to Kyiv on business year-'round. But a gathering like the Third World Forum of Ukrainians, tied to the tenth anniversary of Ukraine's independence, brings all of them together at once to this big diaspora fair. And the thought circling one's mind is that the specific gravity of the dispersed Ukrainians around the globe is changing; that the smugness of the WORLD Congress of Ukrainians limited to the Toronto-New York axis may be losing its foundation.

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