President called on to help lift the seal on KGB archives

The Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance has called on President Yushchenko to ask the Russians “to declassify the KGB archives from the time of the Second World War, in particular as regards the activities of the OUN – UPA [the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Resistance Army], as well as the pseudo-Bandera-supporting groups of the NKVD”.

The appeal states that “Russian and Ukrainian historians on the basis of irrefutable historical facts must, finally, be able to turn the page over this issue.  The Institute of National Remembrance believes it expedient to publish specific names, facts and testimony linked with these events.

The letter also speaks of the need for parliament to pass a law “On the Ukrainian liberation movement of the 1920s – 1950s, and the status and social protection of its participants”. They suggest that the law should establish criminal liability for insults to resistance fighters.

The Institute of National Remembrance also suggests creating State educational programmes which “will tell the wider Ukrainian public and world community about the truth of the history of the creation and activities of the UPAQ”. Such programmes, they believe, should be financed by the government.

The letter appeals also to the management of Ukrainian media outlets to “stop the practice of professional ignorance when, with the help of experts nobody knows and compromised academics, some journalists, perhaps without realizing it, and in their youthful fervour to seek more dynamic stories, fuel intolerance in society and negative stereotypes of ethnic, ideological and cultural confrontation”.

The Institute also suggests establishing a competition for scripts of a television series on the events in Western Ukraine from 1939-1954., and seeking money “from Ukrainian sponsors to finance a film about the tragic, while heroic, page of Ukrainian history.”