“Our presence here is symbolic; we’re here to show solidarity with the student movement in Ukraine. […] As Canadians, we support their right to democracy, their right to choose.”
Halyna, a fourth-year Ukrainian-Canadian student of International Relations, expressed her reason for standing out in the cold in front of Toronto’s Ukranian consulate last night. A single voice at the all-night protest uttered these words, but they should be in the mouths of every member of this university.
The free world is looking on in muted disbelief at the farcical voter’s nightmare currently violently dividing Ukraine. We are outraged, but it is tempered by the sad intuition that the democratic process is rarely all that democratic. This is most true in post-totalitarian countries like Iraq and Ukraine.
In these depressing times, when not even the pre-eminently free U.S.A. has run an uncontested election for the past eight years, it is all but expected that violations of this sort will occur elsewhere.
For the sake of the people of the country and of the over one million Ukrainians living in Canada, we should stifle our sense of defeatism and come out in unmitigated support of their demand: to be governed by the candidate they voted for.
This is not merely a political or even a humanist cause; it is also largely a student one. Students in Ukraine were persistently blocked from getting to the capital of Kiev to voice their dissent. The no-longer-legitimate government is doing everything in its power to prevent those who represent their country’s future from taking any part in it.
U of T should come out in support of its Ukrainian members and denounce these election results as quickly as possible. Canada and the international community must refuse to recognise the election as valid just as swiftly.
