Die Präsidenten der Ukraine und Polens haben drei Jahre nach dem letzten fehlgeschlagenen Versuch einen Streit beigelegt, der bereits seit 87 Jahren andauert. Hierüber schreibt Wojciech Kosc in Transitions Online.
After 87 years, thousands of young Polish soldiers may finally be truly able to rest in peace following a ceremony in which the Polish and Ukrainian presidents tried to bury a controversy that says much about the two nations’ tortured and deeply entwined histories.
The hope is that the ceremony in Lviv’s Lychakivske cemetery will transform the soldiers’ graveyard from a symbol of national heroism for some Poles and a symbol of subjugation for some Ukrainians into a symbol of reconciliation.
At the heart of the controversy is the complex history of Lviv itself. Before World War I, Lviv was a Polish town surrounded by Ukrainian villages, ruled from Vienna by the Habsburg emperor. In November 1918, the same month that Poland re-emerged as an independent state, the Ukrainian National Council declared Ukraine an independent country and laid claim to Lviv. Nearly 3,000 Poles died successfully defending the city in a brief but fierce battle. Lviv remained part of Poland through the interwar years and the burial site of the Lviv’s Polish defenders – the grandly designed Eaglets Cemetery, so named because many of the dead were teenagers – became one of Poland’s most prominent symbols of patriotism. For Ukrainians, it became a symbol too, though of a lost cause and of Polish supremacy.
After World War II, Lwow became Lviv (or, in Russian, Lvov) after the Soviet Union extended its borders far to the west. The Soviet authorities – who had no time for nationalism in Poland, a key satellite state, or in Ukraine, a key republic – deliberately neglected and in 1971 bulldozers flattened much of the cemetery. But for Poles, the graveyard remained a symbol and in 1989, in the era of glasnost introduced by the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet authorities began to protect the site from further ravages.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Poland swiftly recognized Ukraine as an independent state. An opportunity for reconciliation seemed to open up and, in 1994, the Ukrainian and Polish governments agreed to rebuild the cemetery. However, as the years passed, the disputes seemed to increase, rather than decrease. The problem – in essence, how to commemorate Polish fighters who fought Ukrainians and ultimately helped foil the idea of an independent Ukrainian state – centered on the inscription on the cemetery’s main monument. In 1997, Ukrainian officials halted renovation work on the cemetery, arguing that the Polish-only inscriptions on the graves glorified the Polish past by saying the Polish soldiers died heroically. In 2000, the city council suggested alternative wording, reading simply (in Ukrainian as well as Polish): „For the unknown Polish soldiers who died for Poland in 1918-1920.“ Polish officials refused to step down, demanding the word „heroically“ be re-inserted, as the Polish and Ukrainian governments had agreed. However, Lviv’s city council stood firm, forcing Poland’s President Aleksander Kwasniewski to cancel the re-opening of the cemetery.
His Ukrainian counterpart, Leonid Kuchma, blamed the impasse on local officials, apologizing to Kwasniewski for the delay.
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