Attacks on dark-skinned visitors and Aryan-only (White) pools reveal post-Maidan Ukraine still has some maturing to do says the media....
In the beginning of the year, the Washington Post ran an opinion piece from AlterNet editor Terrell Jermaine Starr with an eye-catching headline: “A Cop in Ukraine said he was detaining me because I was black. I appreciated it.” According to the Mr. Starr, who visited Ukraine in 2009, back then people with different skin color had routinely faced housing discrimination, police treated them as suspects in drug-smuggling crimes, and occasionally the reporter “encountered young men dressed in black shirts and Doc Martens who would throw up the Nazi salute at my direction.”
In other words, “racism in Ukraine was much more blunt [than in the US] – always in my face, unabashed and in plain view.” So, how much things have changed in Ukraine with regard to racism since the Maidan revolution supposedly brought to power the first truly pro-West, pro-European, pro-democracy and pro-human rights government?
Zhan Beleniuk, 24, is a contemporary of Ukrainian independence – he was born in 1991, the year of the collapse of the Soviet Union. He shared everything with his beloved Ukraine – including hunger of the 1990s and wild reforms that did not bring much in terms of positive economic change into his family’s life – he still lives with his mother in their small one-room Kiev apartment and has to count every hrivnia. And of course, like the rest of his generation, he shared the exhilarating hope for his country to change and become a European state in every sense of the word.
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