Dr. Per Anders Rudling’s Email to Colleagues of 3 October 2012 Concerning the Zabily Speaking Tour In North America



 


The following is the text of the email which Dr. Per Anders Rudling circulated to colleagues today on the subject of Ruslan Zabily’s planned North American lecture tour, including engagements at top universities and a meeting with the prime minister of Canada.


 
3 October 2012 16:03:03 CEST Dear Colleagues,
 
I would like to bring to your attention an announced Canada-wide lecture tour by Ruslan Zabily, former director of the OUN(b) facade organization The Center for the Study of the Liberation Movement and currently the director of the National Memorial “Lonsky Street Prison” Museum in Lviv. Zabilyi holds a Masters degree and has, to my knowledge no publications in peer reviewed journals. He has been central to the promotion and glorification of the OUN, the UPA, Stepan Bandera, and Roman Shukhevych. At the same time, he has actively obfuscated the OUN’s role in the Holocaust. His museum, housed in the facilities of an infamous Soviet prison where nearly 1,700 inmates were murdered by the NKVD prior to the evacuation of Lviv in June 1941 passes over in silence the massacre of local Jews carried out by the OUN militia at the same location only days later. The lecture tour has been organized by the OUN(b) League of Ukrainian Canadians, its fwomen’s branch, the League of Ukrainian Canadian Women, and its uniformed youth section, the Ukrainian Youth Association of Canada (SUM/CYM), the Banderite newspaperpaper Homin Ukrainy, the Society of Veterans of UPA, and the Ukrainian Canadian Congress. Zabilyi is invited not only to speak at the University of Alberta, the University of Toronto, and Harvard, but also at the Universities of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Ottawa. The website of the League of Ukrainian Canadians informs us that their lecture tour was made possible through the cooperation of the Canadian Institute of Canadian Studies, the Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine, the Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, the Harvard Institute of Ukrainian Studies, and the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Ottawa. The Zabilyi lecture tour culminates in an LUC/SUM event dedicated to the celebration of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) commemorating a celebration of its fictitious 70th anniversary, and a meeting with Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Paradoxically, the announced lecture tour, titled “Current State of Academic Freedom in Ukraine” is announced on LUCs website, accompanied by an image of Stepan Bandera, a racist, antisemitic politician, who was explicitly opposed to democracy. Thus, an ultranationalist activist is invited by the direct successor of the OUN(b), an organization which incited Ukrainians to antisemitic violence and organized pogroms in 1941, and the veterans of UPA, an organization involved in mass murder of nearly 100,000 people, not only Poles, Jews, and other minorities, but also thousands of Ukrainians. The tour is underwritten by Ukrainian Studies institutes across Canada, and even includes a meeting with the head of the Canadian government. This follows invitations under 2011 to Volodymyr Viatrovych, who has been invited to speak at HURI, CIUS, the Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter and other venues. The expansion to more universities means that the legitimizing activities are being stepped up, with the active or passive support by leading Canadian institutions of higher learning. Thus this is not an isolated incident, but an ongoing and growing concern. Below follows a link to the announcement on the LUC website. http://www.lucorg.com/block.php/block_id/51 Thank you for your attention, Per Rudling
 
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Per Anders Rudling, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Department of History
Lund University
Box 2074
SE – 220 02 Lund
Sweden
 
Tel: +46-46-2227968
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