Language has been used to create hatred that justifies violence. Langauge and faith are as integrated into a person's identity as their fingerprints. It is very easy to use these simple LABELS to separate a country into factions for the purpose of leveraging power.
The Ukrainian people have to willingly stop making ethnicity, religious and language an opportunity for division and violence. Everyone is safe if they want to be. All the people of the Ukraine can be free of hatred on this Easter Sunday if they set aside nearly genetic identity and simply live their day to day lives.
Freedom to express oneself through language is important to exchange ideas. How will Ukraine resolve to peace if no one understands each other because of the 'hatred of difference.' Hate and fear is the tool used toward a divided Ukraine and evidently language is the identifier. That is simply wrong. Language is not the enemy, the fear and hate it brings is.
April 19, 2014
Nicholas Kristof
Mykola Hometskyi, left, lives
in a house in Karapchiv, Ukraine, that was once owned by Nicholas
Kristof's father. As recently as a decade ago, many homes in the area
lacked electricity and plumbing. That's certainly not the case anymore
as the whole region looks to the West.
Credit
Daniel Rzhenetskyy
...On past visits to this village, (click here) which my family fled in the 1940s, it
seemed impossibly backward. It was near the Romanian border, a world
apart from Kiev, the capital, and even a decade ago many houses lacked
electricity and plumbing. Horses did the plowing. Nobody spoke English.
If people went abroad it was to Russia.
Yet
Ukraine has changed and opened up. Almost everyone now has electricity,
plumbing and television, and many young men and women have traveled to
Italy to find jobs. There is bewilderment that Poland is now so much
richer than Ukraine — and resentment at Moscow for holding Ukrainians
back.
I
asked Margaryta, the girl with the European soul, whether she could
speak Russian. Everyone in the village can speak it, she acknowledged,
but she added primly: “I will not speak Russian. I am a patriot.”...
