For almost a year and a half Rustam Ibrahimov has started every morning by visiting the canteen to pick food and deliver it to solitary elderly persons, helping them with household chores, or just keeping them company. Outwardly everything is simple. The young man works for the Kyiv social service. In reality, it is his way to serve in the army, and it is called alternative service. Rustam chose it because of his religious beliefs (he is an Evangelist) that are incompatible with regular service. There are 2,854 such alternative servicemen in Ukraine.
Alternative service was instituted in 1991, although few are aware of it, all things considered. The point is that selection for such alternative service is done not by the Defense Ministry but by the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy. Liudmyla Shcherbak, secretary of the Committee on Alternative Service, told The Day that they have offices in every oblast, presided over, as a rule, by deputies to the heads of regional state administrations, with labor and social department officials acting as secretaries. The procedure is set forth in the law on alternative (nonmilitary) service, enacted in 1991, and in keeping with the regulations governing enrollment and alternative service.
This practice is nothing new. In France, conscientious objectors are assigned to paramilitary units or work in the civilian sector. More often than not such people are given menial jobs (as orderlies and in psychiatric hospitals). Apart from Ukraine, such alternative “conscription” is practiced by Armenia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan.
The mechanism of alternative service is not complicated in Ukraine. Borys ANDRESIUK, chairman of the parliamentary National Security and Defense Committee, told The Day that conscripts must apply to the alternative service committee at the regional office of the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy. These committees are made up of official representing different structures, including the Family and Youth Policy Committee, the viyskomat Military Registration and Enlistment Office, Employment Agency, and Committee for Religious Affairs. The latter is involved because only people belonging to confessions allowed under the laws of the Ukraine have a right to the alternative option at conscription age. There is a cabinet enactment, the lawmaker pointed out, under which this right is accorded Adventists, Baptists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the Charismatic Christian Church.
Liudmyla Shcherbak said that people referring to religious beliefs preventing them from doing military service must produce a document signed by a minister and sealed by a religious organization (as all such organizations are officially registered and have the requisites).
The committee must, in turn, decide whether a person at conscription age is eligible to be an alternative serviceman. If so, an appropriate document is forwarded to the viyskomat. It is important to have this document when being summoned to the viyskomat. The latter passes judgment on the draftee being fit for service and sends him back to the committee, which gives him an optional assignment. Such clumsy procedures are explained by the fact that the Alternative Service Committee deals only with persons pronounced fit for military duty. “Alternative service is not a kind of employment, it is service, only it’s in a different form,” explained Ms. Shcherbak, adding that this service is anything but easy. First, it lasts not 18 months, as does regular conscription, but up to 27 months (18 months for draftees with a post-secondary education). It is basically socially oriented, helping people that need it more than anyone else. The alternative servicemen (about 2000 to date) are mostly assigned jobs that are not generally considered prestigious, Ms. Shcherbak went on to explain, meaning that the pay is also low. In other words, she believes that alternative service relies on the principle of proving one’s convictions about it being impermissible to touch firearms. “Since it is impossible to have a board of experts verify one’s true beliefs, [the law] provides conditions in which these beliefs can be put to the test.” This kind of service is no easy replacement of the military duty... and there are cases when lonely elderly people are not even visited by neighbors. Working under such conditions is very difficult and some people asked to be assigned other jobs, because they couldn’t stand the psychological stress,” she said. Nor is it easy to be assigned other jobs while on alternative service. Of course, there is social service, the Red Cross, and quite a number of other such institutions provided for by law. Ms. Shcherbak explained that, while other employment opportunities appear, the list of alternative service assignments, adopted by the cabinet three years ago, remains unchanged (except the Red Cross, entered on the list last year — Author), meaning that such people cannot have any of those new jobs.
Another problem, she said, is that some draftees are too indifferent to alternative service, regarding it as a kind of favor done them by the state, allowing them to avoid the hardships of the regular military duty. This is very wrong, because, apart from considerable physical strain, the cabinet enactment provides for measures of control. The committee secretary and members must and actually can monitor alternative service. Now and then they come for inspections and talk to employers to find out how alternative servicemen are performing. Those found to be shirking are dealt with individually; habitual shirkers are sent back to the viyskomat and placed on the regular duty record, in which case their term of alternative service is disregarded.
The catch, according to Ms. Shcherbak, is that the regional committee secretaries are people who work in addition to their regular occupations; they are not paid anything extra for working on the committee. She says that they raised the matter of making the committee secretary’s job a regular paid one, considering that it requires such painstaking effort. As it is, there are no budget subsidies even for office equipment. “If we had proper conditions, all transgressions would be investigated in greater depth,” Ms. Shcherbak summed up.
INCIDENTALLY
Australia was the first country to legally protect people refusing to serve in the army for religious reasons. Its first defense law in 1901 allowed completely exemption from conscription of individuals who refused to bear arms because of their convictions. Conscription was instituted in 1911, except for individuals who could not handle weapons on religious grounds; such persons were to serve on a civilian basis. In 1939, the defense law held that a citizen could refuse to serve in the army on both religious and non-religious grounds.
