The Day proposed those favoring and opposing Western aid to voice their views on its pages and will carry them starting with this issue. Hopefully, readers will join in the discussion. Please contact us by phone (414-91-26), fax (414-43-31) or e-mail ([email protected]).
Yevhen BYSTRYTSKY, managing director, International Renaissance Foundation:
Yes, we need this help, the sooner the better. But it must not become another con game. Any kind of aid must be clearly defined as a means of saving somebody or something. People know no other real aid. The West has every opportunity to help us by way of aiding our education (which requires a lot of spending, of course), so we can save ourselves by learning some quite simple things: supremacy of the law, transparency of political power, administrative reform to get over stagnant bureaucratic management, making those in high office aware of their responsibility — something they loath. The West can help us also in a more practical manner, by bringing to bear the pressure of European laws and social standards compared to the glaring shortcomings of the Ukrainian administration and social order, provided we ourselves strive to move west, along the road of a market economy, scholarly, technological, and cultural exchanges. In this case the West could be even more helpful, forcing us to show our hidden talent through strict world market requirements, something we can only guess we have every time we soliloquize about our great cultural heritage. Renaissance Foundation operating on George Soros’s charity. I am certain that it use. What kind of paternalism is this? Every grant we receive must become a very strong impetus to a socially significant initiative, to our mutual development.
Post-Soviet dependence above all means our dependence on our own fears, our unsettled state, all those problems haunting us daily, and incompetent administrators. As for those believing that Western aid is meant to feather the nests of those incompetents, such people are beyond remedy. Remember Lazarenko and his arrest? One should not worship Western idols, just as one should not regard Western aid as a great temptation, a worldwide conspiracy aimed at damaging our unique culture.
Dmytro HOLOVKO, student, Kyiv:
I don’t think one can give a yes or no answer to such a question. The fact remains that all the previous foreign loans have been used in Ukraine as though under the motto Apr О s nous le default! If such credits were used for budget reform, sible to finance the domestic and foreign debts, monitoring their dynamism and ly imbedded in potential defaults. I am not saying there were no people in Ukraine who realized the fragility of benefits derived from such loans in that way. Now and then they proposed bills which they thought could get Ukraine out of its economic crisis, but who would have passed such bills or carried them out?
