For a blunder, it’s quite one. Anthony Rota didn’t just invite a former member of a Nazi division to the House of Commons. He made him applaud wildly by the entire Canadian Parliament, the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, and even Volodymyr Zelensky.
The event ridiculed Canada around the world and symbolically humiliated the Ukrainian president.
The man has been defending his country for a year and a half against an invader 100 times more powerful. The excuse for invading Ukraine is to liberate the Russian minority from oppression and “denazify” the country.
And now Russian propaganda is being provided with images of Zelensky, himself a Jew, standing applauding this Yaroslav Hunka.
The Kremlin immediately seized this superb opportunity and declared the scene “scandalous”. Pro-Russian social media relayed everything without delay.
The error, even if made in good faith, caused irreparable damage to the reputation of Parliament and the country. The moment was too solemn, the subject too serious for the file to be closed with an apology. Mr. Rota has in fact apologized to the country’s Jewish communities. But he owes an apology to the whole country, and to Ukraine.
Volodymyr Zelensky risks his life every time he leaves the country to seek military and financial support. And this is what will be remembered from his historic visit.
It’s not like the mistake is inevitable. Indeed, you have to know nothing about history not to understand what “fighting against Russia” meant in Ukraine during the Second World War. By definition, in this area of Eastern Europe, this meant fighting on the side of Nazi Germany.
This does not mean that Yaroslav Hunka is a war criminal. The Nuremberg Tribunal determined that this division was not guilty of such crimes overall. A commission of inquiry chaired by Judge Jules Deschênes into the presence of former Nazis in Canada focused in particular on the case of the Galician division, because Canada welcomed between 400 and 600 of its fighters after the War. She concluded in 1986 that “their behavior [celui des anciens Waffen SS] since they came to this country [le Canada] was good and they never indicated in any way that they had been infected by Nazi ideology […] It seems that they had volunteered to fight against the Red Army for nationalist reasons which were given a strong impetus by the behavior of the Soviet authorities during the occupation. [en 1939] of the western part of Ukraine after the signing of the German-Soviet pact.
Sources subsequently discovered, however, blamed them for massacres in Poland and other countries, particularly against Jews. They would have gone much further than the nationalist struggle in favor of the Nazis.
The division was called “Galician”, after Galicia, an ancient state straddling present-day Poland and western Ukraine. It was incorporated into Poland after the First World War. When the Germans and Soviets divided Poland in 1939, the eastern portion of Galicia (where Lviv is located) was absorbed by the USSR. A Ukrainian nationalist movement seized the opportunity to recreate Ukraine’s independence. For their part, the Germans used them against Stalin’s army.
We must not forget that after being an ally, the USSR became a rival of Canada. A Canadian Jewish historian wrote that the anti-communist tattoos of the members of this division assured them unproblematic entry into Canada. Anti-communism came, so to speak, to obliterate the fact that they had acted under Nazi command. The Deschênes commission, however, determined that the past of these Ukrainian fighters had been verified.
I will certainly not resolve here the intense debates on the extent of the abuses committed by this division of volunteer soldiers. One thing is clear: they were part of the SS.
I highlight all this only to show to what extent this story is not obscure, and has been studied, debated, re-debated many times in Europe and even here in Canada.
The Speaker of the House of Commons and his staff must therefore have been profoundly historically ignorant and seriously negligent in their verifications for this individual to be invited and given a triumph, whatever his personal responsibilities.
The symbolic charge is intolerable.
We learn that this “Ukrainian who fought Russia” is, as luck would have it, a citizen of Mr. Rota’s constituency, to whom he wanted to pay a favor – while using him politically.
There are limits to opportunistic political naivety. Mr. Rota has crossed it and should, as the NDP and the Bloc Québécois say, resign altogether.