Petro Jacyk International Ukrainian Language Competition

This year’s Petro Jacyk International Ukrainian Language Competition will soon be held. In the eleven years since its creation, it has gained considerable popularity and prestige. It went international in 2007. At present, it involves over five million school, college and university students, and cadets within Ukraine and in more than 20 other countries, among them China, Finland, and Sweden. However, this year’s launch is marred by two veteran organizers, the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine (Minosvity) and the League of Ukrainian Philanthropists (LUP). According to LUP director Mykhailo Slaboshpytsky, this year the ministry cancelled the competition; www.new.ua reads that the reason is that, under President Yanukovych’s edict, the ministry is responsible for the holding of the Taras Shevchenko Language and Literature Competition for school and college/university students. In view of this, decisions on the Jacyk competition will be the prerogative of local authorities, namely the administrations of “general educational establishments.” The Day asked Slaboshpytsky for comment.

Mykhailo Slaboshpytsky:

“We’ve collaborated with the Ministry of Education and Science for 10 years. In this time the ministry has been headed by different people, including the Social-Democrat Vasyl Kremen, the Socialist Stanislav Nikolaienko, Our Ukraine’s Ivan Vakarchuk, but it was only with the appointment of Dmytro Tabachnyk that the ministry adopted this destructive stand. This makes it clear that we’re living in a country where no legal rules are effective. The Petro Jacyk International Ukrainian Language Competition is formally registered with the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine, and the registration documents date back to 2008. These documents read that the Minosvity and the LUP are number-one and number-two organizers, respectively, with the League acting as a donor. This year it transpired that the Shevchenko Language and Literature Competition had been established specially to bury the Jacyk competition. However, the status of the Ukrainian language is so bad that improving it would take a hundred such projects. As it is, our upper-echelon bureaucrats are once again thinking along destructive lines. Rather than helping the Jacyk and Shevchenko competitions, they are setting off one against the other. I wrote a letter to President Viktor Yanukovych. It was signed by a number of literary and cultural figures and read, in part, that our [Jacyk] competition could be a harmonious component of the Shevchenko one, with the former being a language and the latter a language-and-literature contest. When the [Jacyk] competition was launched, our tax laws envisaged levies on the children’s prizes: an 11th grader winning 7,000 hryvnias (the first prize) had to part with 1,400. At the time we wrote to the authorities on all levels that this money came from the Diaspora that had already paid all legally required taxes in the country of residence. Also, how about the agreements signed with Ukraine, concerning measures to prevent double taxation? It was then that Prime Minister Yanukovych, contrary to Minosvity’s State Secretary Zhuravsky, European Integration Minister Khoroshkovsky, and Deputy Prime Minister Tabachnyk, said that if we can’t help them otherwise, let’s pay for these children. He submitted this proposal to the Verkhovna Rada and it passed a resolution in its support.

“In other words, we are launching another Jacyk language competition in the founder’s home town of Verkhnie Syniovydne (Lviv oblast), and simultaneously throughout the diaspora, ranging from Chicago to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatski (Russia). This will be proof that characters like Tabachnyk come and go, but the Ukrainian language is here to stay.”