President Leonid Kuchma's sixtieth birthday has been celebrated. "Celebration" is how Geidar Aliyev called it in his oriental way, proceeding from the assumption that the jubilee of the nation's father cannot fail to be a nationwide holiday.
We still are not hanging portraits the height of nine-story buildings like in Tajikistan, which is still not exactly overjoyed with its President, but the scale of the preparations for the action bears witness to the organizers' desire to demonstrate how much our President is loved and appreciated at home and abroad.
"I see that I have very many friends" is how our President commented on the multitude of greetings sent him on his birthday.
According to Interfax Ukraine, Azerbaijani President Gaidar Aliyev, Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze, Latvian President Guntis Ulmanis, CIS Executive Secretary Boris Berezovsky, Russian Deputy Premier Ivan Rybkin (who passed along greetings from Boris Yeltsin), and former Russian Premier Viktor Chernomyrdin all sent birthday greetings.
Initial agreement on how to meet the jubilee was made sometime before President Kuchma opened the new capital of Kazakhstan, sang something, and danced well, perhaps improving his pre-election image, almost like Yeltsin, only better.
The importance of this meeting with his fellow presidents was confirmed by the fact that they were given access to the presidential person precisely on August 9, the date of the jubilee. Ukrainians had to wait to greet their leader until the tenth or eleventh. There were three days of celebrating in all. Well, so what? Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan can spend three days celebrating the birthdays of presidential offspring; are we any worse? In Ukraine there is crisis, collapse, miners, teachers, and pensioners - well, so? In answer to all those stupidities about fiddling while Rome burns one can make the counter-argument that for the good of the state we have to strengthen our relations with our neighbors, and why not use outstanding dates to do so?
As a whole, the presidential jubilee was a chance for the country not to slip up. It is good that it fell in summer when the miner's were not banging their helmets, and it is also good that the budget sequestration was done around Parliament under the President's signature. May the celebration continue. As long as he is President.
Photo by Efrem Lukatsky:
“Twinkle, twinkle little star"







