Humor against discrimination

The organizers received more than 280 works from nearly 40 authors. The theme of the 7th Ukraine-wide human rights themed cartoon contest sounded as follows: “Discrimination and Tolerance in Ukraine.” The contest was held by the civic organization Association of Cartoonists in cooperation with the Coalition for Combating Discrimination in Ukraine, assisted by the International Foundation Vidrodzhennia. A jury of journalists and human rights advocates picked out the best works. One of the jurors was Hanna Sheremet, Den/The Day’s deputy editor-in-chief. It is quite logical, for Den/The Day is one of the few Ukrainian periodicals with its own school of caricature. Anatolii Kazansky was a star of that school.

The authors of the works submitted to the contests are people from all walks of life, professional artists and amateurs, adults and teenagers. Natalia Mykytenko (15) from Kryvy Rih created a series of simple, but interesting cartoons. One of them shows the generation gap and different mentalities: an old lady holding a Soviet flag tries to persuade her patriotic Ukrainian granddaughter to take part in an orchestrated paid rally. And Oleksandr Pavlov (12) from Kyiv mocks the devaluation of the hryvnia in his cartoon.

Both amateurs and professionals were awarded prizes. The first prize went to Oleksandr Kovtun, a former career military man from Donetsk oblast. His work reflects the discrimination of voters from the east of Ukraine. The second award was given to Vadym Symynoha (Kherson), who had something to say about the burden of beauty standards. The third winner is a professional cartoonist Serhii Dudchenko from Odesa with an ironic drawing bemoaning the hardships of working among sheep, literally and figuratively.

“This competition had a variety of themes, including human rights as such, freedom of speech, and the faulty judicial system. Now we dwelt on the theme of tolerance, topical for today’s Ukraine,” says Kostiantyn KAZANCHEV, chairman of the Association of Cartoonists. “The problem of intolerance is aggravated by the political situation in our country. People become more irascible, and often it is caused by bad economy. But a society without tolerance is virtually doomed.”

The participants of the contest raised a broad range of issues: problems of the disabled and war veterans, gender and language discrimination, etc. However, the jury excluded several works, which did not fit in the announced theme or even derided tolerance. Iryna Fedorovych, a juror and co-coordinator of the project “Without Borders,” initiated by the Center for Social Action, shared her impressions with The Day: “I am not an artist, so I evaluated the works’ relevance to the declared theme. As jurors, we looked at how the winning cartoons covered various issues. We cannot divide problems into less and more acute. The problem is that discrimination does exist in Ukraine, and government is not prepared to work on it. We have legislation which prohibits discrimination on the basis of a huge range of principles, but in practice little has been done.”

“FOR ATO ZONE VOTERS.” THIS WORK BY OLEKSANDR KOVTUN, A CARTOON AMATEUR, A FORMER ARMY SERVICEMAN FROM THE VILLAGE OF KRASNA HORA, DONETSK OBLAST, WON FIRST PLACE AT THE COMPETITION

Kazanchev notes that this year a lot of works were dedicated to the army and the current political situation. A juror, Colonel Valentyn Buriachenko, editor-in-chief of the magazine Viisko Ukrainy (“Army of Ukraine”), agrees: “I was pleased to see that discrimination of the disabled was one of the leitmotifs of the cartoons in the contest. Now that the wounded troops return home from the ATO, this is a burning problem,” said Buriachenko in his comment. “A lot of works reflected gender inequality: for instance, women may not serve in the Ukrainian Army just like men can, unlike in many other armies across the world. We have enough subjects to mock, because there are so many problems. The vast majority of the artists have coped with the task.”

The best 50 cartoons will soon appear in a catalog. Also, they are supposed to be shown during the International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival Docudays UA, which will be held in Kyiv in late March. The best works will be certainly exhibited in various regions of Ukraine, in particular, in Chernihiv, Khmelnytsky, and Berdychiv. As to Kazanchev, he dreams of a museum of the Ukrainian cartoon. Our authors are among the world’s best cartoonists, they take part in competitions across the globe, and the number of their awards exceeds one thousand. But the chairman of the Association of Cartoonists is frustrated after all the fruitless attempts to create the museum: no one will provide the premises. Unfortunately, humor and satire alone are not enough to combat this problem.