Irish-American communities, particularly in Boston and New York, are known for being cohesive, having a strong community spirit, and, despite tilting Democratic come election, for being socially conservative.
Back in the aul’ sod, however, they stand accused of being bigots.
Ireland’s Prime Minister Enda Kenny has come under fire for agreeing to participate New York’s annual St. Patrick’s Day parade, because it bans marchers carrying posters promoting LGBT rights.
[. . .]
Larry Donnelly, a law lecturer at the National University of Ireland, says Irish-American communities often are different from the Irish in Ireland, but that times are changing in the US, too.
“If you look at the parades, I wouldn’t take the organizers as a barometer of where Irish America is. There are different shades of opinion, but there is certainly a Catholic conservative streak. Catholicism and Irishness would be closely tied together in their identity,” he says.
Mr. Donnelly, a Boston native who formerly worked as an attorney in Massachusetts, says Irish need to understand where Irish Americans are coming from, which is in part from a much more actively Catholic identity.
“Rates of participation in [Catholic] mass and sacraments are far higher in Irish America than they are in Ireland, even if they don’t toe the [church’s] line on issues like abortion and gay marriage," he says.
“The ethnic identification in Boston particularly was defined by standing up against the WASPs [white Anglo-Saxon Protestants], or against the Italian Americans. It wasn’t only the Irish who were exclusionary. I don’t think its a simply prejudicial issue. You have to understand it historically.”
Our elders don’t cling to convention; they run from it. And for good reason. In 1981, on a taxpayer-funded mission estimated to have cost a quarter of a million dollars, police carrying crowbars and sledgehammers raided bath houses in Toronto’s gay village, forcing nude and nearly naked men onto the streets, where more than 300 LGBT people were arrested. Bik describes the night as “terrible.” Anyone wondering why some gay people at Pride are so “in your face” should look to events like these for an answer. There was a time when we weren’t in anyone’s face, but everyone was in ours. Hence the naked marching: When you can’t express yourself safely in private, there is no act of civil disobedience more powerful, I’d imagine, than doing so in public.
Sotiropoulos has, besides nudity, “no other issue whatsoever with the Pride parade.” But, as he wrote to me in an email, “I don’t think we ought to allow the wilful actions of a few people to hijack and tarnish the image of the event as a whole.” The problem with this line of apparently popular thinking is its sheer shortsightedness. Without the “wilful actions” of those “few people,” the event in question would not exist. In this country, public opinion is on the side of gay rights. In my short life, public opinion has always been on my side. I am insanely lucky. There is no greater proof of how lucky I am than the ease with which I once winced at the unlucky: buck-naked old men who wear nothing with as much defiant pride as our veterans wear the poppy on Remembrance Day—buck-naked men, to whom I owe almost everything. This year, I won’t wince. I’ll salute.
Links between business, politics and crime in the former USSR began to surface in the second half of the 1980s, at the same time as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev liberalised the economy. Crime exploded in three regions of Ukraine – Crimea, Donetsk and Odesa – where there were huge profits to be made from trade, tourism, property and the export of raw materials. During this legal vacuum, and at a time of the disintegration of one state (USSR) and a yet-to-be-built Ukraine, individuals such as Yanukovych, Aksyonov and their Donetsk and Crimean allies literally fought their way to the top. Those who survived the bloodshed, by the late 1990s were already attempting to transform themselves into biznesmeni.
Serhiy Taruta was appointed Donetsk governor by Kyiv’s then revolutionary leaders because although co-director of the Industrial Union of Donbas, he had never joined the Party of Regions, and supported the pro-Western opposition. In 2010, Yulia Tymosenko’s election headquarters were located in Kyiv’s Hyatt Hotel that he owns.
A cable from the US Embassy in Kyiv reported that Taruta had dismissed the whole Donetsk-Regions group, saying 'they are all looters’, which, as clearly seen in the massive asset and budget stripping that occurred under Yanukovych. Former National Security and Defence Council Secretary Volodymyr Horbulin told US Ambassador to Ukraine John Herbst that the Party of Regions was 'notable for its inclusion of criminal and anti-democracy figures.' Another cable described the Party of Regions as, 'long a haven for DONETSK-based mobsters and oligarchs,' led by 'DONETSK CLAN godfather Rinat Akhmetov.' Akhmetov, who has close business ties to Yanukovych going back to the 1990s, backed him to the ignominious end, and has issued timid statements during the Maidan protests and Crimean invasion.
The Party of Regions elected organised crime leaders to the Ukrainian and Crimean parliaments and local government. In the March 2006 elections to the Crimean parliament and local councils, hundreds of candidates who had 'problems with the law,' according to then Interior Minister Lutsenko, ran in the election blocs ‘For Union!’ and ‘For Yanukovych!’
Many of these candidates were, like Aksyonov, members of the Seilem organised crime gang, such as its leader Aleksandr Melnyk who was elected in the ‘For Yanukovych!’ bloc. Yanukovych reportedly told a Party of Regions deputy who criticized this alliance with organised crime that, 'I take responsibility for him (Melnyk);' and Prime Minister Yanukovych asked Police Chief Lutsenko to not touch 'my Sasha' (Melnyk).
The corrupt Prosecutor-General’s office assisted in protecting these ties between politics, business and crime. Former Deputy Prosecutor-General Renat Kuzmin ensured Melnyk evaded justice, after the Party of Regions lobbied the prosecutor’s office not to press charges. Lutsenko said, 'Having all the evidence connecting the (Seilem) gang to murders' Kuzmin 'releases the man who Yanukovych shelters, the head of an organised crime gang.' Lutsenko told the US Embassy in Kyiv that the Seilem organised crime gang had been responsible in the 1990s for 52 contract murders, including one journalist, two police officers, 30 businessmen and 15 organised crime competitors.
Mustafa Djemilev, former leader of the Crimean Tatar Majlis and veteran activist for the community, has just declared to Ekho Moskvy that he is satisfied with Russian President Vladimir Putin's reassurances to him on the safety of the Crimean Tatar community. Djemilev, who initially refused to meet the Russian president, still insists on the removal of Russian forces (should they officially exist or not) from the peninsula.
Putin stated that Russia's final decision on the crisis in Crimea will be presented after the referendum on its legal status. The role of mediator in these negotiations was played by Mintimer Shaimiev, former President of Tatarstan.
[. . .]
The Crimean Tatars' anti-Russian (hence in this context, pro-European) stance was forged by their 1944 deportation to Central Asia and problematic resettlement in their ancestral homeland. They are suspicious of Russian intentions and politically mobilised under the leadership of the Crimean Tatar Majlis. The official justification for Russia's actions in Ukraine was supposedly their concern for minority groups - specifically, though not limited to, Crimean Russians. Given their mistrust and fears of repeated persecution, the Kremlin is approaching the Crimean Tatar community cautiously, with a little help from its friends, such as Shaimiev.
The related but ethnically distinct Volga Tatars, numbering some six million across the Russian Federation, are one of the country's largest ethnic minorities. They are chiefly concentrated in the gas-rich and economically successful Republic of Tatarstan. It is one of the top four regions of Russia by contributions to the federal budget.
Both Volga and Crimean Tatars traditionally trace their ancestry back to the Turkic peoples of the Golden Horde. Tatar patriots perceive them as brotherly nations, though there are significant differences: the Volga Tatar and Crimean Tatar languages are quite different.
Throughout the 1990s Tatarstan's regional leadership asserted the Republic's "sovereignty" to varying degrees (and much to Moscow's irritation) until the erosion of provincial autonomy under Vladimir Putin. Parading its supposed regional sovereignty in the 1990s, Tatarstan was one of the most flamboyant about it and went as far as opening a small number of its own delegations abroad. Yet for over twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Tatarstan maintained no official ties with Crimea. This was probably because of pressure from Moscow not to do so, as journalist Rim Gilfanov has explained.
It can be no coincidence that Crimean officials have welcomed a number of high-profile guests from Tatarstan as of late. On March 5, Tatarstan President Rustam Minnikhanov signed an agreement on co-operation between Tatarstan and the new Crimean authorities, the actual contents of which were to be established over the coming month. The agreement implies significant collaboration between ten government institutions as well as significant financial aid to Crimea from Tatarstan businesses.
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