Support for Romanians in Ukraine

The Romanian Government reacts by taking concrete measures as to the provisions of the new education law in Ukraine

România Internațional, 26.01.2018, 13:40

On Thursday the Romanian Government adopted concrete measures to
support the ethnic Romanian students and their teachers in the neighboring
Ukraine. Therefore, the best one thousand students will receive from the
Romanian state monthly scholarships amounting to 200 lei, that is around 50
Euros. Also 300 teachers from the Romanian schools in Ukraine will be able to
attend teacher training and development courses in the universities of Cluj
(northwest), Suceava (northeast), Iasi (east) and Galati (center east).

Those
who can enroll in these courses are the teachers who hold diplomas allowing
them to be teachers on the territory of Ukraine and who can provide documents
proving that they have declared their Romanian identity. The candidates will be
selected by the higher education institutions that organize the training
courses, with the support of the associations, organizations and foundations of
ethnic Romanians in Ukraine.

These measures, initiated upon the proposal of the
Ministry for Romanians Abroad, are meant to ensure the observance of the right
to linguistic identity for the ethnic Romanians in Ukraine, through means that
should provide tuition in their mother tongue, writes a communiqué of the
aforementioned ministry. Bucharest is thus trying to mitigate the effects of
the new Ukrainian education law, which was passed last autumn and which largely
restricts the ethnic minorities’ right to education in their mother tongue.

According
to that law, children belonging to the ethnic minorities in Ukraine will be
able to study in their language only in kindergarten and primary school.
Starting with secondary school, they will have to study exclusively in
Ukrainian. This month, the Romanian Foreign Minister Teodor Melescanu proposed
to his Ukrainian counterpart Pavlo Klimkin that Romania and Ukraine draft a
common document on the implementation of the Ukrainian education law.
Previously, Minister Melescanu and his counterparts from Hungary, Bulgaria and
Greece had signed a joint letter in which they expressed concern with and
profound regret over the passing of the new education law in Ukraine.

The
Romanian education minister Liviu Pop traveled to Kiev to make a plea against
this law. In a declaration voted unanimously in Romania’s Parliament, Bucharest
officials called for the re-examination of the law and warned that they were
following ‘very closely and with concern’ the developments generated by the
provisions of this law. In turn, the Romanian President Klaus Iohannis decided
to postpone his visit to Kiev. Analysts consider Bucharest’s concerns
absolutely legitimate, given that almost half a million ethnic Romanians live
in Ukraine, most of them in the eastern Romanian territories annexed in 1940,
following an ultimatum, by the former Soviet Union. The territories were taken
over by Ukraine as a successor state in 1991.