[lg policy] Russian speakers in Crimea protest media language regulations

[Harold Schiffman]

Russian speakers in Crimea protest media language regulations

16:07 19/03/2007

SIMFEROPOL, March 19 (RIA Novosti) - About 40 members of an ethnic
Russian movement protested outside the Crimean office of the Ukrainian
broadcasting authority over alleged suppression of the Russian
language, a RIA Novosti correspondent reported Monday.

The protesters brought about 10 television sets and some radios and
smashed them. "We don't need radios or televisions if we cannot hear
our mother tongue on them," a protest organizer said. Earlier
Ukraine's National Committee for Television and Radio Broadcasting
ruled that at least 50% of air time should contain programs in
Ukrainian.

The status of the Russian language in the former Soviet country was
one of the hotly debated issues that delayed the signing of a national
unity agreement on key policies by President Viktor Yushchenko and
parliamentary leaders before Viktor Yanukovych's appointment as prime
minister last year.

Last month, an appeal court upheld the status of Russian as a regional
language in eastern Ukraine.
The appeal court overturned the decision of a district court in the
city of Donetsk revoking the language's regional status, thereby
upholding a May 2006 ruling by the Donetsk regional court granting
Russian the status of a regional language.

The sides eventually agreed to keep Ukrainian as the main state
language, without enshrining it as the only official language.
Yanukovych said previously that granting Russian the status of an
official language in the country was impossible under current
conditions, but that Ukraine needed a law to regulate the use of the
Russian language, in line with the European Charter for Regional or
Minority Languages.

Ukraine's Communist leader, Petro Symonenko, earlier said his party
will push the government for a referendum on granting Russian the
status of an official language, and that the party will advocate
budget spending in full on programs to enable the Charter to be
applied in Ukraine.

He said the current language policy being pursued by the authorities
has antagonized certain forces in Russia, who took advantage of the
situation to create an unfavorable political climate and impede the
normalization of Ukrainian-Russian relations.

http://en.rian.ru/world/20070319/62223101.html

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