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Germany Begins Labor Camp Compensation Payouts in the Ukraine
KIEV, Aug 6 (News Agencies) - Germany began making compensation payments to tens of thousands of Ukrainians who survived Nazi slave labor camps Monday, some 56 years after the end of World War II.
Prime Minister Anatoly Kinakh presided over a ceremony at which Michael Jansen, president of the German "Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future" compensation fund, symbolically handed cash payments to 14 survivors of Nazi Germany's forced labor regime.
"We Germans acknowledge our responsibility. We obviously cannot pay back the years that were taken away. Please accept this compensation as a gesture of good will," Jansen said.
"The victims have waited a long time. But even though this compensation is being paid, the matter is not over. We do not intend to draw a moral and political line under it. You cannot forget history," he stressed.
Kinakh noted that the event was "very important financially, but also a symbolic moment which confirms that the principles of human rights are gradually taking precedence in Europe."
But, not all the recipients were happy. "This money is too little and comes far too late," Yosip Krakovstky, a 67-year-old former deportee, told AFP. "A lot of the victims have been dead for a long time."
Grygory Sagaidak, 76, a survivor of the Mauthausen forced labor camp in Austria, said he would be using his 15,000 marks (6,750 dollars, 7,650 euros) compensation payment for writing and publishing his memoirs at his own expense.
Around 477,000 Ukrainians are due to receive compensation ranging between 1,500 and 15,000 marks, depending on individual circumstances.
A fund totaling 1.7 million marks has been set up to compensate the Ukrainian victims.
The money is to be distributed by a special Ukrainian fund under the supervision of the country's national bank.
Germany has set up a 5.1-billion-euro (4.5-billion-dollar) fund to compensate the forced laborers from the various countries that fell under Nazi rule; half of the money was pledged by the Berlin government and the other half by German industry.
The compensation fund organizers deal with seven partner organizations around the world, which submit compensation claims and then hand out the money to victims.
Four of these organizations have already received the first payments - for victims from Poland, the Czech Republic, Russia and the U.S.-based Jewish Claims Conference (JCC).
The first compensation payments were made in Germany on June 23 after a U.S. judge dropped a number of outstanding lawsuits that had been holding up the process.
Estimates of the number of survivors considered eligible to claim damages for having been forced to work as slaves during the Third Reich varies widely. The final figure, following the extension last month of a deadline for making claims, could be as high as 1.8 million people.
The German parliament agreed to push back the deadline from August 11 to December 31, 2001.
Most of the victims are from Eastern Europe - Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland and the Czech Republic.
In related news, the U.N. World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance - scheduled to meet in Durban, South Africa from August 31st to September 7th - will visit the possibility of forcing the U.S. to make similar compensation payments to African American victims of U.S. slavery. The U.S. has voiced its disapproval of the conference, which will also visit the issue of racism within the Zionist ideology, and intends to boycott it.
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