Ukraine’s Dostoyevsky test

Does Dostoyevsky's maxim that you can judge a country by how it treats its prisoners hold true for internally displaced people? If the answer is yes, the new Ukrainian government has some catching up to do.

There’s a lot of coverage of the conflict in Ukraine’s eastern oblasts but the media pays relatively little attention to the experiences of the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the fighting and even less to the government’s efforts to help them.

Frequent violations of the ceasefire continue to drive people from a conflict that has already claimed some 4,000 lives. In Ukraine, the number of IDPs stands at 417,000 but an accurate figure could be twice as high because a central registration system was only set up in mid-October and no single agency has a comprehensive overview of numbers. Russia, meanwhile, says it has taken in an additional half a million refugees. The vast majority of the displaced in both Ukraine and Russia are from the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.

The scale of the tragedy is modest by historical standards in a part of the world that Timothy Snyder, in his epic history of the region caught between Hitler and Stalin, describes as the blood lands. After suffering on such a scale, it is hard for today’s displaced people to rise above what media analysts call the ‘awareness threshold’.

The lack of government strategy adds to a sense of abandonment as IDPs grapple with challenges ranging from housing, heating, child care and pensions, to longer-term issues like compensation for what they’ve left behind and, for the young, enrolment in universities as regular students. The visitor status they’ve been accorded precludes them from graduating.

Frustrations are compounded for some IDPs who feel their hosts in other parts of Ukraine blame them for failing to stand up to pro-Russians who are fighting for greater autonomy or outright secession of Ukraine’s old industrial heartland.

When you see families with young children living in overcrowded dormitories in what was once a warehouse on the eastern side of the Dnieper River, it is hard to imagine what role they might have played in slowing the country’s disintegration.

What struck me most in a focus group of IDPs in Kyiv was their desire to have their views taken into account by the authorities as they try to piece their lives back together. This mirrors the aspirations that drove a million people into the streets of Kyiv last winter and ended up with the ouster of Viktor Yanukovych and his government.

With a new president and freshly elected government now in office, the focus is on regularising the status of the IDPs and providing the most vulnerable with warm clothes, blankets and weatherproof tarps for their houses. In a place where savings and jobs are equally scarce, providing cash to people whose pensions and welfare payments are frozen is another challenge.

Reconciliation, too, is important. Major efforts are needed to overcome tensions between communities who are now forced to live together and share underfunded schools, overcrowded health facilities and, of course, to compete for employment in a country that according to the World Bank is now shrinking at 8% annually.

An initiative that may pay both a practical and a psychic dividend is the government’s plan, using Ground Truth’s methodology, to listen systematically to displaced people across the country, to find out whether they feel accepted where they now live, if they have access to information they need, if they are willing to play their part in improving their lot, and if reforms are making things better.

This kind of frontline intelligence from IDPs is very different from once-in-a-while listening – or heeding the loudest voices. It offers a month by month take on the perceptions of a representative cross-section of the displaced population whose feedback is rigorously analysed and made sense of. If it is used conscientiously, it will enable the new government to treat the IDPs better. Ultimately, it is their judgement that counts.