WESTERN UKRAINE:

Yushchenko thanks Ukrainians here (ABDON M. PALLASCH, April 5, 2005, Chicago Sun-Times)

The cheering crowd was dressed in orange Monday night, but it wasn't for the Illini basketball team seeking a national championship.

It was for newly elected Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, who came here to thank local Ukrainians for their support in helping him win office.

"I am happy to have the Chicago community giving most of their votes to me," he told a crowd that packed the grand ballroom of the Palmer House Hilton during a speech sponsored by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations.

"I think the count was 99.6 percent of the votes," he said of the Chicago area Ukrainians who voted for him. "The turnout was like it used to be when we had the communists, although with the communists sometimes the turnout was 102 percent," he joked.

The crowd shouted "Yushchenko, Yushchenko," and in Ukrainian chanted the slogan of the Ukraine's Orange Revolution: "Together we are many and will not be defeated."

"I am particularly happy to have seen the Ukrainian nation having arisen from its knees," Yushchenko told the crowd. "We are off our knees because you were by us."

Earlier Monday Yushchenko met with President Bush in Washington, saying, "Our ideals are simple and eternal. We want democracy and freedom."

MORE:
Democracy's hero in Ukraine (John Shattuck, April 5, 2005, Boston Globe)

FROM HIS prison cell on Robben Island, Nelson Mandela fired the hopes of millions of South Africans that the chains of apartheid could be broken. Three years after his release, Mandela was elected his country's first postapartheid president. For more than a decade Vaclav Havel led a dissident movement that challenged the moral authority of Czechoslovakia's Stalinist regime. Then, in 1989, he emerged as the leader of the Velvet Revolution and a year later became the Czechs' first democratically elected president after more than half a century of fascist and Communist domination.

Modern heroes like Mandela and Havel are in short supply. So it is a cause for celebration when another bursts onto the world stage. Last fall, Viktor Yushchenko galvanized a democratic revolution in Ukraine, a country at the heart of the former Soviet Union. Battling against enormous odds and at great personal risk, Yushchenko confronted a corrupt and oppressive oligarchy rooted deeply in the old Soviet system. Inspired by his courage, millions of Ukrainians flocked to his cause and propelled him to victory in an ''Orange Revolution" that recalled the Czechs' Velvet uprising 15 years earlier.

What made Yushchenko a hero of democracy? A Soviet-trained economist, he began his career as an accountant in provincial obscurity, emerging after the collapse of the Soviet Union as an economic reformer and head of the Ukrainian National Bank. He became prime minister in 1999. When his reform policies began to threaten the power of the oligarchs, he was fired by the president. Out of office, Yushchenko built Ukraine's first popular democratic opposition movement, winning the largest bloc of seats in parliamentary elections in 2002 and, a year later, beginning his drive for the presidency.