Sunday, Oct. 02, 2005

Signs Of The Times

By YURI ZARAKHOVICH

In the land of the blind, the old saying has it, the one-eyed man is king. In a country intimidated into silence, a signer for the deaf was among the first to speak out. Not that Natalya Dmitruk, 48, planned it that way in the fall of 2004, when she worked as a signer for the Ukrainian state-run television station UT-1. The runoff for the presidential elections had just taken place, and the tightly controlled TV broadcasters were reporting that outgoing President Leonid Kuchma's favored candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, had beaten challenger Viktor Yushchenko. But evidence was mounting that the vote was rigged, and a crowd of protesters had begun to gather in Kiev's freezing, snowbound Independence Square.

On Nov. 25, Dmitruk was assigned to translate the afternoon news into sign language for a deaf audience of some 100,000. But instead of repeating the official announcement that Yushchenko had lost, she signed instead: "Yushchenko is our President. Do not believe the Central Electoral Commission. They are lying." Says Dmitruk: "I expected there would be hell to pay, but the disgust I felt about all that lying forced out the fear."

Dmitruk's personal rebellion triggered a wider revolt. First, other UT-1 journalists refused to broadcast the official line, and then almost every other channel in the country joined in. Within a day, all of Ukraine knew that Yushchenko was the country's true President. In January, Yushchenko personally called UT-1 to ask that Dmitruk translate the TV coverage of his inauguration.

Dmitruk's courage made her something of an international celebrity. In May, Vital Voices Global Partnership, a group of female American human-rights activists including Senator Hillary Clinton, invited Dmitruk to a function in Washington. As Dmitruk entered the hall, she bumped into former U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright, who hugged her and said in Russian: "Natalya, I'm proud of you. You're a smart one." Dmitruk says that made her feel "warm and deeply moved," though she says she does not "feel like a hero at all."

Dmitruk learned her signing skills from her deaf-mute parents, former industrial workers who are now retired. Though not deaf-mute herself, she sees it as her mission to provide deaf people with a vital link to the world. And despite President Yushchenko's dismissal of his government amid allegations of corruption, she still believes the orange revolution will succeed: Ukraine will overcome corruption; the economy will grow; and next March's parliamentary elections will be free and fair. "Would I do it again? No, never," Dmitruk says, conceding that, though morally justified, what she did was a breach of company policy. "Am I sorry that I did it? Not one little bit, nor will I ever be. It was all worth it."