763.72119/2858
The Swedish Minister ( Ekengren ) to the Secretary of State
Excellency: By request of the Foreign Department of the recently established Austro-German republic the following telegraphic appeal has by the Royal Foreign Office at Stockholm been forwarded to me for transmission to the President of the United States.
May I ask for Your Excellency’s good offices in order that the desire of the applicants be granted.10
“To the President of the United States of North America, Mr. Woodrow Wilson:
“The provisional Government of Halycz the province of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire united to an independent Ukrainian State permits itself, aware of the call issued by you, Mr. President, to the peoples now freed from the oppression of the former Monarchy, to address to you, Mr. President, the following appeal for support.
“On constituting our State at Lemberg on October 19 of this year we drew the boundary line of our State which is only provisional pending your decision, Mr. President, taking pains to avoid any usurpation even of a strip of land whose population is not Ukrainian by an overwhelming majority, in keeping with the 14 righteous principles laid down by you, Mr. President, within that line, the National Council representing the State is endeavoring to maintain order and shrinks in horror from any inhuman act and any improper forcible use of the power it holds. It finds this task all the more arduous as the four and a half million Ukrainians heretofore oppressed in East Galicia especially by the Poles, in Hungary by the Magyars and in Bukowina by the Roumanians are, as may be easily understood, actuated in the great mass of the people by an impulse to shake off as soon as possible and without waiting for peaceable development of the changed conditions, the foreign and national administrative and economic system of oppression residing in the mastery of the Polish and Magyar nobility in former East Galicia and in Hungary. The exasperation of the masses of our Ukrainian population is further fanned by the action of a Polish adjustment Commission which has set itself up at Cracow in the name of the Polish Government at Warsaw and is striving with the manifest tacit consent of the former Austrian Emperor to bring about the annexation of all Galicia, that is to say also the Ukrainian provinces of the San and the Lemkowczyzna.
“With our own Ukrainian forces and not as has been falsely represented to you, Mr. President, by the Warsaw Government, with German [Page 196] or Hungarian military forces, but thanks to the unexampled selfsacrificing spirit of our Ukrainian population we are defending our historic Ukrainian land on which a free democratic entity is to thrive as intended by you, Mr. President, and now troops sent by the Polish Government are trying to subject us again to foreign domination. On the other hand Roumania will, by the power of her regular army, gain possession of the whole of Bukowina, including the North and Northwest parts exclusively inhabited by Ukrainians. In both cases the principles you, Mr. President, magnanimously set up for the heretofore oppressed peoples are ignored. These we can most scrupulously fulfill and we beseech your intervention, Mr. President, so that without resorting to violence your final verdict and that of the Peace Conference concerning the ultimate demarcation of the boundaries of the new States, to which we Ukrainians unreservedly bow, may bring to us the coveted deliverance from foreign rule and give us existence as a free democratic State. Bolshevism and Nihilism have no footing in our Nation. These were but the offspring of a desperate mind and would make their appearance if the Ukrainian Nation were forsaken by the new triumphant democracies led by you, Mr. President, and again delivered up to its former foreign masters.
“For the provisional Government of the Ukrainian State of Halycz,
“Dr. Petruszewicz
“President of the National
Council.”
Accept [etc.]
- The following is a translation of the German text quoted by the Minister.↩