UKRAINE: HOLODOMOR, Stalin’s artificial famine in Ukraine was a genocide
HOLODOMOR, Stalin’s artificial famine in Ukraine was a genocide (2)
28 countries, the Baltic Assembly, the European Parliament and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe recognized Holodomor as a genocide. Putin’s Russia denies.
By Dr Ievgeniia Gidulianova for Human Rights Without Frontiers
HRWF (27.11.2023) – On 25 November, Ukraine celebrated the 90th anniversary of the Holodomor to commemorate those dark times in the early 1930s and our mourning for all the innocent victims of those times.
It was only at the beginning of the perestroika in 1985 that the authorities loosened the reins of censorship and the topic of the Holodomor of 1932-33 began to appear at the highest party level.
The Ukrainian diaspora in Canada and the United States organized an information campaign aimed at recognizing the Holodomor of 1932-33 as an act of genocide. In December 1985, the U.S. Congress created a commission to investigate this crime. The commission included six congressmen and six representatives of Ukrainian NGOs. The head of the commission was James Mace, an American researcher on the history of Ukraine.
During the four years of the commission’s work, documents and testimonies of about 200 witnesses were collected. In 1988, the commission published a report concluding that the Holodomor of 1932-33 in the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic was an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people.
Since mid-1988, the topic of the Holodomor in its scale and resonance has been on a par with Stalin’s repressions and the Chornobyl disaster. For example, translations of chapters of the book “Harvest of Sorrow” were published and the weekly “Ukraine” accepted a column titled “Along the Paths of Pain and Torment” echoing testimonies about the tragedy.
In the same 1988 year, the newspaper “Silski Visti” made the first attempt in Ukraine to collect eyewitnesses’ memories of the Holodomor. In response to the call, the organizers received six thousand letters, one thousand of which were included in the collection “33: Famine. People’s Book-Memorial”.
After the proclamation of its independence, Ukraine was given the opportunity to conduct a thorough investigation of the Holodomor.
According to the Law of Ukraine, the Holodomor of 1932-1933 was officially recognized as a crime of genocide of the Ukrainian people.
On 22 November 2023, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine issued a Statement in connection with the 90th anniversary of the Holodomor of 1932-33.
This statement draws the attention of parliaments and governments of the world, international organizations, and the international community to the crime of genocide of the Ukrainian people.
The Verkhovna Rada expressed deep gratitude to foreign states and international organizations that recognized the Holodomor in Ukraine as an act of genocide (a total of 28 states, as well as the Baltic Assembly, the European Parliament, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe).
The statement states that Ukraine recognizes the large-scale Russian armed aggression against Ukraine as a continuation of Russia’s genocidal imperial policy, the purpose of which is to punish Ukrainians for their desire to build a modern successful democratic state and to be part of the European Union.
Russia, the legal successor of the former USSR, does not even recognize the fact of the Holodomor, as well as it does not recognize the war crimes in Bucha and other territories of Ukraine.
Once again, unpunished genocidal evil is returning to Ukraine.
Photo: Memorial “Candle of Memory” to the National Museum “Memorial to the Victims of the Holodomor in Ukraine”. Photo http://vkieve.net