Ukrainians mark 75th anniversary of the Holodomor
Millions of Ukrainians to commemorate 75th anniversary of Soviet-instigated famine known as the Holodomor
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Saturday, 22, Nov 2008 08:40
Millions of people in the Ukraine will this weekend commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Holodomor, remembered in the country as a Soviet-made famine which caused the deaths of up to six million people.
The commemorations are generally viewed with distrust by Russia which officially denies the Holodomor as ethnic genocide, and it is likely the commemorations will do little to ease tensions between the two nations.
Earlier this year the Russian state Duma passed a resolution on the subject of the Holodomor saying it should not be considered genocide.
"There is no historical proof that the famine was organised along ethnic lines. Its victims were millions of citizens of the Soviet Union, representing different peoples and nationalities living largely in agricultural areas of the country," the resolution said.
Meanwhile vice-speaker of the Duma, Lyubov Sliska, when asked in Kiev when Russia would apologise for its part in repressions and famines in Ukraine replied: "Why always insist that Russia apologise for everything? The people whose policies brought suffering not only to Ukraine, but to Russia, Belarus, peoples of the Caucasus, and Crimean Tatars, remain only in history textbooks, secret documents and minutes of meetings."
Many Ukrainians believe Russia contests their assertions that the famine was genocide, because other ethnic groups also suffered and as the Soviet Union's legal successor, Russia is concerned about the possibility of legal action or having to pay reparations.
The final report of the International Commission of Inquiry Into the 1932–33 Famine in Ukraine, delivered to the UN under secretary for human rights in Geneva in 1990 stated the famine in Ukraine was genocide.
But at time the commission was unable to confirm the existence of a preconceived plan to organise a famine in the Ukraine, in order to ensure the success of Moscow policies.
According to the Aegis Trust however, a UK-based international genocide prevention organisation, the Holodomor involved Soviet confiscation of grain and other foodstuffs from most of rural Ukraine, combined with border closures which prevented the starving from fleeing to find food and stopped international aid from reaching them.
In 1933, the lawyer Raphael Lemkin urged the League of Nations to recognise such mass atrocities against a particular group as an international crime.
He was ignored until a few years later when the Nazi regime murdered six million Jews, including Lemkin's own family.
In 1943, Lemkin created the new word genocide in order to describe such mass killing. He also proposed the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, approved in 1948.
The first draft of the Convention included political groups as well as those defined by nationality, ethnicity, race or religion, but following objections from the Soviet Union and several other countries, political groups were left out.
Some like the Aegis Trust argue the motivation for Soviet policy to bring about mass starvation in the Ukraine was the destruction of Ukrainian nationalism.
Lemkin himself described the Holodomor as "perhaps the classic example of Soviet genocide, its longest and broadest experiment in Russification - the destruction of the Ukrainian nation."
Regrettably, the debate over whether or not the Holodomor constitutes genocide often becomes overlaid with political considerations and continues to distract governments and policy makers around the world from simply honouring the memory of its victims - and from reflecting on the lessons it holds for a world in which genocide continues.
On October 23rd, 2008, the European Parliament passed its own resolution which called the Holodomor "an appalling crime against the Ukrainian people, and against humanity" that was "cynically and cruelly planned by Stalin's regime in order to force through the Soviet Union's policy of collectivization of agriculture".
But the resolution stopped short of calling the famine an act of genocide.
Meanwhile two years ago the Ukrainian parliament passed a bill, describing the Soviet-era forced famine as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people.
And in 2007 president Viktor Yushchenko proposed a law criminalising the denial of the Holodomor. That law has still not been voted on by the country's parliament.