EDITORIAL: The Famine and Russia's denials (09/21/03)

EDITORIAL

The Famine and Russia's denials

The Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, defines genocide as: "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, such as: a) killing members of the group; b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

The definition above lays the groundwork for the topic of this week's editorial: the Russian Embassy's attempt to derail the U.S. Senate resolution commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine. A front page story in this issue, which is based on a Radio Liberty report, indicates that representatives of Russia have contacted officials at the U.S. Department of State and in Congress in an effort to block passage of the resolution, introduced in late July by Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-Colo.), co-chairman of the U.S. Helsinki Commission. The reason: the resolution characterizes the Famine that was perpetrated on the orders of Joseph Stalin as "an act of genocide as defined by the United Nations Genocide Convention."

The press secretary of the Russian Embassy, Yevhen Khoryshko, told Radio Liberty: "We categorically disagree with this assessment of the famine in Ukraine of the 1930s. ... The policies of collectivization and the famine in Ukraine of the 1930s in no way fall under the juridical concept of genocide." Furthermore, he chided U.S. lawmakers for facilely "giving political assessments that have far-reaching consequences" and stated that this readiness to issue such an evaluation of the Famine "testifies to the lack of understanding on the part of American lawmakers of the juridical essence of the term 'genocide.' "

The Russian Embassy spokesperson's comments come in the wake of a statement made back in August by Russia's ambassador to Ukraine, Viktor Chernomyrdin, who said that Russia has no intention of apologizing for the Stalin-era famine: "We're not going to apologize ... there is nobody to apologize to." The envoy went so far as to suggest that perhaps it is the Georgians who owe Ukrainian an apology since, after all, Stalin was Georgian - this despite the fact that Russia, by its own choice, is considered by the international community to be the successor state to the USSR, and, therefore, any apology in the name of the USSR is Russia's to make.

Clearly then, the genocide deniers are hard at work.

All of the above makes it even more imperative that we Ukrainian Americans - and all those we can rally to our cause - must work to secure passage of Senate Resolution 202. During this 70th anniversary of the Famine-Genocide we can accept nothing less than full acknowledgment that the "Holodomor" (as it is known in Ukrainian) that killed 7 million to 10 million of our brethren in Ukraine was unmitigated genocide. So, get on the phone, write those letters and send those e-mails to your senators to urge them to sign on as co-sponsors of this landmark resolution that unequivocally states the truth.

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