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Holodomor news round-up – Nov 24 2009

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Highlighting some recent news for Holodomor Awareness Week

National Holodomor Memorial Day – November 28, 2009

TORONTO, Nov. 24 /CNW/ – Saturday, November 28 marks Holodomor Memorial Day in Canada. Canadians will honour the memory of the victims of this famine-genocide with a moment of silence at 9:00 a.m. and light candles of remembrance in their homes. Memorial services will be celebrated in churches across the country on Sunday, November 29.

On Friday, November 27, Holodomor Memorial Day will be marked in schools of the Toronto District, Hamilton-Wentworth District and Hamilton-Wentworth Catholic District School Boards.

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Supporters gather to remember genocide in Ukraine

Every November, Leoniv Korownyk revisits one of the darkest periods in Ukrainian history.

Korownyk, officials and supporters gathered at the legislature yesterday for a service that recognized Bill 37 and commemorated those who died as a result of the man-made famine and genocide of 1932-1933 in the Ukraine.

Bill 37, passed on Nov. 4, 2008, declared every fourth Saturday in November as Ukrainian Famine and Genocide (Holodomor) Memorial Day in Alberta.  The service was hosted by Ken Kowalski, speaker of the legislative assembly of Alberta, and featured Premier Ed Stelmach along with other officials and survivors of the genocide.

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Lemkin: Holodomor ‘classic’ genocide

Because of the horrors committed by Nazi Germany in World War II what is often forgotten, however, is that Lemkin’s thinking about an international law to punish perpetrators of what he originally labeled the “Crime of Barbarity” came not in response to the Holocaust but rather following the 1915 massacres of Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians within the Ottoman Turkish empire.

Likewise overlooked were Lemkin’s views on Communist crimes against humanity. In a 1953 lecture in New York City, for example, he described the “destruction of the Ukrainian nation” as the “classic example of Soviet genocide,” adding insightfully:“the Ukrainian is not and never has been a Russian. His culture, his temperament, his language, his religion, are all different…to eliminate (Ukrainian) nationalism…the Ukrainian peasantry was sacrificed…a famine was necessary for the Soviet and so they got one to order…if the Soviet program succeeds completely, if the intelligentsia, the priest, and the peasant can be eliminated [then] Ukraine will be as dead as if every Ukrainian were killed, for it will have lost that part of it which has kept and developed its culture, its beliefs, its common ideas, which have guided it and given it a soul, which, in short, made it a nation…This is not simply a case of mass murder. It is a case of genocide, of the destruction, not of individuals only, but of a culture and a nation.”

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The Man who expaosed Stalin and the nazis

Welsh investigative reporter Gareth Jones believed in the truth. In the early 1930s, he travelled through Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union recording the grim realities of nascent dictatorships. As a new exhibition of his writing opens, Alex Donohue goes in search of Jones’ legacy

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canada, news

Ukrainian Archives among urban design winners [Article]

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From the CBC:

The design for the Ukrainian Canadian Archives and Museum of Alberta on Jasper Avenue was one of 10 winners at the 2009 Edmonton Urban Design Awards Wednesday night.

The museum — which is still awaiting federal funding — will transform a former hotel on Jasper Avenue and 95th Street that dates from the turn of the 20th century.

HIP Architects and David Murray Architect received an award of merit for the design in the unbuilt category.

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news, usa

U.S. Honors Stalin on Hallowed Ground, Will Saddam Hussein Be Next? [Article]

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From the Huffington Post:

Astonishingly, in America, the National D-Day Memorial is honoring Stalin by placing his bust on a pedestal at its museum in Bedford, Virginia.

This misguided move will haunt millions of Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Jews, etc. whose families were massacred by this Soviet tyrant. Stalin’s killing machine slaughtered more people than Adolf Hitler and the Nazis did.

Although Stalin eventually became an Ally to the West, does he deserve a monument?

Stalin only gave lip service to the allies so that they would attack Nazi Germany on the Western front. Stalin did not liberate Eastern Europe from the Nazis in 1945; he sent in Soviet troops that occupied half of Europe until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Stalin the communist barely hid his disdain for capitalist America during WWII, and once the war ended, he began the Cold War and ordered his scientists to work on missiles and nuclear weapons that could destroy the United States.

Given McIntosh’s logic, should America put up a statue of Saddam Hussein because he was an ally of the U.S. in the 1980s when we supported Iraq in a war against Iran?

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WSET covered this last month:

Memorial officials say the statue is not meant to celebrate, but rather illuminate a moment of time.

“Stalin is a part of the story, he’s not there because we honor him, he’s there because he’s a critical piece of the puzzle and if you want to understand D-Day, that’s what its there for,” McIntosh said.

The statue was made possible by a private donation.

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You can contact the offices to let them know your thoughts and if you would ever visit their memorial site or donate after they erect this monstrosity.

news, usa

Obama on the Holodomor

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From the White House:

Statement by the President on the Ukrainian Holodomor Remembrance Day

Seventy six years ago, millions of innocent Ukrainians – men, women, and children – starved to death as a result of the deliberate policies of the regime of Joseph Stalin.  Tomorrow, we join together, Ukrainian-Americans and all Americans, to commemorate these tragic events and to honor the many victims.

From 1932 to 1933, the Ukrainian people suffered horribly during what has become known as the Holodomor – “death by hunger” – due to the Stalin regime’s seizure of crops and farms across Ukraine.  Ukraine had once been a breadbasket of Europe.  Ukrainians could have fed themselves and saved millions of lives, had they been allowed to do so.  As we remember this calamity, we pay respect to millions of victims who showed tremendous strength and courage.  The Ukrainian people overcame the horror of the great famine and have gone on to build a free and democratic

country.

Remembering the victims of the man-made catastrophe of Holodomor provides us an opportunity to reflect upon the plight of all those who have suffered the consequences of extremism and tyranny around the world.  We hope that the remembrance of Holodomor will help prevent such tragedy in the future.

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news, uk

True extent of Ukraine famine revealed in British journalist’s diaries [Article]

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From the Times Online:

Millions of peasants were starving. Children were turned against adults as they were recruited to expose people accused of hoarding grain. Stalin sealed the border between Russia and Ukraine to ensure that news of the famine would not spread, but one journalist was able to break through to discover the truth.

Gareth Jones, who revealed the story of the forced famine that claimed the lives of four million people in Ukraine in the 1930s, recorded the words of Stalin’s victims in his diaries, which he then used to prepare his dispatch.

The public can see the diaries for the first time today as they go on display at the University of Cambridge.

One entry from March 1933 describes how Jones illegally sneaked across the border from Russia to interview peasants. “They all had the same story: ‘there is no bread; we haven’t had bread for two months; a lot are dying’,” he wrote.

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Despite his first-hand account of the starvation, the story of what has become known as the Holodomor (Ukranian for “the famine”) was not widely followed because it was disputed by other Western journalists based in Moscow who wished to placate their contacts. Walter Duranty, a British-born correspondent for The New York Times, opined that Jones’s judgement had been “somewhat hasty”. He suggested that Jones had a “keen and active mind” and that his 40-mile trek near Kharkov had been a “rather inadequate cross-section of a big country”.

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Jones’s relatives, who discovered his diaries in the 1990s, believe that his kidnap in China may have been arranged by Soviet spies. David Lloyd George, who consulted Jones on foreign affairs after he stepped down as Prime Minister, hinted that Jones was killed because of something he knew. The diaries, which are on display at the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge until mid-December, lay forgotten for more than 50 years.

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Scans of his diary are available online at his memorial website. More from the University of Cambridge:

Now, for the first time, the diaries that Jones kept as he trekked across Ukraine and used as the basis of his reports are being put on display by Trinity College, University of Cambridge, where he was a student.

The documents have been kept by his family and are going on show to coincide with a new, feature-length documentary about Jones and the famine by the director Serhii Bukovs’kyi. The film, called “The Living”, will receive its British premiere on Friday (November 13th) as part of the Second Annual Cambridge Festival of Ukrainian Film, organised by the University’s Department of Slavonic Studies.

“These diaries are the only independent Western verification of what was arguably Stalin’s greatest atrocity,” Jones’ great nephew, Nigel Linsan Colley, said.

“Jones was the only journalist who risked his name and reputation to expose Holodomor to the world,” Rory Finnin, Lecturer in Ukrainian Studies at the University of Cambridge, added. “His diaries are a stirring historical record of an often forgotten tragedy of the 20th century.”

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Gareth Jones’ diaries will be displayed at the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge, from November 13th to mid-December. The library is open at specific times during the week. For details, visit: http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk

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Much of Gareth Jones’ life has been documented online at his memorial site and is a great resource with lots of information. As we are approaching Holodomor Memorial day, please take some time to read about the works of his 29-year old life and it’s great importance to Ukrainians and the Holodomor.