Ukrainian Sues Yanukovych Over Famine Statement

KIEV, Ukraine -- A court in Ukraine is due to start hearing a lawsuit against President Viktor Yanukovych for saying the famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s should not be considered genocide.
Volodymyr Volosyuk is suing Yanukovych for a statement he made in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in April. Yanukovych said that "it is not fair to call the great famine in Ukraine in 1932-1933 a genocide against the Ukrainian people."

Volosyuk argues that Yanukovych wounded his personal honor and dignity and the memory of the millions of Ukrainians who died in the famine. He wants the court to demand that Yanukovych offer a public apology for his statement in Strasbourg.

Yuriy Karmazin, a member of Ukraine's Parliamentary Committee on Issues of Justice, told RFE/RL that the Kyiv appeals court had ruled that the Soviet leaders of the 1930s were responsible for the famine that killed millions of people in Ukraine.

According to Karmazin, denying the famine took place is illegal. Yanukovych did not deny the famine, but he said it affected many nationalities and ethnic groups, and therefore it was not fair to label it genocide.

A second member of the Parliamentary Committee on Issues of Justice, Svyatoslav Oliinik, told RFE/RL that the case has no chance of success. He predicted that Volosyuk will not be able to prove judicially that his rights were abused.

Mykola Zamkovenko, a former chairman of Kyiv's Pechera District Court, which is hearing the case, told RFE/RL that it is necessary to have adequate legal documentation in order to state officially that the famine was genocide. He added that Yanukovych was simply expressing his personal opinion, which he has the right to do.

Diary That Helped Expose Stalin's Famine Displayed

The diaries of a British reporter who risked his reputation to expose the horrors of Stalin's murderous famine in Ukraine are to go on display on Friday.
Welsh journalist Gareth Jones snuck into Ukraine in March of 1933, at the height of an artificial famine engineered by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin as part of his campaign to force peasants into collective farms. Millions starved to death between 1932 and 1933 as the Soviet secret police emptied the countryside of grain and livestock.Jones' reporting was one of first attempts to bring the disaster to the world's attention."Famine Grips Russia — Millions Dying" read the front page of the New York Evening Post on March 29, 1933. "Famine on a colossal scale, impending death of millions from hunger, murderous terror ... this is the summary of Mr. Jones's firsthand observations," the paper said.As starvation and cannibalism spread across Ukraine, Soviet authorities exported more than a million tons of grain to the West, using the money to build factories and arm its military.Historians say that between 4 million and 5 million Ukrainians perished in what is sometimes referred to as the Great Famine.Walking from village to village, Jones recorded desperate Ukrainians scrambling for food, scribbling brief interviews in pencil on lined notebooks."They all had the same story: 'There is no bread — we haven't had bread for two months — a lot are dying,'" Jones wrote in one entry."We are the living dead," he quoted one peasant as saying.Jones' eyewitness account had little effect on world opinion at the time. Stalin's totalitarian regime tightly controlled the flow of information out of the U.S.S.R., and many Moscow-based foreign correspondents — some of whom had pro-Soviet sympathies — refused to believe Jones' reporting.The New York Times' Walter Duranty, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, dismissed his article as a scare story."Conditions are bad, but there is no famine," Duranty wrote a few days after Jones' story was published. Other correspondents chimed in with public denials.With his colleagues against him, Jones was discredited.Eugene Lyons, an American wire agency reporter who gradually went from communist sympathizer to fierce critic of the Soviet regime, later acknowledged the role that fellow journalists had played in trying to destroy Jones' career."Jones must have been the most surprised human being alive when the facts he so painstakingly garnered from our mouths were snowed under by our denials," Lyons wrote in his 1937 autobiography, "Assignment in Utopia."Lyons' admission came too late for Jones, who was killed under murky circumstances while covering Japan's expansion into China in the run-up to World War II.British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, whom Jones had once served as an aide, said shortly after his death in 1935 that the intrepid journalist might have been killed because he "knew too much of what was going on.""I had always been afraid that he would take one risk too many."Jones' handwritten diaries are on display at the Wren Library at Trinity College in Cambridge, where he was a student, until mid-December.

Ukraine Accuses Moscow Of Genocide Over 1932 Famine That Killed Millions

KIEV, Ukraine -- Bitter enmity between Ukraine and Russia could be rekindled after the Kiev authorities launched a criminal investigation into a devastating famine that claimed millions of lives, stating it was an More than 70 years since the famine struck Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union, the country's prosecution service believes it has enough evidence to begin criminal proceedings.A statement issued by Ukraine's security service, the SBU, said that through murder, the forcible collectivisation of agriculture, dispossession, deportation and confiscation, the Soviet authorities had "aimed at organising hunger to kill the Ukrainian people as an ethnic group".It went on: "The Stalinist regime wanted to create living conditions that would result in the total physical elimination of ethnic Ukrainians."Although estimates of how many people died in what Ukrainians call the Holodomor, which ravaged the nation in 1932 and 1933, conservative estimates have put the death toll at more than seven million.Ukraine has long maintained that Stalin wanted to wipe out the Ukrainian people, because of their questionable loyalty to the Soviet Union and their stubborn adherence to age-old farming practices that stood in his way of the plan to destroy private agriculture.In the early 1930s, Stalin launched a brutal campaign of collectivisation and requisition across Ukraine that few historians dispute turned a natural famine into a human tragedy of massive proportions. Eye-witness accounts from the time speak of whole villages being obliterated by starvation and disease, and people resorting to cannibalism to stay alive. Often, the authorities prevented survivors fleeing the famine-stricken regions in fear that if news got out, it would damage the credibility of Stalin's regime and policies.The Ukrainian government has waged a long campaign in the international arena to have the famine classified as genocide, while some Ukrainian nationalists argue that Russia, as the successor to the Soviet Union, should now be held responsible.However, the Russian government disputes the genocide claim, pointing out that famine and starvation struck other regions of the Soviet Union at the same time. It also argues that so far no evidence, such as a paper trail, clearly stating that the Kremlin wished to starve Ukraine has ever come to light.With Ukraine and Russia at odds over links to the West and energy, Kiev's genocide claims have assumed a political dimension. Some in Russia consider Ukraine's willingness to open old wounds as evidence of its determination to antagonise Moscow and seek sympathy in the West.Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, has charged Ukraine's pro-western president, Viktor Yushchenko with exploiting the famine for "instantaneous political goals", while General Vasily Khristoforov, head of the registration and archives department at Russia's federal security service, dismissed the Holodomor as a "Ukrainian invention".Ukraine's decision to push ahead with a criminal investigation could fall under the scrutiny of a new Russian commission, appointed by Mr Medvedev last week and charged with guarding against "the falsification of history at the expense of Russian interests".But opposition to the inquiry also comes from within Ukraine, with some politicians questioning the sense of investigating events of 70-plus years ago."From the legal point of view, what the security service is doing is absurd," said Gennady Moskal, a member of parliament. "Who will criminal charges be brought against? Maybe against a cemetery? Who can be brought to justice? If a person was 18 years old in 1933, then how old are they now when criminal proceedings are beginning?"act of genocide orchestrated by Moscow.