Rada passes bill recognizing the Holodomor as genocide (12/03/06)

Rada passes bill recognizing the Holodomor as genocide

by Zenon Zawada
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - In a historic vote, Ukraine's Parliament followed President Viktor Yushchenko's lead and on November 28 passed a law declaring the Holodomor of 1932-1933 a genocide against the Ukrainian people.

Verkhovna Rada Chair Oleksander Moroz and his Socialist Party of Ukraine broke ranks with the pro-Russian factions that comprise the coalition government and joined the Our Ukraine and Yulia Tymoshenko blocs to cast 233 votes in favor - seven more votes than what was needed for the bill to pass.

The next day, President Yushchenko signed the Holodomor bill into law, declaring it a historic moment in Ukraine's history.

"The vote does not target anyone," Mr. Yushchenko said. "It restores our national dignity. We will renew our national memory of those 10 million innocent victims killed in 1932-1933."

The Holodomor of 1932-1933 was an artificially created famine launched by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin with the goal of breaking Ukrainian resistance to forced collectivization and eliminating Ukrainian national consciousness, resulting in the genocide of an estimated 10 million Ukrainians.

Previously, the Verkhovna Rada had just barely passed a resolution on May 15, 2003, declaring the Holodomor an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people.

In the drive to get that designation codified as Ukrainian law, its advocates stressed the moral need for the nation to come to grips with its terrifying, tragic past in order to move forward.

But there were pragmatic reasons as well.

Efforts to gain further international acknowledgement and status for the Holodomor will progress significantly, particularly with regard to United Nations recognition, supporters of the bill argued.

In his proposed bill, Mr. Yushchenko wanted to make it illegal to deny the Holodomor in Ukraine, subject to criminal punishment and a petty fine.

However, Mr. Moroz's compromise eliminated such a provision.

The main conflict over the bill during the November 28 session was the use of the term "genocide" in referring to the Holodomor.

Most fiercely opposing the bill was the Communist Party of Ukraine, which blames the Famine of 1932-1933 on crop failure and refers to the Holodomor as an American-sown myth.

Just two weeks earlier, the Communists distributed in Parliament a recently published booklet, "The Myth of the Holodomor." The booklet's author, Dr. Gennadii Tkachenko, estimates that no more than 2 million or 3 million Ukrainians died during the Famine.

"The myth of the Holodomor is a diversive-ideological cuisine prepared by Harvard University," according to the booklet. "Its main creator was Zbigniew Brzezinski and its assistants were Ukrainian (Halychyna) nationalists - former servants of Hitler and, today, Uncle Sam."

Joining the Communists not voting for the bill was the pro-Russian Party of the Regions, with the exception of two deputies, Taras Chornovil and Hanna Herman.

The Party of the Regions position on the Holodomor did acknowledge the Famine as a disaster intentionally created by the Stalin government.

"We believe that the Stalin regime created this crime, the essence of which depended upon destroying existing structures of agriculture by means of carrying out a mass dekulakization of villagers, violent implementation of collectivization and placing upon village homes of Ukraine's regions exorbitantly high wheat quotas," said Vladyslav Zabarskyi, a Party of the Regions national deputy.

However in its version of the bill, the Party of the Regions referred to the Holodomor only as a tragedy, not genocide, and blamed Stalin's regime and not the Communist government.

When asked why the party opposed referring to it as genocide, Mr. Zabarskyi said the Holodomor applied to all those living on Ukrainian territory, regardless of their ethnicity.

"In the understanding of genocide according to international law and national legislation, we can't say this was genocide considering that it hasn't been defined to this day that these actions were taken exclusively against Ukrainians," he said.

He added that the very same year famines occurred in many parts of the Soviet Union, including the central and lower Volga regions, the Ural Mountain region, the northern Caucasus and Kazakhstan, among others.

Party of the Regions deputies accused their opponents on the subject of the Holodomor of exploiting the tragic deaths of millions for political gain and re-igniting ethnic tensions within Ukraine.

As their attempt at a compromise, the Party of the Regions offered the following definition of genocide in its version of a bill: "Criminal acts of the Stalinist totalitarian-repressive regime aimed at mass destruction of parts of the Ukrainian and other peoples of the former USSR, resulting in the Holodomor of 1932-1933."

Our Ukraine and Tymoshenko Bloc deputies flatly rejected that proposal.

In rebuttal to the Party of the Regions' claim that it was not genocide, Our Ukraine National Deputy Viacheslav Kyrylenko pointed out that while the Soviet Union's population rose 20 percent between 1926 and 1937, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic's population declined 16 percent during that span.

As further evidence, he noted that in January 1933 Soviet authorities banned all travel from Ukraine and the Kuban region, where 80 percent of inhabitants were ethnic Ukrainians, all peasantry. "Such bans on travel weren't on any other territories where famine occurred," Mr. Kyrylenko said.

Once again, Mr. Moroz played the role of kingmaker.

Votes on both the president's and the Party of the Regions' bills failed, leading the Rada chairman to offer his compromise.

A top-ranking Communist until Ukrainian independence, and a supporter of Marxist and Communist principles afterwards, Mr. Moroz's decision to support the genocide designation may lie in his own personal history.

Though he was born in 1944, Mr. Moroz told reporters during a November 21 visit to Lviv that he was well aware that his native village of Buda in the Kyiv Oblast suffered greatly from the 1933 Famine.

"Regarding the Holodomor, more than half the people in my village died," Mr. Moroz said. "People ate other people. That's why for me personally it was a genocide."

Two days later, Mr. Moroz publicly suggested that any Holodomor law consist of the phrase "genocide against the Ukrainian people" ("narod" in Ukrainian), instead of "genocide against the Ukrainian nation" ("natsiya" in Ukrainian).

In his address on the day of the vote, Mr. Moroz explained that the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948 defines genocide as the destruction of a "national, ethnic, racial or religious group."

Therefore, referring to the "Ukrainian people" instead of the "Ukrainian nation" would be enough to gain U.N. recognition for the Holodomor.

As to why the Socialist Party insisted on the Ukrainian word "narod" as opposed to "natsiya," as preferred by the president, its deputies explained to reporters that the term "narod" can refer to various ethnicities victimized by the Holodomor that inhabited Ukraine at the time.

Using the word "natsiya" would have only referred to ethnic Ukrainians.

To some deputies, the difference was largely meaningless.

However, Our Ukraine National Deputy Yaroslav Kendzior pointed out that Ukrainian villages targeted by the Holodomor were 95 percent ethnic Ukrainian, at minimum.

National Deputy Yevhen Hirnyk of the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists said there's a significant difference between the words, but, as long as the word "narod" is qualified by the word "genocide," he said he's comfortable with the compromise.

Another compromise on Mr. Moroz's behalf involved laying blame for the genocide on the "totalitarian, repressive Stalinist regime," instead of the Communist Party, to the dismay of patriotic deputies.

"Communist, totalitarian regime should be underlined, the cessionaries of which are sitting in that wing of the Verkhovna Rada," Mr. Kendzior said, pointing to the section occupied by the 21 Communist deputies.

The president's clause for criminal punishment for Holodomor deniers was removed.

"The presidential version called for a $36 fine against someone denying the Holodomor," said Volodymyr Yavorivskyi, a Tymoshenko Bloc National Deputy. "I thought about that and told my deputy colleagues, 'You know, if that edition of the law passes, I'd much rather take the paper it's written on into my hand and smack such a person across their mug instead of having them pay $36."

The day after the vote, the Communists expressed their disappointment with the Socialists, and Communist National Deputy Oleksander Holub hinted that it could threaten the coalition government's stability.

On the other hand, President Yushchenko specifically thanked Mr. Moroz for his valuable role in passing the law and said he still intends to introduce legislation to punish Holodomor deniers.

Ironically, the western Ukrainians who most fervently fought for the Holodomor bill are from a region largely unscathed by the genocide. Meanwhile, eastern and southern Ukrainians, who live in regions where the Holodomor was most acute, opposed the legislation.

One hint as to the reason for the discrepancy is revealed in the Party of the Regions' leadership.

Assistant Faction Chair Yevhen Kushnariov was born and raised in Kharkiv, but both his parents are from the Russian Federation, as is the case with many residents of eastern Ukraine. He said he considers himself a Ukrainian, but simultaneously acknowledges his nationality is Russian.

In fact, many residents of industrial towns, particularly Donetsk, settled in eastern Ukraine after the Holodomor, aren't ethnic Ukrainians themselves and therefore feel uneasy about talk of ethnic genocide, national deputies said.

Since the Ukrainian Holodomor didn't directly affect their families, and because they have personal affinities for Russia and its culture, they lack an ability to empathize with or comprehend the Holodomor's meaning for ethnic Ukrainians, deputies said.