President Viktor Yanukovych’s address to the PACE session in Strasbourg was a blatant violation of the Law of Ukraine “On the Holodomor of 1932-33 in Ukraine,” ratified by the Verkhovna Rada on Nov. 28, 2006. Yanukovych further ignored the ruling of the Kyiv Court of Appeal (Jan. 13, 2010) that proclaimed the leadership of the totalitarian Bolshevik regime guilty of committing “an act of genocide against a part of the Ukrainian national group in 1932-33 by creating living conditions aimed at its partial physical destruction,” reads a statement issued by Our Ukraine. It stresses that “Viktor Yanukovych has actually placed himself in opposition to the parliaments of Estonia, Australia, Canada, Hungary, Lithuania, Georgia, Poland, Peru, Paraguay, Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, and Latvia that officially recognized the Holodomor as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people — also, the European Parliament that qualified the Holodomor as a crime against the Ukrainian people and against humanity.”
The Day asked its experts for comment.
Kateryna MARCHENKO, veteran of the Great Patriotic War, 1932-33 Holodomor eyewitness:
“When I heard Yanukovych’s statement that denied the Holodomor’s recognition as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people, saying it was a common tragedy involving the states that were then members of the USSR, I wanted first to call Channel 1, Ukrainian Radio or Radio Culture (the television channels were packed with all kinds of shows), to share my eyewitness story. I am 91 years old and I did live through the Holodomor of 1932-33.
“My native village of Kyshchentsi in Cherkasy oblast was run by the Russian Treasury before the Bolshevik revolution. We had no landlords and the land belonged to the people. Some had plots of up to 70 hectares, while the average plot ranged from one to seven hectares. Each family had at least five children. In 1933, half the villagers died of starvation, with dozens dying every day. Those half-dead were picked with the dead and carted off to the cemetery (those still alive would die anyway, but the horse-drawn carts would be available in a couple of days). Tykhon, a boy who lived next door, was buried alive. Thank God, he managed to get out of his grave, from among the dead and still breathing bodies. He survived. But that political system turned people into cannibals! All this was done for the sole purpose of annihilating the Ukrainian peasants as the basis of everything Ukrainian! For me, the president’s statement was like trampling on the eight graves of my relatives who were killed by the Holodomor. It was like desecrating my people’s memories!”
Natalia DZIUBENKO-MACE, writer, James Mace’s widow:
“After all, what did you expect? We saw the Party of Regions being established as a clear follower of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The new political leaders do not know any other political culture than that, they hate their people, they disdain the Ukrainian Constitution and Ukrainian laws. The old political force, adjusted to the new political circumstances, is rapidly and clearly removing all the enclaves of the people’s self-activity, which were created and started to develop through such an ordeal. Suddenly we have again found ourselves in the Anti-Ukraine, as Oxana Pachlovska has aptly put it. It is the Anti-Ukraine, where the Ukrainian culture and Ukrainian word is allowed, as usual, to drag out a miserable existence, whereas the Ukrainian audience instead is offered the boorish culture, the variety of shows broadcast by our television are hosted by two people, a Russian-speaking one and an allegedly Ukrainian-speaking one (in fact, s/he uses the language of a Soviet-era person). They represent the clear mould of our being, a bifurcated creature that is well-fed, boorish, and offhanded. The Ukrainian economy, whose future successes are boasted by the nation’s old-new leaders, becomes hopelessly dependent on the ‘fraternal’ people, whose deathly embrace we still feel on our necks. This noose is tightening. Surrender of the Black Sea Fleet, rehabilitation of Stalin and Stalinism, attacks against the Ukrainian language in the higher educational establishments and schools are links of the same chain.
“In this situation, the self-preservation instinct should have had its effect, because the national memory is an efficient and probably the only guarantee, under our circumstances, against returning to the colonial past. The women should have thought of their sons who might get to unfair wars in the near future, to burning Chechnya, Dagestan, or God forbid, Georgia. The men should have thought of their families’ destinies, because it was their grandfathers who were turned out of their own lands and starved to death. And the strong and hard-working heads of families had to watch the agony of their families and keep silent. They were the first to die.
“There can be different interpretations of Yanukovych’s words: a betrayal of own people, violation of the Constitution, but he has not betrayed the Russian people, nor did he violate the RF Constitution. He simply is not aware and has never been aware of what state he is living in, whose president he has become. The new political force is not only toadying before the new host, it is a flattering servant to it. It won’t be difficult to prove that genocide took place in 1932-33 in Ukraine, but the new ideologues won’t listen to this. They will soon write a new constitution, adopt new legislation and write another history, under one condition: if we allow them to do so.
“I don’t trust in the order promised by the Party of Regions, because the only order known by the Communist force is concentration camps. I don’t believe either that the people will be well-fed under their rule. Bones are only sometimes thrown to serfs.
“I believe that this year on November’s last Saturday, The Day we commemorate the victims of the Holodomor and repressions, even more candles will be lit in the windows and even more people will come to the St. Sophia and St. Michael squares in Kyiv.”
