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There is no membership fee- all we ask is that people participate in our campaigns on the Ukrainian famine and other genocides.

The eye witness accounts of the Ukrainian Famine of 1932- 1933 are almost unbearable to read. Carts rolled through the streets collecting bodies. Sometimes people who were half alive were flung into mass graves with corpses because they would die soon. Flocks of children wandered the roads and died in ditches and fields. People stripped the bark off trees while barns full of grain were guarded by bayonet wielding guards. The endless fields of rye and wheat that spill across the Ukrainian Steppe were littered with corpses and mass graves. The cost in human lives may be as high as 10 million.

One of the reasons that the famine, the largest act of genocide within a single state in human history, has been ignored is that Ukrainians were for much of their history submerged within other states and were seen simply as a province of Russia. After a brief period of independence in 1918 the Bolsheviks occupied Ukraine, some of them carrying banners which read “Death to Ukrainians”. In Kyiv people were shot for speaking Ukrainian or for carrying Ukrainian passports.

However during the 1920s Ukrainian culture blossomed. The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was one of the founding members of the USSR in 1922 and Lenin allowed Ukrainians a measure of intellectual and artistic freedom.

The mood changed in 1929 when Stalin, who had consolidated his power over the party, introduced the collectivisation of agriculture. Peasants were forced into large communal farms where they worked together on fields so vast it could take a single man an entire day to plough them. Stalin saw that resistance to collectivisation was particularly strong in Ukraine and that the Ukrainian Communist party was taking an increasingly independent line. During 1932 he developed a simple plan for dealing with the threat of resistance to Soviet power in the republic. He was going to use hunger in order to break opposition to the regime. Then, in the words of the Secret Police Chief in Kharkhiv, the “ethnographic material [of Ukraine] would be changed”. The Italian diplomat who quoted these words, writing from Kharkhiv on 31st May1933 estimated that 10 to 15 million people had died and that what Stalin saw as “the Ukrainian problem” would be liquidated in a few months and that Ukraine would become “a part of the Russian country”.

He knew what he was talking about. Stalin had written to his henchman Lazar Kaganovich on 11th August 1932 that there were difficulties collecting bread in Ukraine and that the Ukrainian Party was becoming a “caricature of a Parliament”. He claimed that nationalist spies working for Poland must be behind a plot to sabotage grain requisitioning. Then introduced a number of measures which included sealing Ukraine’s borders, removing everything edible from the rural population and using armed units to surround villages and stop starving peasants fleeing.. The result of this forced famine, known as the Holodomor or “hunger plague” in Ukrainian, was that Ukraine’s population declined from 28,925,976 to 28, 388, 000 between the Census of 1929 and 1937 while the Russian population grew. The actual shortfall in Ukraine’s population could approach 10,000, 000 but estimates of the human losses of the famine vary and the accuracy of the statistics is questionable- three successive heads of the Soviet Central Statistical Administration were executed because the Censuses figures were showing an enormous increase in mortality concentrated in Ukraine during 1933. The figures that we have may have been massaged to conceal the extent of the excess deaths caused by the famine.. All we know for certain is that millions of people died.

Although there was famine on a smaller scale in Russia and an appalling famine in Kazakhstan during this period, there is a clear difference between these events, which were brought about by incompetence and a crude communist approach to farming, and what happened in Ukraine. After the Holodomor settlers from Russia were moved into Ukraine and a process of “Russification” or encouraging the replacement of Ukrainian by Russian gathered strength. The years before and after the famine saw mass arrests and executions of Ukraine’s cultural elite and people from all sections of society, teachers, priests, clerks and peasants. Anyone, whatever their ethnicity, who was seen as a potential leader or as helping the independent cultural life of the nation, was at risk of losing their life.

The Ukrainian Government is campaigning for the Holodomor to be condemned internationally as an act of genocide. Was it? The 1948 Convention states that genocide is “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such [including] deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”. When we consider that the Soviet Government decided to take everything edible from Ukraine and starve the country’s people to death, it would appear that the Holodomor falls within the scope of the Convention. The British government should find the moral courage to unequivocally condemn this act of mass murder - the continuing moral and spiritual cowardice of our leaders means that brutal regimes everywhere can murder people by enforced hunger knowing that their actions will not be condemned.

Steve Komarnyckyj

Further information:
http://www.holodomor.org.uk
http://www.artukraine.com/famineart/mace18.htm
http://www.unian.net/eng/news/news-222452.html
http://www.ukrainesf.com/inform/Holodomor/Holodomor.htm
http://www.ukraine-eu.mfa.gov.ua/eu/en/news/detail/3956.htm
Stefan Romaniw speaks about the Ukrainian genocide on theage.com.au
Holodomor information page at the Ukrainian Canadian Congress website

International condemnation and intervention remain pathetically weak and woefully inadequate while aid workers on the ground in Sudan have been robbed, attacked and killed by the Janjaweed militia. Most of the much needed aid is not reaching the people who are starving in the no-go zones. Direct pressure and action is paramount to bring the genocide and conflict in Sudan to an end and every minute is precious if we are to save lives. According to Save The Children more than 70 children under the age of 5 die every day in Darfur due to malnutrition or the direct result of violence perpetrated against them. 500 people are estimated to die each day while 15'000 people in Darfur die each month, mostly due to starvation brought about by the destruction of their grain.

Over two million Darfuri people have been forced to flee the violence and an estimated 400'000 have died since the violence erupted in 2003 and the conflict is spreading to neighbouring Chad. Janjaweed from Sudan have been known to enter Chad in order to attack refugee camps along the border. There have also been rumours of Chadian Janjaweed attacking Sudanese refugee camps within Chad as well as Chadian villages.
The Sudanese government, in turn backed by China, has orchestrated and participated in these crimes by arming and training the Janjaweed militia and providing air support by carrying out air raids on Darfuri civilians.
The Sudanese government has suppressed information by jailing and killing witnesses since 2004 and tampered with evidence such as mass graves to eliminate their forensic values.

The most recent conflicts in Sudan started when the National Islamic Front took power by military coup in 1989. The genocide and enslavement now carried out against Darfuri people is excused and dismissed by the Sudanese government in the same way they justified their use of force against the Dinka people of Southern Sudan. A fundamentalist government which is carrying out “jihad” in its most distorted version against anyone who opposes them, they do not see what they are doing as genocide while excusing slavery as their right under Islam. But unlike the Second Civil War, the current conflict is along ethnic and tribal lines rather than religious.
However, the Sudanese regime has used slavery and forced displacement as well as starvation through the wilful destruction of crops as part of their reign of terror against both the African population, mainly of Dinka ethnicity, in Southern Sudan in the past and against people in Darfur now. Slavery also still carries on in Sudan even if there is no prevailing conflict and both slavery and genocide are gross human rights violations. So why have no effective measures been taken to stop either? Where is the international outrage and condemnation against slavery and genocide in Sudan?

We need to lobby governments to supply troops and helicopters to Sudan's troubled regions to protect the civilian population and to force the Sudanese regime to stop their genocidal actions against the African population in their country. Humanitarian aid is not enough for Darfur, political pressure is paramount. When a government attacks a group of its own people, the international community has to act to protect the innocent civilians.

To petition PM Gordon Brown to supply choppers and crew to Darfur, please sign the ePetition at the 10 Downing Street website: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Dafur-Copters. Deadline to sign up by is 7 June 2008. Other petitions specific to Darfur: Darfur related petitions at 10 Downing Street.

Further information:
Human Rights Watch report
www.amnesty.org.uk

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