Resolution: PACE Refuses to Recognize Holodomor as Genocide of Ukrainian People

STRASBOURG – In a resolution adopted on April 28, 2010, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) strongly condemned “the cruel policies pursued by the Stalinist regime” which triggered the Great Famine in 1929 in the grain-growing areas of the former Soviet Union, culminating in 1932-33, UNIAN reports.

PACE “resolutely rejects any attempts to justify these deadly policies, by whatever purposes”; for the parliamentarians, these policies as deliberately conducted by the Soviet regime, are comparable to “a crime against humanity” because they led to the deaths of “millions of innocent people in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Russia and Ukraine, which were parts of the Soviet Union.”  The Assembly stresses that in Ukraine, which suffered most, these tragic events are referred to as Holodomor (politically motivated famine) and are recognised by Ukrainian law as an act of genocide against the Ukrainians.

According to PACE, while these events may have had particularities in different regions, as pointed out in the report by Mevlüt Çavusoglu (Turkey, EDG), the results were the same everywhere: millions of human lives were sacrificed to the fulfilment of the policies of the Stalinist regime. PACE recommends establishing the full, un-biased and un-politicized truth about this human tragedy, and making it public. The assembly welcomes the important work already done in Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Republic of Moldova, Russia and in particular in Ukraine in order to ease access to archives, and calls on the competent authorities of these countries to open up all their archives and facilitate access thereto to all researchers, including from other states.

At the same time, PACE has refused to recognize the Holodomor as genocide of the Ukrainian people.

Only 21 assembly members voted for recognizing Holodomor as genocide of the Ukrainian people, while 55 voted against corresponding amendments to the draft resolution on the issue, an Interfax correspondent reported.                                                                                                        

Speaking at PACE on Tuesday, April 27, Yanukovych said that one cannot call the Holodomor of the 1930s genocide of the Ukrainian people. “It was a common tragedy of states of the Soviet Union,” he said.