Justice
The main goal of bringing the Holodomor to international attention is to pay tribute to the millions of innocent lives taken, to condemn the crimes of the Soviet Communist regime, to restore historical justice and to obtain recognition world-wide of the Ukrainian genocide.
By making the case of the Holodomor as a genocide, Ukraine seeks to increase the international community's awareness of the fact that man-made famines and engineered famines can and are still being used as a weapon, and through this awareness to help prevent these despicable acts elsewhere.
The Verkhovna Rada (the Parliament of Ukraine) called for international recognition of the Holodomor as a genocide in the three resolutions that took place from 2002-2003. On November 28th 2006, the Parliament of Ukraine passed a law declaring the Holodomor as a genocide.
Outside the Soviet Union the governments in the West adopted a passive attitude toward the famine, although many of them had become aware of the true suffering in Ukraine through some confidential diplomatic channels.
To date, the legislative bodies of Austria, Canada, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Lithuania, and the United States of America referred to the 1932-1933 Holodomor as Ukrainian genocide.
In November of 1933, president Franklin D. Roosevelt and the United States chose to formally recognized Stalin’s Communist government and also negotiated a sweeping new trade agreement. The following year the pattern of denial in the West rose greatly with the admission of the Soviet Union into the League of Nations. Stalin’s ‘Five Year Plan for the modernization of the Soviet Union’ depended greatly on the purchase of huge amounts of manufactured goods and technology from Western nations. Those Western nations were unwilling to disrupt lucrative trade agreements with the Soviet Union in order to pursue the matter of the famine. This was kept out of official history until 1991, when the Ukraine finally won its independence. Today the Holodomor is recognized as a genocide by less than two dozen countries out of 196.
Ukraine’s government is asking the United Nations to recognize the disaster as an act of genocide, which is worsening already frosty relations with Russia, who say the famine resulted from drought. Russian nationalists had vandalized an exhibit at the Ukrainian embassy in Moscow a few years ago. While the Russian government didn't condone the attack they called Ukraine’s depiction of the famine a “one-sided falsification of history.’’
In recent years former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko had ordered the release of old KGB (the state security police in Russia) records on the Famine. With this information released it has become very apparent that this Famine was a deliberate act of Genocide and recognized as a method to ethnically cleanse Ukrainians from the territories of Ukraine and parts of Russia. At first only several thousand documents were released, but recently another batch of 25,000 documents are being declassified. As more documents are being released, the Holodomor has taken on a very ominous tone.
The following parliaments in Canada have recognized the Holodomor:
Federal Government of Canada – May 29, 2008
Province of Saskatchewan – May 7, 2008
Province of Alberta – October 30, 2008
Province of Manitoba – December 4, 2008
Province of Ontario – April 9, 2009
"The Holodomor was deliberately organized by Stalin's regime, and must be condemned publicly by the Ukrainian society and the international community as one of the largest--in terms of the number of victims--genocides in the world."
Leonid Kuchma President of Ukraine (1994-2004)
- House of Senators of Argentina-September 23 2003- commemorated victims of Ukrainian Holodomor, 'organized by the Soviet totalitarian regime.'
- Senate of Australia- October 28 2003-recognized starvation in Ukraine as 'one of the most heinous acts in genocide history.'
- Senate of Canada- June 19 2003- called on Canadian Government 'to recognize the Ukrainian Genocide of 1932-1933 and to condemn any attempt to deny this historical truth as being anything less tat a genocide'
- Parliament of Estonia- October 20 1993- condemned 'the communist policy of genocide in Ukraine.'
- Parliament of Georgia- December 20 2005- stated that 'the totalitarian Bolshevik regime...committed a deliberate act of genocide against Ukrainian people'
- National Assembly of Hungary-November 26 2003 commemorated 'the terrible tragedy of mankind and victims in Ukraine'--'artificial and intentional famine, caused by Stalin's Soviet regime.'
- Sejm of Lithuania- November 24 2005- declared 'Stalin's communist regime carried out deliberate, thoroughly planned genocide of the Ukrainian people.'
- Senate of Poland- March 16 2006, stated that the 'Holodomor was intentionally designed by the despotic Bolshevik regime.' The Senate upheld 'the position of Ukraine regarding the need to declare the 1932-1933 Great Famine as an act of genocide.' The Sejm of Poland condemned on December 6 2006 'the totalitarian regime responsible for genocide.'
- United States Congress- 2003- referred to Holodomor as genocide quoting the 1988 US Congress Commission on the Ukraine Famine official report. The report reads 'Joseph Stalin and those around him committed genocide against Ukrainians in 1932-1933.'