Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-10-22-Speech-3-457"
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"en.20081022.24.3-457"2
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"Madam President, the Holodomor is a fact and symbolises one of the most inhumane methods of slaughter. An ideology called upon to serve the ordinary people took a form which today beggars the imagination. It was a simple method – it required no armaments or men, no gas chambers. All it took was to gather up everything the earth had given, and the "disobedient" population would disappear from its villages, because it did not fit into the system. People were pushed into a Utopian vision, and despite its horror and its cost, many still find it attractive and it is defended by some members on the left side of this House. The Bolshevik ideology used methods which cannot be justified in any way. My PhD on Ukraine dealt with the traumas of people who had survived this socialist horror, even though survivors were the exception. The accounts provided by survivors reveal that starvation led to cannibalism; for example, we are aware of the case of a mother who sent her six-year-old son into the forest in winter, because he would not have survived in the village but been eaten.
On the one hand, we have the 1930s, with Joseph Stalin, the wise father and friend of the peoples heralding world revolution and, on the other, we had millions dying in the streets with swollen stomachs. It must have been a horrifying sight even for the political commissars serving the authorities. That was how it was in eastern Ukraine. 10 years later, however, a tragedy of the same nature befell the Poles in what was then eastern Poland, albeit on a lesser scale. The nationalist ideology of the Ukrainian UPA, which colluded with the Nazis, resulted in the ethnic cleansing of Poles. The methods were equally savage: burning alive, cutting open pregnant women’s stomachs, beheading children with axes. The men were at the front then. Today, this Golgotha of the east, as the survivors call it, is a subject of taboo and embarrassed silence and, most ironically, statues are now being erected to the nationalist leaders of that time. Perhaps now is an occasion – and there are observers from Ukraine here – while honouring the victims of the Holodomor – also to honour the Poles and Ukrainians who were so savagely murdered for not agreeing with that ideology. It is not easy to admit to such facts, but failing to do so will make it difficult to bring peoples closer together, to accept Ukraine into the sphere of the European values for which we strive in this House.
I understand Russia’s protests against the European Union. If we are going to speak of the Holodomor, as they propose, we should also talk about the extermination of the Indians in the New World by the colonists. The Holodomor is worthy of particular condemnation. However, let us also add the millions sent to labour camps, i.e. death camps, in Siberia during World War II – Ukrainians, Poles, Tartars. Just for the benefit of this gathering, I would like to add that of the 100 000 POWs of General Paulus’ army sent to Siberia following Stalingrad, only 5 000 survived up to 1955. For the sake of Europe, its Parliament cannot trivialise these tragedies of the 20
century."@en1
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