“Stop Putin, stop this war,” said the initiator of the parliamentary initiative
The Bundestag, Germany’s federal parliament, passed a resolution on Wednesday recognizing the so-called Holodomor, literally the “starvation murder” of four million Ukrainians under Josef Stalin’s Soviet regime 90 years ago, as genocide. A disaster that many describe as the “Ukrainian Holocaust” in the country now invaded by Russia, which never acknowledged that carnage. The document is also a condemnation of the war unleashed by Russian President Vladimir Putin and his continued attacks on the civilian population of Ukraine. “Putin follows Stalin’s cruel and criminal tradition,” said green Robin Wegener, promoter of the initiative and chairman of the German-Ukrainian parliamentary committee. “Stop Putin. Stop this war,” Wegener said in the speech that opened the ensuing debate, in which the speakers without exception criticized the “brutal offensive” of the Russian president, repeatedly comparing him to Stalin.
The resolution was passed by a clear majority with the votes of the ruling tripartite Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals and the conservative opposition of the Bavarian Christian Democrats and Social Christians. In the box, Ukrainian Deputy Foreign Minister and former Ambassador to Germany, Andrij Melnyk, and his successor at the head of the Ukrainian Legation in Berlin, Oleksij Makeyev, closely followed the debate. Given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the document is more than a gesture, even if it has no legal ramifications. But at least it presupposes the recognition of the existence and independence of the Ukrainian people, something Putin denies to his neighbors, whom he wants to forcibly integrate into Russia. The term genocide appears in Article 2 of UN Convention 260 of 1948 and is defined as that action aimed at the total or partial extermination of a national, ethnic or religious group.
The document approved by the German House of Commons emphasizes that the Holodomor was a “crime against humanity” adding to “the list of crimes of contempt for human dignity committed by totalitarian systems, which in the first half of the century killed twenty million human lives were destroyed in Europe”. The resolution also refers directly to the war going on in the east of the European continent. “Today more than ever we are confronted with Russia’s offensive war against Ukraine against international law, which is at the same time a attack on our order of peace and European values. The aspirations of great power and repression must have no place in Europe,” emphasizes the draft resolution, which also condemns Putin’s aggressive policies.
Germany thus joins the 16 countries, including Australia, Canada, Mexico and Poland, that have declared the genocide of the Holodomor and condemned the famine deliberately caused by Stalin by forcibly collectivizing agriculture, setting unattainable supply quotas for agricultural products. and to confiscate crops and livestock as punishment. farmers in Ukraine. Historians agree that it was “an unprovoked catastrophe”. The famine did not only wreak havoc in Ukraine. The “revolution from above” ordered by Stalin to industrialize the Soviet Union at the expense of the peasantry also spread famine to the North Caucasus, the Volga region and Kazakhstan. In the latter republic, one in four inhabitants then died of starvation, about eight million in the entire USSR.
But already at the beginning of the 30s of the last century, the terror regime of the then Soviet leader was particularly virulent in Ukraine. According to American historian Anne Applebaum, Stalin feared that opposition to the collectivization policies of a large section of Communist officials in Kiev threatened the loss of Ukraine to the Soviet project. The repression was brutal. In addition to the purge from 1932 of the local communist apparatus and the persecution of suspected Ukrainian nationalists, the Kremlin ordered the arrest, imprisonment and execution of numerous Ukrainian intellectuals, writers, artists, professors and scientists. In his book “Red Hunger,” Applebaum literally describes the actions of the Soviet regime as a “war against Ukraine” and concludes that the Holodomor “was a planned and ordered mass murder.”
Source: La Verdad
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