UNIAN, Kyiv, Ukraine, Wed, Nov 25, 2009

 

KYIV - The President of Ukraine Victor Yushchenko will take part in the memorial measures dedicated to the memory of victims of Holodomor of 1932-1933 on Saturday, November 28.  The press service of the head of the state disclosed to UNIAN that at 8:45 am the President will lay flowers to Memorial sign to victims of Holodomor (the Great Famine) at Mykhaylivska Square.

At 9. 00 am in Sofiyskiy Cathedral the head of the state will be present at a rite and prayer with participation of leaders of different religious organizations of Ukraine and high officials of Ukraine. NTCU will broadcast these measures.

 

3:15 P.M. EVENT
The memorial measures with participation of V. Yushchenko will take place at the territory of the State museum “Memorial to Victims of Holodomors in Ukraine” (Kyiv, Mazepy Street, 15 A) at 15.15 pm. The National Television Company of Ukraine will broadcast these measures.

The President of Ukraine will address to the Ukrainian people at 15. 50 pm. The national minute of silence will be at 16. 00 pm, after that all-Ukrainian action “Light a candle” will start.

 

LINK: http://www.unian.net/eng/news/news-348708.html

ZIK news, Zakhidna Informatsiyna Korporatsiya, Fri, Nov 27, 2009 

 

KYIV - SBU prosecutors may send the criminal case on the 1932-1933 Holodomor in Ukraine to court by the end of 2009, SBU Director Valentyn Nalyvajchenko said Nov. 27, speaking on the 5th Kanal.

 

“We will publicize the names of those officials who orchestrated the crime of genocide against Ukrainians,” the SBU director said. SBU prosecutors point to top officials in the Ukrainian Bolshevik party as organizers of the Holodomor, he said. The prosecution allowed me to release the names of suspects, Nalyvajchenko assured.

 

       1.  Stanislav Kosior, the Bolshevik party of Ukraine secretary.
       2.  Pavel Postyshev, who was sent by Stalin and Molotov to head the Kharkiv oblast, making it one of the worst famine-hit areas of Ukraine.
       3.  Vlas Chubar, one of the people’s commissars of Ukraine.

We have to prove the guilt of these people in court. Following this, these persons must be condemned and stripped of any privileges, Nalyvajchenko continued.  When the Holodomor organizers are proved guilty, the central government is to oblige local governments to dismantle the monuments to these individuals, he added.

 

Answering a question whether a court may give its verdict with regard to deceased persons [the three suspects are long dead], the SBU director said the crimes against humanity have no statute of limitations.  He also confirmed the criminal case will be declassified.

 

Meanwhile, Ukraine will commemorate the Holodomor victims on Nov. 28.  The Kyiv administration will light up 30,000 candles on the slopes of the hills facing the memorial to the Holodomor victims. The candles will burn for 16 hours, city officials say.  In a related move, Ukraine will remember the famine victims with a minute of silence at 16.00 on November 28.

In 2006, Verkhovna Rada recognized the 1932-1933 famine as the genocide of Ukrainians. According to various estimates, the death toll from the Holodomor stands at between 3 and 7 million.
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U.S.-Ukraine Business Council (USUBC): http://www.usubc.org

 

By Rostyslav Khotin, BBC Ukrainian Service, UK, Thu, Nov 26, 2009
 
KYIV - A statue of a politician considered to be one of the main instigators of the man-made famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s, has been demolished.

 

The authorities tore down the statue of the Communist leader of Ukraine when it was part of the former Soviet Union, Hryhoriy Petrovsky. It was carried out just days before Ukraine commemorates the victims of the famine, known as the Holodomor, or genocide.

 

President Viktor Yushchenko issued a decree ordering the removal of monuments to Soviet leaders, "in memory of the victims of the Holodomor". The statue stood in Kiev's Europe Square - one of the capital's most prestigious locations.

Between seven and ten million people died in what officials say was a deliberate policy pursued by the former Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, to destroy the

Ukrainian peasantry who were opposed to the collectivisation of farming.

 

CLOSE ALLY 
Hryhoriy Petrovsky was an ethnic Ukrainian and a committed member of the Bolsheviks - the movement of professional revolutionaries led by Vladimir Lenin, who seized power in 1917 and went on to found the Soviet Union. Petrovksy saw himself as an internationalist, and rejected Ukrainian nationalism. 
 
He fought against the short-lived Ukrainian People's Republic (1917-1919), which was crushed by the Bolsheviks. Petrovsky became the interior minister of the Russian Soviet Republic before returning to Ukraine in 1919, where he served as prime minister until 1938. He was thought to be a close ally of Stalin, whose purges led to the deaths of thousands of Ukrainian communists.

Local historians think he and the Ukrainian Soviet Communist leader, Lazar Kaganovich, were the main executors of Stalin's policies in Ukraine. Other historians, like Vasyl Marochko, a member of an official commission which investigated the Holodomor, say that when Petrovsky realised the extent of the famine he pleaded twice with Stalin to provide Ukrainians with more food. His requests, they say, went unheeded.

 

INCREASINGLY UNPOPULAR 
Last year, the statue to Petrovsky was defaced by young Ukrainian nationalists who threw paint over it, and wrote in graffiti: "To Petrovsky, the executioner of the Ukrainian people".  Earlier this year, the still-standing Lenin monument on Kiev's main street, Khreshchatyk, was also damaged by the same group. 
 
In that incident, Lenin's nose and one of his hands were broken off with a hammer. Less prominent statues to Ukrainian Soviet communist leaders have been removed before.

 

But Petrovsky, whose body is interred near the Kremlin wall in Moscow, is perhaps the highest profile figure to have his statue demolished. His legacy has not completely vanished, because the central industrial city of Dnipropetrovsk still carries his name, much to the annoyance of some Ukrainians.

"The city should have been renamed when Ukraine gained its independence," says Vadym Skurativsky, a leading Ukrainian writer.

 

ERASING THE PAST 
Ukraine has been slow to remove historical monuments to Soviet leaders, despite the country's first president, Leonid Kravchuk, issuing orders aimed at "de-sovietisation" in the early 1990s.

 

The process has gone much further in the Ukrainian-speaking western regions than in the industrialised, largely Russian-speaking eastern regions.
The Holodomor has emerged as a contentious issue in Ukraine's relations with Russia.

Moscow insists that other republics, particularly southern Russia and Kazakhstan, also suffered from famine during the 1930s. It rejects the assertion from Ukraine's leadership that there was a deliberate policy of anti-Ukrainian "genocide".

But Ukrainian historians point to the widespread use of Soviet interior ministry troops to requisition desperately needed food, as well as the ban imposed on the movement of peasants to the cities. The commemorations on Saturday will be marked by church services all over Ukraine, the laying of wreaths, and a gathering of Ukraine's leaders at a recently completed monument to the victims on a hillside location in Kiev.

LINK: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8380433.stm

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5.  ‘ARE YOU LISTENING, THE NEW YORK TIMES?’
Truth, and an informed public, are the linchpin of a free society

 

The Big Issue in Scotland, Glasgow, Scotland, Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009 
 
GLASGOW - The truth was everything to Gareth Jones. The Barry-born Welsh investigative journalist led a short but highly eventful life that ended in his murder in the wilds of Mongolia in 1935 aged 29. It was the price he paid for his reportage in Communist Russia and Nazi Germany in the 1930s, as he selflessly helped expose one of the gravest crimes against humanity the world has ever seen.

Unravelling the ultimate legacy of Gareth Jones has only just begun. In his lifetime his work was cruelly discredited by other journalists, jealous at his connections and incredulous that the gravity of what he reported could possibly be true.

Jones’ picaresque career includes the time he shared a plane with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels in February 1933, hours after Hitler was made Chancellor of Germany. Jones later interviewed the Nazi propaganda minister after a hysterical, 25,000-strong rally in Frankfurt.

He also became a personal aide to former Prime Minister David Lloyd George, aged only 25, and was once photographed alongside shamed US president Herbert Hoover outside the White House. Jones could also count the wife of Lenin and American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst among his interviewees.

But his single greatest achievement was almost single-handedly exposing to the world the brutal reality of Josef Stalin’s regime, when he covertly travelled to the Ukraine in the early 1930s to report on The Great Famine (also known as the Holodomor) which killed an estimated five million of the Communist dictator’s countrymen.

For the first time ever, Jones’ many diaries are on public display to help cast new light on the personality and career of a man who, in the words of his friend Lloyd George, “died because he knew too much.”

Nigel Linsan Colley, great nephew of Gareth Jones and the person who’s done more than anyone to resurrect Jones’ memory, is keen to shine a light on his great uncle’s achievements.  “I think these diaries were destined to resurrect Gareth’s memory,” Colley says of the pencilled notes found in a dusty old suitcase in the house of Jones’ elder sister in Barry in 1990. “I think even [when he wrote them] he understood how important they would one day become.

“We have the benefit of hindsight and history, but Gareth was living it. There is great serendipity in his story and it’s one that proves that the pen was mightier than the Soviet sword.”

Jones’ diaries are on display until next month in the Wren Library at Cambridge University’s Trinity College, where he was once a student. Colley says there are no firm plans to hold an exhibition of Jones’ work in his native Wales, but the day is surely inching closer.

The National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth, which already houses many of Jones’ documents, says it has no immediate plans to hold an exhibition of his life and work. But the interest in the journalist’s work will reach a new level when Ukrainian director Sergey Bukovsky’s documentary about the Holodomor, The Living, gets its Welsh premiere at Cardiff’s Chapter Arts Centre in January.

Born Gareth Richard Vaughn Jones on August 13 1905 in Barry, Jones quickly demonstrated a highly inquisitive and academic flare. Graduating from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth in 1926 with a first class honours degree in French he went on to Trinity College Cambridge in 1929 and gained the same result in French, German and Russian.

But he was flung into the world of work at a time of devastating financial upheaval. Unable to find regular work as a journalist during the Great Depression, Jones, through close family friend and fellow Welshman Thomas Jones, was introduced to the former Prime Minister David Lloyd George. His talents quickly earned him an internship.

Jones’ close association with Lloyd George’s Liberal Party in the early 1930s was the making of him. “From then on, wherever he turned up in the world he would be granted interviews with extremely powerful people,” Colley explains.

Despite his fascination with Westminster, Jones’ true passion was travel. It was during three visits to Russia between 1930 and 1933 that he uncovered a genocide being inflicted on the Ukrainian people by Stalin’s Five Year Plan.

His diaries, and the subsequent newspaper reports in the Manchester Guardian and New York Evening Post, made him the first Western journalist to uncover the horror of Holodomor – Stalin’s devastating “manmade famine” in the Ukraine during 1932-33, which claimed the lives of millions.

Jones’ diary entries exposed the daily horror of people forced to starve in a country that in 1932 produced its largest ever wheat harvest: “Everywhere was the cry, ‘there is no bread. We are dying,’” his reports read.

“This cry came from every part of Russia, from the Volga, Siberia, White Russia, the North Caucasus [and] central Asia. I stayed overnight in a village where there used to be 200 oxen and where there now are six. The peasants were eating the cattle fodder and had only a month’s supply left. They told me that many had already died of hunger. Two soldiers came to arrest a thief. They warned me against travel by night as there were too many ‘starving’ desperate men.”

Holodomor is now recognised by the Ukrainian government as a crime against humanity. But after exposing Stalin’s purposeful starvation policy against the Ukrainians, Jones became a marked man who would eventually pay the ultimate price for the success and potency of his work.

“Gareth saw himself as a British citizen, ultimately,” Colley explains. “Perhaps he felt that was enough to protect him from danger. He knew he was likely to have been caught by the Soviet secret police, but he was a teetotal, devout Welsh non-conformist and for him, the truth mattered.

“I think he felt it was absolutely wicked what was happening and that he had been given this duty to tell the story no matter what personal risk he put himself under.”

Jones’ exposé of the Soviet government’s persecution of its own people eventually led to him being banned from Russia altogether in 1933. It proved a decisive moment; in less than two years, he was dead.

Jones’ Ukrainian stories were mercilessly discredited in the US media, which, perhaps jealous of his contacts, tried to smear the young Welshman with claims he’d fabricated them. He died knowing his integrity had been undermined.

“He loved writing letters to the newspapers,” Colley says. “He enjoyed having an argument, it was almost a game to him. But I think he was disappointed to be shunned after his stories were printed and much of his work was then overlooked.”

Jones’ ability to be at the centre of a story has acquired legendary status. Within days of interviewing Joseph Goebbels in Frankfurt on February 24, 1933 in a five star hotel, he was sleeping on bug-infested floors of peasants in the Ukraine as he attempted to expose the horror of Holodomor.

He interviewed the Nazi propaganda minister just three days before the burning of the Reichstag in Berlin; an act that changed Germany forever. In a chilling warning of what was to come, Goebbels told Jones the Nazis would never surrender their stranglehold on power.

“It’s almost prophetic how Gareth was always in the right place at the right time,” Colley says. “But of course, his death was very much a case of the exact opposite being true.”

The circumstances of Jones’ death are still shrouded in mystery. Question marks linger over who was with him in Mongolia and why. The identity of Jones’ murderers may never actually be discovered.

Colley says there is “absolutely no doubt whatsoever” that he was murdered at the request of Soviet agents. On August 12, 1935 he was kidnapped while travelling with a German journalist “friend” named Herbert Mueller in Mongolia.

Both Mueller and Jones were taken by a group of Chinese bandits, but Mueller was released unharmed two days afterwards. It has since emerged that Mueller was a Communist spy employed by Soviet agents supplying arms for Chairman Mao’s Long March in 1934-36.

According to Colley, even the vehicle Mueller and Jones travelled in was owned by the Soviet secret police. While there’s no conclusive proof Mueller sold his friend to the Russians, Mueller certainly had the connections and wherewithal to organise Jones’ death. That he died because of what he knew seems beyond doubt.

“He was an enemy of the state,” Colley says. “He would not have been murdered without the say so from someone in Moscow because of his close association with Lloyd George. I just wonder what would have happened had he survived. Would he have become editor of The Times or Churchill’s interpreter at Yalta?”

Gareth Jones’ death aged 29 denied the world a fine journalist who, had he lived, would likely have gone on to report further atrocities happening in war torn Europe in the 1940s. The fact that he never realised his full potential still leaves a bitter taste.

Exactly a year ago this week, the Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko posthumously awarded Gareth Jones and another British journalist, the late broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge, the Ukranian Order of Freedom for their “exceptional services” to the Ukrainian people in exposing Holodomor.

The day that Wales brings home Jones’ diaries and recognises him as a national hero, and arguably the finest journalist it’s ever produced, must surely come soon.

LINK: http://www.bigissuescotland.com/features/view/186
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7.  GARETH JONES DIARIES: PERTURBING TRUTH IN CAMBRIDGE

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