Support to the people of Ukraine was this week in a meeting at the Norwegian Storting with a cross-party group of Storting politicians.
Photo: Arne Ivar Mikalsen. From right: Grunde Almeland, parliamentary representative Venstre, Dr. Liliia Honcharevych, Chargé' d'affaires, Embassy of Ukraine in Norway and Per-Kaare Holdal, s2pU
The members of the Storting were:
- Åsmund Aukrust, parliamentary representative of the Labor Party
- Nils Ole Foshaug, parliamentary representative of the Labor Party
- Grunde Almeland, parliamentary representative Venstre
- Dag Inge Ulstein, parliamentary representative and deputy leader of KrF
- Christian Tybring-Gjedde, parliamentary representative for the Progress Party
- Arne Ivar Mikalsen, Group leader, county council in Nordland, municipal council and board member in Hadsel municipality
- Jørn Wichne Pedersen, political advisor for the Labor Party's parliamentary group
- Malin Eidsvåg Østevik, political advisor for the Liberal Party's parliamentary group
- Alexander Zlatanos Ibsen, senior foreign policy adviser, Conservative Party's parliamentary group
- Johan Brox, political advisor for Rødt's parliamentary group
From right: Oksana Huk, s2pU, bishop of the Lutheran Church in Great Britain and ambassador for s2pU, Tor Berger Jørgensen, Arne Ivar Mikalsen, Group leader, county council in Nordland, municipal council and board member in Hadsel municipality and Alexander Zlatanos Ibsen, senior foreign policy adviser, Conservative Party's parliamentary group
The agenda
- Opening - Dr. Liliia Honcharevych, Chargé' d'affaires, Embassy of Ukraine in Norway and Per-Kaare Holdal, s2pU
- Facts about the Holodomor, Oksana Huk, s2pU
- The Church and the Holodomor - bishop of the Lutheran Church in Great Britain and ambassador for s2pU, Tor Berger Jørgensen
- Why the municipalities of Lyngdal and Farsund recognized the Holodomor 15.12.22, Jan Kristensen, mayor of Lyngdal municipality
- Call to parliaments of all nations to support Ukraine by recognizing the Holodomor by Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba - Dr. Liliia Honcharevych, Chargé' d'affaires, Embassy of Ukraine in Norway
- Recent acknowledgments of the Holodomor. Process further for us in s2pU - Per-Kaare Holdal, leader in s2pU
Åsmund Aukrust, the parliamentary representative of the Labor Party (in the middle in the photo) who hosted the meeting, thanked for the presentations and commented that there is great interest in the topic throughout the Storting. - We are following this up on a cross-political basis because this is an important issue and there is clearly a need for information on the topic.
- The Holodomor took place before the Genocide Convention and the Statute of the International Criminal Court were adopted, and thus before the international crime of genocide was firmly defined in international law. It is therefore difficult to attach the definition "genocide" to events that took place before the relevant norms of international law were adopted - and with retroactive effect on these. It is also primarily the task of the judiciary to determine whether a serious international crime has taken place. This stance has been confirmed by various governments repeatedly, writes Eivind Vad Petersson, State Secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to TV2.
Our immediate reaction is that it is not at all difficult and no task for the judiciary. This is a task for politicians who take responsibility and have feeling for the tragedy that was inflicted on the Ukrainian population.
And why won't Norway?
The official justification is that no court has determined that this was genocide. The fact that the Genocide Convention was only introduced in 1948 does not prevent people from saying that the Holocaust was genocide. Then they say that this must be left to lawyers and historians.
But it is not their responsibility to respond to genocide. It is the responsibility of our politicians and the state. It is also the responsibility of our politicians and the state to prevent future genocide and one does this by talking about it, spreading knowledge about it, and not least recognizing genocide when our historian's present documentation.
The Holodomor was the first genocide that was methodically planned and carried out by depriving the people who were food producers of their sustenance (to survive). What is particularly appalling is that the withholding of food was used as a genocidal weapon and that it was done in a region of the world known as 'Europe's breadbasket', writes prof. Andrea Graziosi, University of Naples.
We base our statements on leading historians and other scholars, such as James Mace, Robert Conquest, Timothy Snyder, Norman Naimark, Anne Applebaum, who has devoted considerable time to studying the Holodomor and have published widely on the subject, have all concluded that it was genocide.
At the height of the Holodomor in June 1933, Ukrainians were dying at a rate of 28,000 people per day. About 3.9 million Ukrainians died during the Holodomor in 1932-33 (as established in a 2015 study by a team of demographers from the Ukrainian Institute for Demographic and Social Studies, and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill). While Ukrainians were dying, the Soviet state obtained 4.27 million tons of grain from Ukraine in 1932, enough to feed at least 12 million people for an entire year. Soviet records show that in January 1933 there were enough grain reserves in the USSR to feed well over 10 million people. The government could have organized emergency aid and could have accepted help from outside the Soviet Union. Rejecting foreign aid and condemning those who offered it, Moscow instead exported Ukraine's grain and other foodstuffs abroad for cash.
In 1932 and 1933, millions of Ukrainians were killed in the Holodomor, a man-made famine engineered by the Soviet government of Joseph Stalin. The main victims of the Holodomor (literally "death inflicted by starvation") were peasants and rural villagers, who made up about 80 percent of Ukraine's population in the 1930s. Although it is impossible to determine the exact number of victims of the Ukrainian genocide, most estimates by scholars range from approximately 3.4 million to 7 million (with some estimates going higher). The most detailed demographic studies estimate the death toll at 3.9 million. Historians agree that, as with other genocides, the exact number will never be known.
In the late 1920s, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin consolidated his control over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Feeling threatened by Ukraine's strengthening cultural autonomy, Stalin took measures to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry and the Ukrainian intellectual and cultural elite to prevent them from seeking independence for Ukraine.
To prevent "Ukrainian national counter-revolution", Stalin initiated mass-scale political repression through widespread threats, arrests and imprisonment. Thousands of Ukrainian intellectuals, church leaders, and officials of the Ukrainian Communist Party who had supported pro-Ukrainian politics were executed by the Soviet regime. This is called cleansing and is not difficult to define as part of genocide. Historians have recorded around 4,000 local uprisings against collectivization, taxation, terror and violence by Soviet authorities in the early 1930s. The Soviet secret police (GPU) and the Red Army ruthlessly suppressed these protests. Tens of thousands of peasants were arrested for participating in anti-Soviet activities, shot or deported to labor camps. The elimination of the so-called "kulaks" was an integral part of collectivization. These mass repressions, along with the manipulation of state-controlled grain purchases and collectivization through the destruction of Ukrainian rural society, set the stage for total terror—a terror of starvation, the Holodomor.
By the Ukrainians and others who register that Norway does not recognize the genocide, it is perceived as a denial. The Stalin regime and later Putin deny that the Holodomor was a genocide. It is not about legal twists or excuses, but about political responsibility and respect.
From left: Bishop of the Lutheran Church in Great Britain and ambassador for s2pU, Tor Berger Jørgensen, Oksana Huk, s2pU, Arne Ivar Mikalsen, Group leader, county council in Nordland, municipal council and board member in Hadsel municipality, dr. Liliia Honcharevych, Chargé' d'affaires, Embassy of Ukraine in Norway and Per-Kaare Holdal, s2pU and Mayor of Lyngdal Jan Kristensen
Bishop Jørgensen presented the church's cruel treatment during the Stalin regime and especially during the Holodomor period 1932-1933: - Raphael Lemkin, who created the term Genocide and "father" of the UN Convention, considered the suppression of the Orthodox Church to be part of the genocide against Ukrainians. Collectivization meant not only the "robbing" of land from peasants, but also the closing of churches, the burning of icons and the arrest and deportation to Siberia and the killing of priests. Stalin cut state financial support to the church and secularized church schools, Bishop Jørgensen said: - The truth about what happened to the Ukrainian church during the Holodomor must come out, it is very important. He also called for involvement in this matter from the Norwegian Church.
- We asked the Storting the question: What is important here? Recognition of the Holodomor is not about legal twists, it is about historical and political responsibility to prevent the repetition of such terrible crimes in the future, said Per-Kaare Holdal, head of Support to the people of Ukraine.
- We have to restore historical justice - recognize the Holodomor of 1932-1933 as a genocide of the Ukrainian people and prevent Russia from further committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, said Dr. Liliia Honcharevych, Chargé' d'affaires at the Embassy of Ukraine in Norway.
Grunde K. Almeland said in a comment as a summary that he was happy that they received this presentation on this important topic also from the perspective of today's tragic situation. - The importance of generating knowledge about the Holodomor in Norway is something we also see. This topic will be taken up further from our side, he promised.
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