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Friday, June 08, 2007

Support Bill C-450 on Recognizing the Holodomor as Genocide

The League of Ukrainian Canadians asks you to sign their petition, called "Support Bill C-450 on Recognizing the Holodomor as Genocide."

This Private Members Bill was presented in the House of Commons on June 6 by Borys Wrzesnewskyj, MP for Etobicoke Centre.

The purpose of the Bill is to establish the fourth Saturday in November as a day of remembrance for the estimated seven million to ten million Ukrainians [who were starved to death in 1932-33] by the Soviet regime under Stalin. ...

Part of the Soviet strategy also involved suppressing, distorting and wiping out all information about the Ukrainian famine, now and into the future to be known as the Holodomor-Genocide.

By enacting this legislation ... Canada will reaffirm her core values of defending human rights and condemning ... genocide.

Read the full transcript in Hansard here. Sign the petition here.

4 comments:

pumpernickel said...

It's nice to see this being brought forward in a non-partisan way that dignifies and commemorates the sacrifices of the millions of innocent people who were killed by the Soviet regime.

Pawlina said...

Well said, pumpernickel.

Such commomarations should be non-partisan, so that Canadians across the entire political spectrum are reminded of what can happen when politics becomes more important than people.

Breanne said...

We spoke about this in my Ukrainian class at the university. Somehow everyone learns about the Holocaust in school - not that I'm dumping on its importance, because it is important, it's just that the genocide in Ukraine was just as bad and equally important for people to know about. I was glad our teacher, Iryna Konstantiuk made us do history projects. It really opened up my eyes.

Pawlina said...

It was in university that I learned about it too.

I first became aware of the Holocaust, however, in high school, when I checked a book out of the school library called "The Diary of Ann Frank."

Incidentally, the school was run by Ukrainian Catholic nuns.

This certainly illustrates how knowledge of the Holodomor had been suppressed for so long.

It's time for that to change, and for the world to face the fact that the Holocaust was patterned after genocides like the Holodomor and the Armenian massacre of 1915.

And, more importantly, to recognize that the killing will not stop until we start to learn the lessons of history.

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