Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-10-22-Speech-3-448"
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"en.20081022.24.3-448"2
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".
Madam President, Commissioner, I speak to you as someone who has spent many years of his life in Ukraine, who has lived there and who is therefore, naturally, very emotionally involved.
There is not one reason, not one excuse for qualifying or justifying the famine in 1932 and 1933. It affected Ukraine, Russia, especially areas along the Volga, the Don and the Kuban, Western Siberia, the Southern Urals and the northern part of Kazakhstan. Millions of people of various nationalities, Ukrainians, Russians, Kazakhs, Jews, Germans, Belarussians, Tartars and many others, starved to death. We must commemorate these victims and clearly state that this famine was the expression and result of an inhumane policy, of the crime of exporting cereals while allowing one’s own people to die of starvation.
Why then can I not agree with this resolution? Firstly, because this resolution links this catastrophe and this crime to Ukraine and people of Ukrainian nationality alone. As I said at the beginning, this does not reflect the historical truth. Anyone who does not consider the other socialist republics of the Soviet Union and the other various nationalities at the same time is guilty of racism and of contempt for the suffering of all those affected.
Secondly, this resolution recognises the Holodomor as genocide. Genocide is defined as extermination according to ethnic criteria. This applies in particular to the Holocaust. To equate one with the other undermines the argument of the singularity of the national socialist crime of the annihilation of Jews in Europe, the recognition of which has, to date, been the subject of broad democratic consensus.
The severity needed in condemning these events in the Soviet Union requires no such equation. I am convinced that this was the main reason for the declaration by the Israeli ambassador to Ukraine, Mrs Kalay-Kleitman, who stated in an interview with the
that Israel cannot recognise the Holodomor as an act of ethnic genocide.
Thirdly, 10 December 2008 marks the 60
anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Human rights are universal and indivisible. You cannot take a selective, circumstantial or expedient approach to them. The 20
century saw a devastating multitude of horrendous crimes which are not comparable but which nonetheless caused the death of millions of innocent people: the First World War, the fascist invasion, the aggression of Japan towards China and Korea, the atomic bombs dropped by the USA on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Stalin’s policy against his own people, the ravages of various colonial powers in their spheres of influence, the terror of the Khmer Rouge, the slaughter of Tutsi and Hutus. This horrifying list is almost endless. The European Parliament should have an interest in castigating such inhumanity in all its permutations.
Fourthly, there should never be starvation ever again – either for political or for economic reasons. In view of the billions given to aid the banks, Ingeborg Schäuble, the outgoing chairwoman of
has called for a rescue package against world hunger. EUR 14 billion a year are needed for agriculture in development countries in order to achieve the Millennium Goals and halve the number of hungry people by 2015. In 2007, this figure stood at 923 million people.
We must do everything so that hunger is eradicated like the plague."@en1
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"Serkalo Nedeli"1
"Welthungerhilfe"1
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