A court in Baku, Azerbijan, has sentenced two journalists to hard labour following their conviction for libel. The charges related to articles they published in 2007 regarding alleged corruption in government circles.
The battle over the legacy of the Ukranian famine threatens to divide the country, writes Michael Foley
So often that which politicians hope will unite their countries does exactly the opposite. The legacy of the famines which devasted Ukraine in the 1930s might do just that. Ukraine’s President Viktor Yushchenko is to campaign internationally for the famine, or the Holodomor, as it is called in Ukrainian, that killed possibly as many as 10 million people in 1932-3 to be recognised by the United Nations as genocide. Mr Yushkenko is hoping to complete his task by November, 2008, to mark 75th anniversary of the Holodomor.
In November last year a law was tabled in the Ukrainian parliament in November making it illegal to deny the Holodomor.
The famine of 1932 and 1933 was a man-made one. Unlike, for instance, the Irish Famine of the 1840s, no crops failed. The Holodomor was the result of Stalin’s farm collectivisation programme. When in 1932 the grain harvest did not meet imposed targets, Communist party activists travelled to Ukraine’s villages and confiscated all the grain and bread, and all other foodstuffs, ensuring starvation. Watchtowers were erected in order to make sure no peasants tried to take a few ears of corn.
The confiscations continued into 1933, with devastating results. It is uncertain how many died, and most Ukrainians knew little of the famine due to the extreme secrecy of the Soviet period, but with records now open and historical investigations taking place, it is believed as many as 10 million people may have perished.
Truth, notoriously, is the first casualty of war. The truth about the fate of Armenians living under Ottoman rule in 1915 may not be dead yet, but it has certainly wilted in the glare of Washington lobby politics. What should be the subject of solemn commemoration, has instead become the subject of a Mexican standoff, with a plethora of international actors promising dire recriminations if their own view of that tragic history does not hold sway.
A Turkish government at odds with its own military, a democratic US Congress unmindful of the Presidency administration, America’s Armenian community and other ethnic lobbies, the small Armenian community left in Turkey, Armenia itself, even the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the Kurdish administration in northern Iraq have all drawn their pistols. The immediate cause of this complex matrix of bluff and double bluff is a decision by the foreign affairs committee of the US House of Representatives to recommend the passing of a resolution that would recognise an Armenian genocide.