[Ohio UZO News] NYT (Ukraine Famine); State Dept; Chicago Tribune

[Deychak, Orest]

  <javascript:void(0)> 

Metropolitan Desk; SECTB

75 Years Later, Survivor Helps Commemorate Ukrainian Famine 

By PETER DUFFY 

19 December 2007

Late Edition - Final

Seventy-five years ago, in a small village in eastern Ukraine, Daria
Schulha Kira recalls huddling with her three siblings as Communist Party
officials ransacked their home looking for grain. ''Your government
needs your food,'' she remembers the armed men shouting. ''Then they
took iron bars and poked in the walls and the floors looking for
anything they could find.'' 

But they didn't have any food. Ms. Kira, now 85 and living in an
apartment on East Houston Street in Manhattan, was living through one of
the worst periods of Stalin's brutal reign in the Soviet Union. 

It is widely recognized that the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33, which
killed 3 million to 6 million people, resulted from the Soviet
government's policies, said Alexander J. Motyl, a political science
professor at Rutgers University who has written extensively on
20th-century Ukraine. Without the government requisitioning grain at
levels far beyond the capacity of the Ukrainian peasantry to fulfill,
Professor Motyl said, there would have been no famine. 

Even when the scale of the suffering became apparent, Soviet officials
continued to insist that unattainable grain quotas be met, refused to
open up grain reserves or ask for international aid, and prohibited
starving peasants from moving into cities or other Soviet republics. 

The New York Ukrainian community, long centered in the East Village, has
begun commemorating the 75th anniversary of what it calls the Holodomor,
or death by hunger. For the start of a year of activities, scores of
Ukrainian-Americans marched in November from St. George Ukrainian
Catholic Church on East Seventh Street to St. Patrick's Cathedral in
Midtown for a requiem Mass. 

Few famine survivors with clear memories of the tragedy remain, so the
bright-eyed Ms. Kira has necessarily become an object of much attention.
On Nov. 27, she was the only survivor who appeared at a conference of
scholars and diplomats at the United Nations. Ms. Kira said she relished
her role. ''I want the world to know what happened,'' she said. 

This is also a pressing mission of the Ukrainian government, which is
dedicating 2008 to compiling testimonies, supporting scholarly research,
restoring burial places and planning a national museum. Ukraine's
president, Viktor A. Yushchenko, has spoken of the importance of
recovering memories of an event that had long been denied by the Soviet
Union. 

Yushchenko's government is also leading a drive to have the United
Nations declare the famine an act of genocide, seeing it as part of
Stalin's continuing effort to destroy any trace of Ukrainian national
feeling. While some scholars question a genocide designation by arguing
that Stalin was singling out the peasant class rather than Ukrainians or
that the famine also touched other areas of the Soviet Union, few are as
vociferous in their opposition as the current Russian government. In a
Nov. 19 statement released by the Foreign Ministry, it said Ukraine was
engaged in ''a one-sided distortion of history to suit modern
opportunist political-ideological directives.'' 

Surrounded by dolls dressed in Ukrainian folk costumes, Orthodox
Christian icons and old family photographs in her apartment, Ms. Kira
said that Stalin ''wanted to destroy Ukraine.'' As proof, she added that
Russians were resettled in the homes of Ukrainians who had died in her
village, Tajky. She told a harrowing story of being orphaned before the
famine and then struggling to survive its deprivations with her
siblings, the oldest of whom was a 17-year-old brother. ''We went into
the forest and searched for mushrooms,'' she said. ''We ate every kind
of mushroom, except for the poisonous ones. We even ate the ones that
were full of bugs. Thank God for mushrooms.'' 

She said she remembers sneaking into ''golden'' wheat fields to steal a
few stalks, which she would thresh into flour with a small millstone
hidden at home. It was an act that could have resulted in jail time or
even execution. 

In a 1986 book about the famine, ''The Harvest of Sorrow,'' Robert
Conquest tells of a woman sentenced to 10 years of forced labor for
gathering 70 pounds of wheat stalks for her family. Ms. Kira ruefully
recalled when the combines arrived to cull the 1932 wheat harvest. After
the machines completed the job, ''everyone who could walk'' picked
through the bare fields for anything that might have been left behind. 

And death was everywhere, she said. ''I remember the dead bodies looked
like skeletons with big stomachs,'' she said. Cannibalism was not
unknown. She told a macabre tale about a neighbor who ate her dead
children and talked to their bones in hopes that they would return to
life. Young people were afraid to walk into town for fear of being
abducted by people crazed by hunger, she said. 

Ms. Kira was lucky enough to survive the famine. A decade later, she was
forced to confront the Nazis, who took her to a labor camp in Austria.
She eventually made it to the United States, settling in the East
Village in 1954. She vows never to leave the still-thriving pocket of
Ukrainian churches, social clubs and restaurants. 

The neighborhood is happy to have her. ''She holds a special place in
the community's heart,'' said Tamara Olexy, executive director of the
Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, located on Second Avenue.
''She's able to bring a human face to a tragedy that is so little known
throughout the world.''

U.S. Department of State

Daily Press Briefing
Tom Casey, Deputy Spokesman
Washington, DC
December 18, 2007

...

QUESTION: Tom, do you have any thoughts on the fact that the Ukraine,
the Ukrainian parliament has finally elected a prime minister after a
long dispute and the fact also that the opposition refused to take part
in the ultimate vote there?

MR. CASEY: Well, first of all, we welcome the appointment of Prime
Minister Tymoshenko and we look forward to working with her and the new
Ukrainian Government. As you've said, it's been awhile since the
election, so it's a good thing that there is now a government in place.
And we certainly hope that that government will continue the work that
the President and others have set out for Ukraine, which is to
strengthen its democratic institutions and also proceed with the process
of economic reform. Certainly, it's a positive step forward to have a
government in place now. And again, we look forward to working with the
new Prime Minister and her team.

...

Chicago Tribune

News

Ukraine re-embraces Orange Revolution; 2nd try at coalition rule for
Tymoshenko 

By Maria Danilova, Associated Press 

19 December 2007

KIEV, Ukraine

Parliament elected the fiery Yulia Tymoshenko prime minister Tuesday by
the narrowest possible margin in a striking political comeback likely to
strengthen Ukraine's ties to the West and aggravate tensions with
Russia. 

Now the big question is whether the 47-year-old heroine of the 2004
Orange Revolution, which split the country between those who favor close
ties to Moscow and those who seek greater integration with Europe, can
hang onto her job. 

Tuesday marked the second time Tymoshenko has won the prime minister's
post. Her first stint ended after seven months, when she was fired by
her Orange Revolution partner Viktor Yushchenko. 

Speaking shortly before Tuesday's vote, Tymoshenko said it is critical
that the two political parties put their differences aside. 

"Today's vote is a moment of truth for the democratic coalition," she
told parliament. 

Moscow openly endorsed the Orange Revolution's major foe, Viktor
Yanukovych, in the 2004 presidential contest -- and the Kremlin
denounced the results as part of an effort by the West to weaken and
surround Russia. 

\ Moscow reacts diplomatically 

But Moscow reacted with soft words Tuesday, welcoming the prospect of a
Cabinet taking shape in Ukraine. 

Tymoshenko outraged the Kremlin in April, when the American magazine
Foreign Affairs published an article in which she urged Western nations
to oppose what she called Moscow's effort to restore control of its
"lost empire." 

More recently, she vowed to get rid of a company, half-owned by Russia's
state-owned Gazprom, that acts as a middleman in Russian natural gas
sales to Ukraine. She has called the sales arrangement "corrupt." 

"There cannot be any mediators on the gas market," she said Tuesday. 

Tymoshenko received 226 votes -- the minimum required for confirmation
by the 450-member parliament -- from deputies in her bloc and
Yushchenko's party. 

"I congratulate everybody who voted for the democratic forces, and those
who did not -- we will make sure that we are their team too," Tymoshenko
said, with a triumphant smile. "What we have to do now is show society
high-quality results." 

But the narrow vote was an ominous sign of how difficult it will be for
the Yushchenko-Tymoshenko coalition to govern. 

The Party of Regions, led by the Orange Revolution's old adversary,
ex-Prime Minister Yanukovych, is expected to challenge Tymoshenko and
Yushchenko's allies in parliament. 

Yanukovych demonstrated his skill at parliamentary politics last year by
wooing his opponents in the legislature to join in a coalition with the
Party of Regions. 

Tymoshenko and Yushchenko have a history of tensions. Both have shown
interest in running in the 2010 presidential elections. 

Viktor Luhovyk, a political analyst with the Dragon Capital investment
house, said that while the Orange leaders have agreed to share power for
now, their partnership is unstable. 

"There can be no guarantee the promises made today will be kept in a
year from now," he said. 

Party of Regions lawmaker Hanna Herman predicted the coalition would
quickly fall apart, saying, "The earlier they come, the earlier they'll
leave." 

Tymoshenko was one of the most energetic and recognizable figures during
the Orange Revolution, the 2004 mass street protests that led to
Yushchenko's election as president. 

Demonstrations broke out after Yanukovych was declared the winner of an
election that a court later ruled had been fraudulent. The Supreme Court
annulled the vote, and Yushchenko won a rerun. 

Yushchenko struggled to rule, unable to form a stable alliance with
Tymoshenko, while Yanukovych refused to give up. He returned as prime
minister in 2006. 

Yushchenko this year accused Yanukovych of trying to usurp power and
called early elections. In September's parliamentary vote, his
supporters and those of Tymoshenko's won a narrow majority of seats.
Weeks later they agreed to form a coalition. 

Tuesday's vote was a laborious process in which each lawmaker was called
to raise his hand and voice support or opposition to Tymoshenko. 

The process was adopted following charges by Tymoshenko's supporters
that last week's vote -- in which she got 225 votes, one short of
victory -- was sabotaged when someone tampered with parliament's
vote-tallying machine. 

\ U.S. welcomes outcome 

U.S. Ambassador William Taylor on Tuesday called Tymoshenko's election a
vote for reform. 

"It's great to have a prime minister that we can now deal with, and we
hope that this is the first step toward forming a reform-minded
government," he said. "We hope there will be a stable government." 

Yushchenko has consistently advocated moving this nation of 47 million
closer to the West, pushing for quick membership in NATO and the EU. 

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://clevelanduzo.org/pipermail/uzonews_clevelanduzo.org/attachments/20071219/91d20ac4/attachment.html 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 1923 bytes
Desc: image001.gif
Url : http://clevelanduzo.org/pipermail/uzonews_clevelanduzo.org/attachments/20071219/91d20ac4/attachment.gif