[Ohio UZO News] Ukraine: WP (2); Ukraine Famine resolutions (2)

[Deychak, Orest]

The Washington Post

Finding Common Ground With Russia

By Henry A. Kissinger
Tuesday, July 8, 2008; A15

Excerpt re: Ukraine:

...The issue of Ukraine goes to the heart of both sides' perceptions of
the nature of international affairs. America sees the situation in terms
of overcoming a potential military threat. For Russia, the question of
relations with Ukraine is, above all, about coming to terms with a
painful, historic upheaval. 

Genuine independence for Ukraine is essential for a peaceful
international system and must be unambiguously supported by the United
States. Creating close political ties between the European Union and
Ukraine, including E.U. membership, is important. But the movement of
the Western security system to the approaches to Moscow brings home
Russia's decline in a way that is bound to generate emotions that will
inhibit the solving of all other issues. With NATO accepting the
principle of Ukrainian membership, there is no urgency to accelerate the
implementation. ...

Link to entire Kissinger commentary:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/07/AR200807
0702218.html

 

Lengthy reference to the Ukrainian sailor Myroslav Medvid case:

The Washington Post

The Jesse Helms You Should Remember 

Marc Thiessen 

7 July 2008

FINAL

A13

With the passing of Sen. Jesse Helms, the media have demonstrated one
final time that they never fully understood the power or impact of this
great man. Consider, for example, The Post's obituary of Helms; here are
some things you would not learn about his life and legacy by reading it:

As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Helms led the
successful effort to bring Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into
the NATO alliance. He secured passage of bipartisan legislation to
protect our men and women in uniform from the International Criminal
Court. He won overwhelming approval for his legislation to support the
Cuban people in their struggle against a tyrant. He won majority support
in the Senate for his opposition to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
He helped secure passage of the National Missile Defense Act and stopped
the Clinton administration from concluding a new anti-ballistic missile
agreement in its final months in office -- paving the way for today's
deployment of America's first defenses against ballistic missile attack.
He helped secure passage of the Iraq Liberation Act, which expressed
strong bipartisan support for regime change in Baghdad. He secured
broad, bipartisan support to reorganize the State Department and bring
much-needed reform to the United Nations, and he became the first
legislator from any nation to address the U.N. Security Council -- a
speech few in that chamber will forget.

Watching this record of achievement unfold, columnist William Safire
wrote in 1997: "Jesse Helms, bete noire of knee-jerk liberals . . . is
turning out to be the most effectively bipartisan chairman of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee since Arthur Vandenberg. . . . Let us see if
he gets the credit for statesmanship that he deserves from a
striped-pants establishment." This weekend, we got our answer.

What his critics could not appreciate is that, by the time he left
office, Jesse Helms had become a mainstream conservative. And it was not
because Helms had moved toward the mainstream -- it was because the
mainstream moved toward him.

When Helms arrived in Washington in 1973, conservatives were a minority
not only in our nation's capital but also within the Republican Party.
He often took to the floor as the lonely opposition in 99-to-1 votes. By
the time he became chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in 1995,
Republicans were in the majority in the Senate and conservatives were in
control of the Republican Party. And Helms was winning floor votes by
wide bipartisan majorities.

What made Helms stand out was his willingness to stand up for his
beliefs before they were widely held -- even if it meant challenging
those closest to him. In 1985, his dear friend Ronald Reagan was
preparing for his first summit with Mikhail Gorbachev when a Ukrainian
sailor named Miroslav Medvid twice jumped off a Soviet ship into the
Mississippi River seeking political asylum. The Soviets insisted that
Medvid had accidentally fallen off -- twice. The State Department did
not want an international incident on the eve of the summit. But Helms
believed it was wrong to send a man back behind the Iron Curtain -- no
matter the cost to superpower diplomacy. He tried to block the ship's
departure by requiring the sailor to appear before the Senate
Agriculture Committee, which he chaired then -- and he had the subpoena
delivered to the ship's unwitting captain in a carton of North Carolina
cigarettes.

Despite Helms's efforts, the ship was allowed to leave for the Soviet
Union with the Ukrainian sailor aboard. Miroslav Medvid was not heard
from again until 15 years later, when he came to Washington to visit the
man who fought so hard for his freedom. I was working at the time on
Helms's Foreign Relations Committee staff and witnessed this emotional
meeting. Yes, Medvid told Helms, he had been trying to escape -- that
was why he joined the Merchant Marine in the first place. When he was
returned to the Soviet Union, he said, he was incarcerated in a mental
hospital for the criminally insane. The KGB tried to drug him, but a
sympathetic nurse injected the drugs into his mattress. Eventually he
was released; today he is a parish priest in his native village in
Ukraine.

In the course of dozens of interrogations, he told Helms, "the KGB
didn't fulfill its desire about what they wanted to do with me. They
were afraid of something," he said, "and now I know what they were
afraid of." They were afraid of Jesse Helms.

President Bush had it right when he said on Friday that "from Central
America to Central Europe and beyond, people remember: In the dark days
when the forces of tyranny seemed on the rise, Jesse Helms took their
side." This is the Jesse Helms that Miroslav Medvid remembers.
Unfortunately, it was not the Jesse Helms written about this weekend.

The writer, the chief White House speechwriter, was Foreign Relations
Committee spokesman for Sen. Jesse Helms from 1995 to 2001.

U.S. House of Representatives Ukraine Famine Resolution Introduced:

HRES 1314 IH 

110th CONGRESS

2d Session

H. RES. 1314

Remembering the 75th anniversary of the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide of
1932-1933 and extending the deepest sympathies of the House of
Representatives to the victims, survivors, and families of this tragedy,
and for other purposes. 

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

June 26, 2008

Mr. LEVIN (for himself, Ms. KAPTUR, Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland, Mr.
GERLACH, Mr. BERMAN, Mr. ANDREWS, Mr. BILIRAKIS, Mr. COSTA, Mr. LINCOLN
DIAZ-BALART of Florida, Mr. ENGEL, Mr. HINCHEY, Mr. LANGEVIN, Mr.
MCCOTTER, Mr. MCDERMOTT, Mr. MCNULTY, Mrs. MILLER of Michigan, Mr.
ROTHMAN, Ms. SCHWARTZ, and Mr. WALZ of Minnesota) submitted the
following resolution; which was referred to the Committee on Foreign
Affairs 

________________________________

RESOLUTION

Remembering the 75th anniversary of the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide of
1932-1933 and extending the deepest sympathies of the House of
Representatives to the victims, survivors, and families of this tragedy,
and for other purposes. 

Whereas in 1932 and 1933, nearly 10 million Ukrainian people perished at
the will of the totalitarian Stalinist government of the former Soviet
Union, which perpetrated a premeditated famine in Ukraine in an effort
to break the nation's resistance to collectivization and communist
occupation; 

Whereas the Soviet Government deliberately confiscated grain harvests
and starved millions of Ukrainian men, women, and children by a policy
of forced collectivization that sought to destroy the nationally
conscious movement for independence; 

Whereas Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin ordered the borders of Ukraine
sealed to prevent anyone from escaping the man-made starvation and
preventing any international food aid that would provide relief to the
starving; 

Whereas Canadian wheat expert Andrew Cairns visited Ukraine in 1932 and
was told that there was no grain `because the government had collected
so much grain and exported it to England and Italy,' while
simultaneously denying food aid to the people of Ukraine; 

Whereas nearly a quarter of the rural population of Ukraine was
eliminated due to forced starvation, while the entire nation suffered
from the consequences of the prolonged lack of food; 

Whereas the Soviet Government manipulated and censored foreign
journalists, including New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, who
knowingly denied not only the scope and magnitude, but also the
existence, of a deadly man-made famine in his reports from Ukraine; 

Whereas noted correspondents of the time were castigated by the Soviet
Union for their accuracy and courage in depicting and reporting the
famine-genocide in Ukraine, including Gareth Jones, William Henry
Chamberlin, and Malcolm Muggeridge, who wrote, `[The farmers] will tell
you that many have already died of famine and that many are dying every
day; that thousands have been shot by the government and hundreds of
thousands exiled'; 

Whereas in May 1934, former Congressman Hamilton Fish introduced a
resolution in the House of Representatives (House Resolution 399 of the
73d Congress) which called for the condemnation of the Soviet Government
for its acts of destruction against the Ukrainian people; 

Whereas the United States Commission on the Ukraine Famine, formed on
December 13, 1985, conducted a study with the goal of expanding the
world's knowledge and understanding of the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide of
1932-1933 (Holodomor), and concluded that the victims were `starved to
death in a man-made famine' and that `Joseph Stalin and those around him
committed genocide against Ukrainians in 1932-1933'; 

Whereas on May 15, 2003, in a special session, the Ukrainian Parliament
acknowledged that the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide was engineered by Joseph
Stalin and the Soviet Government deliberately against the Ukrainian
nation; 

Whereas with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, archival documents
confirmed the deliberate and pre-meditated deadly nature of the famine,
and the Soviet Government was exposed for its atrocities against the
Ukrainian people; and 

Whereas on October 13, 2006, the President of the United States signed
into law Public Law 109-340, authorizing the construction of a memorial
in the District of Columbia to honor the victims of the Ukrainian
Famine-Genocide, in recognition of the upcoming 75th anniversary of the
genocide in 2008: Now, therefore, be it 

Resolved, That the House of Representatives--

(1) solemnly remembers the 75th anniversary of the Ukrainian
Famine-Genocide of 1932-1933 and extends its deepest sympathies to the
victims, survivors, and families of this tragedy;

(2) condemns the systematic violations of human rights, including the
freedom of self-determination and freedom of speech, of the Ukrainian
people by the Soviet Government;

(3) encourages dissemination of information regarding the Ukrainian
Famine-Genocide in order to expand the world's knowledge of this
man-made tragedy; and

(4) supports the continuing efforts of Ukraine to work toward ensuring
democratic principles, a free-market economy, and full respect for human
rights, in order to enable Ukraine to achieve its potential as an
important strategic partner of the United States in that region of the
world.

END

(Note the last two sentences):

 

Kommersant

 

OSCE Acknowledges Ukrainian Famine

 

The annual session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe concluded yesterday in Astana. At it,
Joao Soares of Portugal was chosen new chairman, replacing Swede Goran
Lennmarker, and a resolution was passed on the Ukrainian famine of
1932-1933. The resolution was passed despite objections from Russia and
Kazakhstan, which insisted that the Ukrainian people were not the only
ones affected by the tragedy. Speaker of the Russian Federation Council
<http://www.council.gov.ru/index_e.htm>  Sergey Mironov called the
resolution acknowledging the famine "complete nonsense." A resolution on
Georgia <http://www.kommersant.com/doc.asp?id_doc=363467>  was also
passed. 

The Georgian resolution was written by U.S. Congressman Alcee Hastings
states that regional instability is tied to Russia's decision to
strengthen official ties with the separatist regimes in Abkhazia and
South Ossetia, to increase the size of its military contingent in
Abkhazia and to issue Russian passports to the residents of the
territories. The document, calling on Russia to refrain from ties with
the breakaway states and maintain OSCE standards in conflict resolution,
was passed by a majority of votes. 
The resolution on the Ukrainian famine (Holodomor) was authored by
Ukrainian delegate Oleg Bilorus. Russian delegate Natalia Karpovich
objected that "We should acknowledge that the Holodomor was not only in
Ukraine, Russians, Poles, Kazakhs and other peoples suffered in the
tragedy." Kasymzhomart Tokaev, speaker of the Kazakhstani senate,
supported Karpovich. The resolution was passed by a majority of votes
and met with indignation in Moscow. "History will avenge!" Mironov
steamed.

www.kommersant.com

 

(Note:  Members of the U.S. Helsinki Commission/ US Delegation to the
OSCE PA cosponsored the Holodomor resolution.  OD)

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