Petro Georgiou (Kooyong, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I second the motion moved by the member for Melbourne Ports, and I would like to recognise the initial work done on this motion by the member for Reid. I would also like to recognise members of the Australian Federation of Ukrainian Organisations who are in the gallery. The 1932-33 Holodomor, the death by hunger of an estimated seven million Ukrainian people, more than one-fifth of that nation’s population, was a tragedy of such magnitude that it can only move us to a sadness that is essentially beyond words. The great Ukrainian famine was a man-made horror of a kind and on a scale that was inconceivable before the 20th century. The horror belongs to the legacy of that century and, from it, we learn the consequences of not only political ambition, which has been and always will be with us, but also political and ideological ambition mobilised by the power of a totalitarian state.

When Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes at the 1956 Communist Party conference, he said that Stalin had wanted to deport all Ukrainians—all 30 million of them—but that he could not find a location for the resettlement. Political scientist Yaroslav Bilinsky recalls that:

... in 1932, Stalin had no illusion that he could exterminate all the Ukrainians at once, but by killing approximately one fifth of all the Eastern Ukrainians, he made a good start in turning them into a more submissive, denationalised people of  ‘sowers of millet and hewers of wood’.

Bilinsky asks:

... is this not genocide?

For far too long, the world has failed to recognise the Ukrainian famine as genocide. We have failed to realise that in 1932-33, the Soviet policy of forced collectivisation created an unprecedented and horribly unsustainable crop failure in the breadbasket of Europe, that the regime punished starving men, women and children alike with execution or deportation for stealing so much as a handful of grain from the collective, that the very seeds were taken from the hands of the planters, that the borders were barred against those who tried to flee and that, in the end, the deaths of millions were defended as the successful execution of a policy assembly.

The world failed to respond. As the Ukrainian Ambassador to the United Nations, Valeriy Kuchinsky, stated on 10 December 2003:

In 1933, the international community believed the cynical propaganda of the Soviet Union, which was selling bread abroad while in Ukraine the hunger was killing 17 people each minute.

On that day, Ambassador Kuchinsky also informed the General Assembly that a joint statement on the Holodomor, signed by 36 delegations and supported by 27 other member states, had been issued. The statement recognised the national tragedy caused by the cruel actions and policies of a totalitarian regime.

I wish to acknowledge the significance of the 2003 motion moved by Senator Bill Heffernan in the Australian Senate. The motion acknowledged the 70th anniversary of the enforced famine, recognised that it constituted one of the most heinous acts of genocide in history and honoured the memory of those who died.

This motion recalls the seven million Ukrainians who starved to death as a result of Stalinist policies and the millions more, amongst whom were intelligentsia, religious leaders and politicians, who died in the subsequent purge. It is a motion of remembrance and honour. It is a motion that joins the Ukrainian people and Ukrainian Australians in commemorating this tragedy. It is a motion that asks the Australian government to support a resolution to the United Nations General Assembly that the Holodomor in Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 be recognised as an act of genocide against the nation of Ukraine and its people. I commend the motion to the House.

See this speech in context