The National Council, the lower house of the Swiss parliament, recognized the “Holodomor”, the great Ukrainian famine of 1932-1933, as genocide against the Ukrainian civilian population.
In the statement adopted, the lower house of parliament, the Swiss National Council, recognizes systematic actions aimed at mass and deliberate killing by starvation with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as an act of genocide, Le Temps wrote.
The decision was approved by 123 votes, with 58 MPs against and 7 abstentions, according to the website of the Swiss parliament.
“With this recognition, we are ensuring that the victims are not forgotten,” said Christine Badertscher (Greens/BE), speaking of ‘a symbolic signal’.
“The declaration of the legal qualification of genocide is a judicial act, not a political one,” said Laurent Wehrli (PLR/VD).
According to the text, four million Ukrainians, about two million Kazakhs and hundreds of thousands of Russians died during the famine in Ukraine in 1932 and 1933.
“The National Council recognizes as an act of genocide clearly systematic actions that lead to massive and deliberate starvation and are committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such in whole or in part,” the text says.
“This is a truly historic decision. And it is an extremely important step towards restoring historical justice and preserving the memory of millions of innocent victims,” the speaker of the Ukrainian parliament Ruslan Stefanchuk said reacting to the decision.
To date, the Holodomor has been recognized as genocide of the Ukrainian people by the parliaments of about three dozen countries, as well as the European Parliament (article) and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.
The Holodomor was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. Many historians concluded that the famine was deliberately engineered by the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement (Wikipedia). Some historians argue that the famine was the result of a massive Soviet agricultural collectivization.
The Holodomor, extermination by the hunger of 1932-1933, was artificially caused by the Stalin regime. The Holodomor was a continuation of imperial Russia’s colonial war against Ukraine, the goal of which was the Ukrainian people’s subjugation and assimilation.
The stories told by still-living witnesses of the Holodomor were shocking, and even more shocking were the cynical documents of the Soviet authorities about the mechanisms of creating artificial famine to exterminate millions. Unfortunately, most records are still kept in Russia under the label “secret.” However, the documents available to historians show that it was a planned genocide, the victims of which were millions of people, the channel 24 wrote.
No one knows the exact number of people killed and starved to death. Historians vary from 4 to 7 million; some even point to a possible number of victims of 10 million people. The memories of eyewitnesses paint an infernal picture with scenes of cannibalism, mountains of dead bodies along the roads and around cities, firing squads, and squads of Soviet military punishers. A joint statement to the United Nations signed by 25 countries in 2003 declared that 7 to 10 million died.
Timothy Snyder, a professor at Yale University and a famous genocide researcher, provided in one of his lectures seven signs of a future genocide that he identified during his research on colonial history.
Snyder underlines the first of these signs: blaming a state for not being an established state; from the colonial power’s point of view, it means that the empire aims at capturing it again. This claim about Ukraine has been one of the most persistent narratives of Moscow propaganda for many years, which pretended that Ukraine was a fictional and failed state.
Read also: The Holodomor, a genocide in 1930ss, and Russia’s attempt to genocide Ukrainians now
