Famine resolution introduced in House (05/29/83)

Famine resolution introduced in House

WASHINGTON - Rep. Gerald B. Solomon (R-N.Y.) introduced a resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives to commemorate the Great Famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine, reported the Ukrainian National Information Service.

The concurrent resolution (H. Con. Res. 111) was introduced on April 19 and referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs.

It notes that over 7 million Ukrainians died in the famine and that the Soviet Russian government "used the famine as a means of reducing the Ukrainian population and destroying Ukrainian national, political, cultural and religious rights."

It also states that "the Soviet Russian government targeted the Ukrainian people for destruction as a whole by directing special draconic decrees against Ukrainian peasants as 'an enemy class,' against the Ukrainian intelligentsia as 'bourgeois Ukrainian nationalists,' and against the Ukrainian Autocephalic Orthodox Church as 'a remnant of the old prejudicial "opiate of the people"' - committed on a gigantic and unprecedented scale the heinous crime of genocide, as defined by the United Nations Genocide Convention." The resolution goes on to state that it is the sense of Congress that the U.S. president should:

"(1) issue a proclamation in mournful commemoration of the great famine in Ukraine during the year 1933, which constituted a deliberate and imperialistic policy of the Soviet Russian government to destroy the intellectual elite and large segments of the population of Ukraine and thus enhance its totalitarian Communist rule over the conquered Ukrainian nation;

"(2) issue a warning that continued enslavement of the Ukrainian nation as well as other non-Russian nations within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics constitutes a threat to world peace and normal relationships among the peoples of Europe and the world at large; and

"(3) manifest to the peoples of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics through an appropriate and official means the historic fact that the people of the United States share with them their aspirations for the recovery of their freedom and national independence."

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