Famine Remembrance Week begins with conference at Columbia University (11/16/03)

Famine Remembrance Week begins with conference at Columbia University

by Roma Hadzewycz

NEW YORK - An international conference at Columbia University featuring speakers from the United States, Ukraine and the United Kingdom marked the beginning of Famine Remembrance Week in New York City on Monday, November 10.

The conference on "The Man-Made Great Famine in Ukraine of 1932-1933 (Holodomor)" was opened by Prof. Mark von Hagen of Columbia, who underscored that the Famine was "a particularly stark demonstration of the brutality of the Soviet regime."

The Famine was denied for 55 years in Ukraine and elsewhere in the Soviet Union, Prof. von Hagen noted. "Compounding this conspiracy of silence ruthlessly enforced by the Soviet government was the complicity of many governments of 'civilized' people and the reporters of the foreign press in Moscow, most notoriously Walter Duranty of The New York Times," he said, adding that "sadly, professional historians reinforced this silence with their own denials until recently."

Among those in the audience at the opening were two ambassadors to the United Nations, Valeriy Kuchinsky of Ukraine and Yerzhan Kh. Kazykhanov of Kazakstan; Ukraine's Consul General in New York Serhiy Pohoreltzev; and National Deputy Hennadii Udovenko, chair of the Verkhovna Rada's Committee on Human Rights, who is a former ambassador of Ukraine to the United Nations as well as a former minister of foreign affairs. Messrs. Kuchinsky and Udovenko spoke during the conference's first panel on the topic "National and International Response to the Man-Made Famine: The Politics of Acknowledgment." Mr. Kazykhanov delivered a statement of support and condolence on behalf of Kazakstan.

Other speakers on the first panel were Dr. James Mace, former staff director of the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine, and Dr. Margaret Siriol Colley, niece of Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist who exposed the Famine-Genocide but who for 70 years "has been conveniently airbrushed out of history."

Subsequent panels were devoted to the topics of "Archival Evidence Since the End of the Soviet Union" and "The Ukrainian Famine-Genocide in Memory and the Arts."

The daylong conference, which took place at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, was held under the aegis of the Ukrainian Studies Program and the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, the Permanent Mission of Ukraine to the United Nations, the Shevchenko Scientific Society, the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America and the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences.

More details about the conference and other events of Famine Remembrance Week will appear in succeeding issues of The Ukrainian Weekly.

| Home Page |