EDITORIAL: Gareth Jones, 1905-1935 (05/14/06)

EDITORIAL

Gareth Jones, 1905-1935

"What can you expect if you fearlessly expose the systematic, genocidal murder of 10 million people?

"You can expect to be branded as a liar in the most prestigious newspaper in the United States. You can expect to be murdered yourself by bandits probably in the pay of conspirators perpetrating equally colossal, monstrous crimes against humanity. And you can even be betrayed after your death and airbrushed out of existence by one of your closest professional colleagues and friends. ..."

- Martin Sieff of United Press International in his June 13, 2003, article titled "Gareth Jones: Hero of Ukraine."

The introduction above succinctly describes the all-too-short life of Gareth Jones, who will forever be remembered by Ukrainians as one of their champions, a true hero who spoke out on behalf of the millions who died in the Famine-Genocide.

Jones had documented the onset of the Famine, reporting hunger and starvation, when he traveled to Ukraine in 1931. By the fall of 1932, while in London, he repeatedly heard rumors about a famine in the USSR that was being covered up by the Soviet authorities. And so, in March 1933 the young journalist, not yet 28 years old, set out to learn the truth firsthand. He headed for the Kharkiv area via train from Moscow and then walked through the countryside with his notebook. He spoke with the villagers and took down their stories. "... we are dying of hunger ... they have taken all we had away from us ... they are killing us," were the words of one of his interlocutors.

Once he returned to the West, Jones filed numerous stories about what he'd seen. The story of the Famine-Genocide began to make international headlines. That, of course, did not sit well with the Soviets; something had to be done to counter his reports. And here the Soviets had the assistance of several Western correspondents, chief among them Walter Duranty of The New York Times, who challenged Jones' accounts in a story headlined "Russians Hungry, But Not Starving." He disparaged Jones for making a "somewhat hasty" judgment and stated unequivocally: "there is no famine."

Jones wrote a letter to the editor to rebut Duranty's article, underscoring that everywhere he went he heard "there was famine in the Soviet Union, menacing the lives of millions of people." He concluded his letter by stating "May I in conclusion congratulate the Soviet Foreign Office on its skill in concealing the true situation in the USSR?"

Two years later, while traveling in Manchukuo on yet another of his fact-finding expeditions, Jones was murdered. He would have been 30 years old the next day.

For decades Gareth Jones' legacy was forgotten. This newspaper rediscovered him in 1983, in Dr. Myron B. Kuropas' scholarly paper "America's 'Red Decade' and the Great Famine cover-up" (see The Weekly, March 20, 1983).

Now, more than 70 years after his murder, grateful Ukrainians led by the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Foundation remembered the young Welshman by erecting a plaque in his honor in his native Wales. The trilingual (English-Welsh-Ukrainian) plaque was unveiled on May 2. It reads: "In memory of Gareth Richard Vaughn Jones, born 1905, who graduated from the University of Wales, Abersytwyth, and the University of Cambridge. One of the first journalists to report on the Holodomor, the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine."

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