We must not shrink from the facts of Genocide

Capital Eye by Randi Bjornstad

Last month, Rep. Sander Levin of Michigan introduced a bill in the U.S. Congress, aimed at raising public awareness of a horrible instance of genocide that happened in Ukraine in 1932-33 that resulted in the deaths of several million people.

During that time, somewhere between 5 million and 7.5 million people died of famine, but not because of drought, flood, crop failure or insect infestation.

Instead, they succumbed to starvation because the Soviet government, under the dictatorship of Josef Stalin, wanted to crush their sense of “peoplehood,” stifling their tradition of active political discourse and forcing them to accept national policies for collectivization of Soviet agriculture.

Among other tactics, the government established impossibly high quotas for grain production and took most of what the Ukrainian farmers produced, leaving them little to feed their families. According to Levin’s bill, H.R. 4450, the United States attempted at that time to intercede in the travesty, but other accounts indicate that western governments and media deliberately downplayed or ignored the situation to avoid overt criticism of a foreign power.

However, decades later Congress appointed a Commission on the Ukraine Famine, which concluded in 1988 that the tragedy occurred as the result of deliberate policy by the Soviet government, and that the consequences fall under the definition of genocide as contained in the United Nations Genocide Convention.

Beyond simply recognizing the Ukraine famine-genocide, Levin’s bill would allow the Ukraine government to create a memorial on federally owned land in Washington, D.C., to honor these millions of victims. In doing so, the U.S. government would bear no expense, either for building or maintaining the site.

While horrors like what happened in Ukraine should never be forgotten, the proposal that would allow this memorial merely scratches at the surface of what we should be doing in this country to educate people about what has happened in the past and to think about the best way to prevent such crimes from being committed in the future.

Rather than allowing Ukraine to put up its own commemoration, Congress–in the name of the American people–should be supporting creation of a facility dedicated to the documentation of past atrocities in all parts of the world.

Unfortunately, it’s not necessary to think very hard before coming up with hideous examples of the inhumanity people have exhibited toward each other, in modern as well as ancient times.

Nearly everyone would put the Holocaust in Germany during World War II at the top of the list, but many other likewise heinous–and in many cases, more recent–examples exist: hundreds of thousands of deaths in Rwanda in the 1990s as well as the murders of untold numbers of innocent people in Armenia, central Africa, Peru, Argentina, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, China, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan.

Of course, this country itself cannot escape its own genocidal history, with the deliberate, near eradication of Native American people through disease and war.

Earlier this year, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan called for establishment of a U.N. Genocide Prevention Committee.

“There can be no more important issue, and no more binding obligation, than the prevention of genocide,” Annan said. “Indeed, this may be considered one of the original purposes of the United Nations. The ‘untold sorrow’ which the scourge of war had brought to mankind, at the time when our organization was established, included genocide on a horrific scale. The words ‘never again’ were on everyone’s lips.”

In 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” which went into effect three years later and now includes 130 signatories, Annan said.

But despite the agreement to prevent and punish genocide, the practice still continues.

Speaking particularly of the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, Annan called them “especially shameful.”

“The international community clearly had the capacity to prevent these events,” he said. “But it lacked the will.”

Annan’s words must be considered carefully. Creating a place to honor human rights and the dignity of all individuals–especially against the backdrop of historic instances in which that didn’t happen–could serve a valuable purpose in raising awareness of the importance of protecting the basic rights of all people.

A museum that chronicles the fate not only of the victims of the Ukrainian famine but all oppressed people could be an important step in that direction.