–by Alina Arustamian
On the fourth Saturday of November Ukraine commemorates the millions of victims of the Holodomor. Because of this, on November 26th, a memorial ceremony was held in the lobby of the main educational building of the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.
Participants of Media Dialogue 2021 also visited the commemorative event and honoured the victims of the Holodomor with a minute of silence and placed flowers and funeral wreath on the monument “Girl with five wheat ears” at the National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide.
Volodymyr Bugrov, rector of the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, started his speech by saying:
“Every year, the university community honours the memory of those killed innocently, because the Holodomor is genocide and a crime against humanity without a statute of limitations”.
The Holodomor in Ukraine has been recognized as genocide at the legislative level. The famine in 1932-1933 is one of the worst national tragedies and one of the most severe humanitarian catastrophes in human history.
Historians name the repressive policy of grain procurement pursued by the communist government as the cause of the famine. Thus, the authorities wanted to subdue Ukrainians, to finally eliminate the opposition to the regime and their struggle for a revival of their own statehood.
Today, it’s impossible to name the exact number of Holodomor victims. The Soviets did their best to conceal all the trails of their crime. At least 3,9 million people have died from the Holodomor in Ukraine. Moreover, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian families were deported to Siberia and other northern regions. They were often brought there and left in the woods.
The historic fact of the Holodomor in Ukraine is officially recognized by more than 70 countries, with 13 of them acknowledging it as an act of genocide.
At the end of his speech, Mr. Bugrov also mentioned and explained the slogan of the Holodomor Remembrance Day: “A very appropriate slogan — Never again! That is so that this tragedy never happens again. That is why today we are honouring the memory of the Holodomor victims with a moment of silence”.
On November 27th, participants of Media Dialogue 2021 joined a commemorative action “Light a Candle of Remembrance” and lit memorial candles at 16.00 Kyiv time.
