The National Assembly on Tuesday recognized as a genocide the Holodomor, this famine caused in the early 1930s in Ukraine by the Soviet authorities, at the origin of the death of several million people. In a resolution adopted almost unanimously (168 votes for, 2 against), the deputies called on the government to do the same, to meet Kiev’s strong expectations about this painful memory, revived by the invasion Russian.
“Gratitude to the deputies of the National Assembly for this historic decision”reacted the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, in a tweet published in French shortly after the vote.
The Holodomor (“extermination by starvation”), “It’s the story of organized barbarism” And “the use of starvation as a political weapon”pleaded the first signatory of the adopted text, the deputy Renaissance Anne Genetet.
The text had been co-signed by members of seven of the ten political groups in the Assembly, with the exception of the groups La France insoumise (LFI), Communist and National Rally (RN).
The “rebellious” did not take part in the vote, believing that there were doubts about the genocidal nature of this event under international law. “No one can deny the reality of the crime” but “was it a question of exterminating the Ukrainian people as such? », asked LFI MP Bastien Lachaud. The Communists are the only ones to have voted against, considering that parliamentarians were not legitimate to replace historians and judges. “We refuse to contribute to the politicization of issues of memory and history”explained MP Jean-Paul Lecoq.
The adopted text “officially recognizes the genocidal character of the famine forced and planned by the Soviet authorities against the Ukrainian population in 1932 and 1933”. He ” sentenced “ these acts and “affirms its support for the Ukrainian people in their aspiration to have the mass crimes committed against them by the Soviet regime recognized”.
Nicknamed “the granary of Europe” for the fertility of its land, Ukraine lost several million inhabitants in the great famine of 1932-1933, against a backdrop of land collectivization, orchestrated according to historians by Stalin to suppress any desire for independence from this Soviet republic.
In mid-December, the European Parliament declared the Holodomor a genocide.
Russia, it categorically denies this classification, citing the fact that the great famine of the 1930s had not only made victims Ukrainians, but also Russians, Kazakhs, and among other peoples.