Canadian Friends of Ukraine Promote Awareness of Holodomor

By Lisa Shymko

To mark the 75th Anniversary of the Holodomor, the Canadian Friends of Ukraine have begun a series of activities and programs aimed at expanding international public awareness of this tragedy.

As a first step, on November 27, the Canadian Friends of Ukraine (CFU), in cooperation with the Shevchenko Scientific Society of Canada, hosted an evening entitled “Gareth Jones: The Man Who Knew Too Much.” CFU President, Professor Jurij Darewych, provided opening remarks and Ukraine’s newly-appointed Ambassador to Canada, Ihor Ostash, delivered official greetings. The guest speaker was introduced by the CFU’s Executive Director, Lisa Shymko. The event received sponsorship support from Buduchnist Credit Union Ltd.

A large Toronto audience welcomed the special guest, Nigel Colley—an author and researcher from the United Kingdom. Mr. Colley is the great-nephew of the Welsh newspaper journalist, Gareth Jones.

Utilizing original photographs and documents in his presentation, Colley delivered a moving address about the historic contributions made by his great-uncle. In 1933, Jones, a 28-year-old journalist from Wales, published the first signed exposй in the United States and Britain on Stalin’s deliberately imposed famine in Ukraine. His articles appeared The Times, The London Evening Standard, The Manchester Guarding, the Berliner Tageblatt and The New York Evening Post, among others.

Fluent in several languages, including Russian, Jones, a foreign affairs advisor to the former British Prime Minister Lloyd George, took a secret train trip to Ukraine. Jones’ off-limits Ukrainian trek in March 1933 took him to villages where he spoke to peasants and witnessed their hunger and despair.

In January 1935, American press baron Randolph Hearst gave Gareth Jones a carte blanche opportunity to re-visit Ukraine. The resulting articles represent some of the most vitriolic attacks on the Stalinist regime of the time. It is believed that Jones was the first journalist to use the phrase “man-made famine” when describing Stalin’s atrocities in Ukraine.

Apologist journalists like the New York Times’ Walter Duranty tried to discredit Jones, Moscow branded Jones a liar and banned him from re-entering the USSR, and fellow journalists like Malcolm Muggeridge tried to airbrush him out of existence.

In 1934, Jones wrote an ominous letter to a friend. In it, he wrote that he had recently learned that he was on the black list of the OGPU and was barred from entering the Soviet Union. Soviet Foreign Affairs Commissar Litvinov sent a cable from Moscow to the Soviet Embassy in London filing an official complaint against Gareth Jones to former Lloyd George.

In 1935, on the eve of his thirtieth birthday, Gareth Jones was mysteriously kidnapped and murdered in the Far East. For decades, he was believed to have been killed by reckless Chinese bandits. But documents recently uncovered at the British Public Records Office in London indicate that Moscow likely had a direct hand in his murder by way of two Soviet secret agents operating in China.

Recent evidence has uncovered that the vehicle in which Gareth Jones was travelling when kidnapped in Mongolia was registered to a trading front of the Soviet NKVD, whose local manager, Adam Purpiss, was associated with the Cheka (Soviet Secret Police). Furthermore, the German journalist who accompanied Jones, Herbert Mueller, was released unharmed. According to British Intelligence, Mueller was a known Communist who travelled under assumed aliases, stayed at the Soviet Consulate in China, and was the Comintern’s representative in China.

Authoritarian regimes have long feared the threat posed by outspoken journalists and writers. Sadly, to the list of inconvenient truth-tellers, such as Georgiy Gongadze, Anna Politkovskaya, and Alexander Litvinenko, we must now add the name of Gareth Jones.

The CFU are working to ensure that the historic contributions made by individuals such as Gareth Jones, in exposing the truth about the Holodomor, reach a wide audience. For example, the CFU facilitated in-depth interviews on the topic, which aired on CBC Radio’s “As It Happens” hosted by Carol Off and CFRB Radio’s Morning Show with Ted Woloshyn.

This past year, representatives of the CFU met with deputies in Kyiv from all of Ukraine’s parliamentary factions to discuss human rights issues, including the urgency of recognizing the Famine as a national genocide.

On November 28, 2006 the Parliament of Ukraine passed a law recognizing the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933 as a genocide. Those voting in favour (233 deputies) were primarily members of the former Orange coalition, namely, Our Ukraine, the Tymoshenko Bloc and the Socialist Party. The Party of Regions and the Communists either abstained or were absent. Of 186 deputies of the Party of Regions, only two, Hanna Herman and Taras Chornovil, supported the vote.

That so many politicians in Ukraine, particularly those from the eastern and southern regions, have little knowledge about the Holodomor should not be surprising. Many Soviet-era crimes have been visibly absent from the history curricula offered by Ukraine’s educational system. That is why the programs undertaken by the CFU, such as the Canada-Ukraine Library Centres, Teachers’ Awards Program, and Crimea Project, are essential to raising public awareness of these issues.

In 2007, the Canadian Friends of Ukraine plan to expand their activities and programs in Canada and Ukraine to ensure that the international community accord the Holodomor the historic recognition that has been long overdue.  With financial and moral support, we can ensure that world opinion never denies this tragedy again.

Lisa Shymko is the Executive Director of Canadian Friends of Ukraine.