Holodomor: The Human Rights Aspect Has Been Overlooked

By Volodymyr Paslavskyi

The Ukrainian Students’ Club at York University (USC) together with the York Federation of Students (YFS) and Stop the Hate Coalition (SHC), organized an on-campus commemorative and educational event on the Holodomor, called “Not To Be Forgotten: Genocide Remembrance and Education.”  The event’s aim was to promote on-campus tolerance, acceptance and awareness of the Ukrainian Famine Genocide as a crime against humanity.

 The full-day event was divided into two parts. In the first, USC students raised awareness about the Holodomor by having an information booth at Vari Hall, a hub where major campus events take place. The second took place at the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections in the Scott Library, a major library at York University.  Present at the official gathering there were guest speakers, professors, university staff and many non-Ukrainian students.  The purpose was to commemorate the Holodomor through a donation of a photo-album, published by the Memorial Society from Kyiv, to the archives.  The album depicts and chronicles, in four languages, the Holodomor and other crimes against humanity perpetrated in Ukraine.

Michael Moire, chief archivist, accepted the photo-album on behalf of York University and gave a brief statement. Other speakers were Jurii Darewych, a professor at York University; Kalyna Klymkiw, a York University graduate who has interviewed a Holodomor survivor; and Corrie Sakaluck, President of the York Federation of Students.

Prof. Darewych shared his experiences in producing the documentary film, Harvest of Despair, and provided facts about the Holodomor in a historical context.  “Is there justification or explanation for the Holodomor,” Darewych rhetorically asked the audience, then, went on to answer it by raising another question: “How can anyone explain the Holocaust”?  These words, building on what already was said, revealed the Holodomor’s complexity and enormity. 

His words had an impact. How do you talk about something if you have a hard time understanding it?  But making the international community understand is a necessary condition if they are to recognize it as genocide.

Unfortunately, none of the speakers talked about the Holodomor from the perspective of human rights, in particular, subsistence rights.  I have noticed that, in general, historians tend to study the Holodomor more than political scientists. Therefore, the human rights aspect is not highly developed in the discourse on the Holodomor. 

In academic language, violation of subsistence rights results in death from malnutrition (i.e. hunger).  In the case of the Holodomor, hunger was the product of specific individuals’ decisions (Stalin’s, Postyshev’s, Kahanovich’s, Yakor’s), permitted by the presence of specific political institutions (the Communist Party and the NKVD) and the absence of other institutions (an independent Ukrainian state and democratically elected Ukrainian government), in the context of natural borders and circumstances, especially the availability of the harvest, its collectivisation, its geographically minded re-distribution and dependence of life on food.  In a nutshell, the Holodomor is a social political disaster and not a natural disaster. 

The Holodomor becomes an ethnic disaster when we realize that where subsistence depends upon supplies or availability of food, seizure of food or even a change in the supply routes can have deadly effects on self-sufficient people.  If no protection is offered against the seizure of grain and/or improper confiscation of land from small farmers, which is then given to state farms by the authorities, death is inevitable.

According to Henry Shue, a professor of Ethics and Ethical Issues in International Affairs at Cornell University, people’s ability to feed themselves is diminished when authorities make inappropriate changes in the use of land or other resources they control.  In his book, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence and US Foreign Policy (1996), he further elaborates on this topic and states a broad rule of thumb of determining harm and the violation of subsistence rights.  He writes that whenever authorities take actions that are sufficient in some given natural, social and political circumstances to bring about an undesirable effect, especially one that there is no particular reason to think would otherwise have occurred, it is perfectly normal to consider their actions to be the main cause of the harm.  Hence, the Holodomor was a social, political and ethnic disaster and fully deserves to be termed as genocide.