Only the elected officials of Die Linke and AFD abstained in the Bundestag during the vote on the famine of 1932-1933 orchestrated in Ukraine by Stalin.
by Thomas Wieder (Berlin, correspondent)
Between a discussion on the protection of forests against fires and another on a candidacy of their country at the 2030 Winter Olympic Games, German deputies had to debate, Wednesday, November 30, of a thorny question of history : Holodomor, the great famine which killed around 3.5 million in Ukraine in 1932-1933, was it a genocide? After fifty minutes of exchanges, they voted by hand, and the answer was clear: apart from Die Linke (radical left) and AFD (alternative for Germany, extreme right), which abstained, all The other groups said yes.
Truth, there was hardly any suspense. Upstream, the three groups of the majority – Social Democratic Party (SPD), Greens, Liberal Democratic Party (FDP) – had associated themselves with that of the conservative opposition (CDU/CSU) to file a resolution recognizing the ‘Holodomor (“hunger extermination”) as genocide. “I thank the deputies of the Bundestag for this historic decision. The truth still wins,” reacted, on Twitter, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
Nine months after the start of the war in Ukraine, the defenders of the text did not fail to make the link between the past and the present, establishing a direct filiation between Joseph Staline and Vladimir Putin. “The cause of the horror that was the Holodomor is not to be sought in nature, but at the Kremlin: there, the dictator made the cruel decision to collect the lands by force and to provoke a famine,” recalled The environmental deputy Robin Wagener. “The objective of death was to politically repress the Ukrainian identity, language and culture. The parallels with today are obvious. Again, a dictator, from the Kremlin, seeks to enslave and destroy the Ukraine “, he continued.
” A historical tradition “
“Even today, hunger is used as a weapon against civilians in the regions occupied by the Russians. By doing so ago ninety years ago, Stalin failed. Putin, too, will fail” , chained the Liberal Ulrich Lechte (FDP). “The war of aggression currently conducts Russia against Ukraine is part of a historical tradition. Those who say today alongside Ukraine must recognize this truth,” also insisted the Bavarian conservative Volker Ullrich (CSU).
Opposite, AFD and Die Linke, while calling the great famine of 1932-1933 as “crime against humanity”, denounced the “historical shortcuts”. “As usual, German politics drapes in its moral superiority. Yes to the memory of the Holodomor, but not to the instrumentalization of history,” replied the far -right deputy Marc Jongen (AFD). “The resolution that is proposed to us starts from the presupposition that Soviet power had racist and ethnic motivations to starve the Ukrainians. The truth is that Stalin has stood against all those against its policy of industrialization and forced collectivization, Regardless of their nationality or their ethnic origin, “insisted Gregor Grysi (Die Linke), recalling that the great famine of 1932-1933 also touched other parts of the USSR, such as the Urals of the South or Kazakhstan.
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