PROCEEDINGS
Congressman MICA: Let me just say welcome, and we are glad to have you here. We had an opportunity to visit with many of you at the reception last night.

As I started earlier and said, this will probably be the norm for some of the Washington meetings. One of the first orders of business today will be to try to set up some kind of a chairman within the public membership who can always be here when we have a meeting.

Without getting into prejudging your decisions as a commission, but knowing the restraints on the money, we’re looking for something like two to four meetings a year, and we’ll do our best either biannually or quarterly, but we’ll do our best to try to schedule them, as today we hoped would be, on a day where all congressional mem¬bers can be here and attend. But I think that’s probably a pipe dream. So we’ll do the best we can, but we will have to come up with a quick procedure as to who will chair and be in charge as the meetings continue, and it will be this morning, and we have to rush out.

I have a complete opening statement, and what I’m going to do and which, inciden¬tally, is common practice here in the Congress is instead of reading the entire state¬ment, ask that the entire statement be made a part of the record and inserted in the record and welcome you all here and just say this.

We do have a task before us to complete. That task is to report to the Congress, as you know, on the Ukrainian famine, what made it happen, who was involved, what were the aftereffects, the ramifications, and what, indeed, we can learn from it.

As I indicated last night, we have two of the finest staff people I think we could lo¬cate in this subject area in the entire world to help us. Each has had tremendous ex¬perience. I’ve seen their work. I don’t want to diminish the importance of this Com¬mission, but I almost feel that left on their own, the two could write the type of report we’d all be proud of.

Obviously they’re going to want our input, our guidance and our direction, and I think each individual member of this Commission has some special areas of expertise and knowledge, and I might just add that the Commission-and Mr. Broomfield and Mr. Gilman are well aware of this—was carefully balanced by the staff to try to repre¬sent all aspects of this historical problem.

I won’t go into all of the other points made in my statement except to say that we’re glad to have you all here. I see one or two members who were not here last night. So I’m just going to take, and this is not speech making time, but maybe just take 30 seconds and ask you each to go around and identify yourselves and give us your name and just a little bit about yourselves.

OPENING STATEMENT

The Commission on the Ukraine Famine, which I am proud to chair, has been given an important mandate: to report to Congress on the tragic man-made famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine. It has been estimated by scholars that seven million Ukrainians and an untold number of others lost their lives as result of a policy of crop seizures carried out by the Soviet government then led by Joseph Stalin. Our mandate is to determine,