PROCEEDINGS
Senator DeCONCINI: Ladies and Gentlemen, the Commission on the Ukraine Famine will conduct a hearing at this time.

On my right is Commissioner Ulana Mazurkevich, who is from Philadelphia and has joined us today for testimony, and I will defer to her in just a moment for any state¬ment that she has. On my left is Oleh Weres of Sonoma. He is also a Commissioner.

The Commission on the Ukrainian Famine has a two-year mandate. That mandate requires that it submit to Congress a report on the great man-made famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine. That report is due by April 22,1988. Today’s hearing will gather material for that report from the testimony we will be hearing from persons who knew firsthand the human suffering caused by Stalin’s Soviet government.

It must be pointed out that our witnesses are courageous people. We commend them for their courage. Many others came here in order to flee the same tyranny, and they have decided that they cannot testify. I understand and respect their reasons. Their reasons are legitimate and above reproach. I mention this only in order to un¬derscore the gratitude we owe those who have agreed to come forward today. They must face the pain of remembering traumas most of us can scarcely imagine. They have accepted the responsibility of exposing Soviet lies with the truth. It is their courage and that alone which makes our work possible.

supported the creation of the Commission on the Ukraine Famine because it is im¬portant for all Americans to recognize and understand what Ukrainians suffered over half a century ago. For too long we have failed to listen to those who came here flee¬ing the oppression of inhuman regimes, whether from the far Right or the far Left. We as a nation can prepare ourselves for the challenges of dealing with those regimes only if we begin to listen to those people who are bearing witness.

Many people have suffered at the hands of tyranny. Sadly, many still suffer. Why, then, should we focus on this tragedy, which took place so very long ago and so very far away? One reason is that the very length of time makes it more urgent that we col¬lect testimonies before they are lost forever. But there are other reasons. The pas¬sage of half a century makes it possible to study this particular tragedy more deeply than we could with one more recent. We can learn from this tragedy. We can gain in¬sight into challenges we still must face.

The famine of 1932-1933 was the result of excessive state seizures of agricultural produce. It was really an artificial famine. Food was used as a weapon against a resis¬tant population. Today we see food used as a weapon by the Ethiopian government in the regions of Eritrea and Tigre. We also see the destruction of crops as a basic weapon in the Soviet war against the people of Afghanistan. The loss of millions of lives in Ukraine demonstrates the terrible potential of the use of food as a weapon.

There is evidence that the famine of 1932-1933 was focused against nations and groups that the government considered unreliable and resistant to its policies. It was accompanied by a deliberate campaign in Ukraine to destroy important cultural and spiritual institutions-to absorb large segments of the Ukrainian population. It was, in short, a campaign to neutralize the Ukrainian national culture.

In the 1940s the Polish jurist Dr. Raphael Lemkin coined a new word for this kind of policy, which tries to eliminate a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. He