Posted by Hungarian News Agency (MTI) on November 26, 2003 at 20:55:29:
Hungarian News Agency (MTI)
November 4, 2003
HEADLINE: PARLIAMENTARY COMMITTEE SUPPORTS CONDEMNATION OF UKRAINIAN GENOCIDE
Budapest, November 4 (MTI) - Members of Parliament's Legal, Minority, and Religious Affairs Committee, meeting on Tuesday, unanimously supported a draft resolution condemning genocide in Ukraine in 1932-33, which will thus go before the plenary session. The Ethnic Ukrainian Authority of Hungary had asked the Hungarian Parliament to declare its solidarity with the Ukrainian people and to acknowledge that the famine which decimated the Ukrainian people was in fact genocide, the president of the local authority, Jaroslava Hartyanyi, said. Speaking at the committee session, she asked the members to replace the phrase "Ukrainian Holocaust" with "Ukrainian genocide" in the text of the draft. The committee members acquiesced. MP Gabor Fodor of the Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ, junior member of the government coalition) told the committee that the famine that claimed the lives of millions of people in those years had been brought about deliberately. At the same time, Fodor said the events of the time could have been investigated more thoroughly and greater attention could have been focused on what happened had Parliament invited historians to a memorial session, instead of formulating a draft resolution. MP Janos Hargitai of the opposition Fidesz-Hungarian Civic Alliance said a memorial session "would have carried less weight than a resolution from the political point of view." The Ukrainian Parliament passed a resolution in May of this year, acknowledging that the famine of 1932-33 was genocide.