Mr. Speaker, this week the Ukrainian Canadian community is commemorating the 65th anniversary of the 1932-33 manmade famine genocide in Ukraine, engineered by soviet leader Joseph Stalin, in which some 7 million Ukrainians perished.
Soviet party leaders with the aid of military troops and secret police units seized every last scrap of food. Whole villages became a mass of corpses. Large parts of Ukraine were blockaded, no food was allowed in, no people were allowed out. While guarded warehouses were filled with grain, Ukrainian peasants were beaten, arrested and even shot for trying to take the few remaining kernels lying on the fields. Their extermination was a matter of state policy.
Food is still a favourite weapon with many authoritarian regimes in the world today. It has been said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
We join today with members of the Ukrainian community and other Canadians in remembering the atrocities of this crime against humanity.