LONDON, December 13. /TASS/. The British government does not intend to recognize the Holodomor - a mass starvation in the USSR in the early 1930s - as genocide of Ukrainians, it is the prerogative of the courts to make appropriate decisions, UK Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office David Rutley said on Tuesday.
"The long-standing position of the UK government is that genocide recognition is a matter for competent courts rather than governments or non-judicial bodies. Our position in no way detracts from our recognition of the Holodomor as an appalling tragedy and its importance in the history of Ukraine or Europe," Rutley said, speaking in the House of Commons of the British Parliament.
He also said that the UK government had no intention of recognizing the events of the early 20th century in the Ottoman Empire as Armenian genocide. "Similarly, although the massacres committed against Armenian people in the early 20th century were tragic episodes in that country’s history and should never be forgotten, the government has no plans to recognize these appalling events as genocide," Ratley stressed.
Before the First World War, the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire consisted of about 2.5 million people. In 1915, as a result of deportations and systematic massacres, according to various estimates, up to 1.5 million Armenians died. A number of states, including Russia, recognized on the state level these events as the Armenian genocide.
Famine in USSR
In the early 1930s, the mass starvation in the USSR became a tragedy for the whole country and covered the territory not only of Ukraine but also of Belarus, the Northern Caucasus, the Volga region, Southern Urals, Western Siberia, Kazakhstan and caused significant human casualties (according to various estimates, from 2 to 8 million people). In 2006, under the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine (Ukrainian parliament - TASS) adopted a law that officially established the concept of the Holodomor as the genocide of Ukrainians. Russia slammed such actions as an attempt to rewrite history.
In 2014, Andrey Artizov, head of the Federal Archive Agency (Rosarkhiv), and Elena Tyurina, director of the Russian State Archive of Economy, presented the book ‘The Famine in the USSR. 1929-1934’, which they prepared together with their colleagues from Belarus and Kazakhstan. The work showed that the famine was caused by a number of factors, the key ones being the policy of exporting agricultural products abroad to carry out the forced industrialization of the Soviet Union, as well as the period of crop failure. In addition, the authors proved that there was no national approach by the international power and that there was no national genocide.