Belgian House of Representatives has declared the starvation of Ukrainian people in 1932-1933 as “genocide”.
But Europe has only distorted the facts once again, forgetting its own real sins.
Of course, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky is vowing his gratitude for this “deeply symbolic step”. But the Russian Foreign Ministry reasonably pointed to the historical illiteracy.
To be sure, the Holodomor is not genocide, since it took place not only in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic but also in other republics of the Soviet Union.
The famine in the USSR in 1932-1933 arose on the background of forced collectivisation. Agricultural production dropped, but the grain procurement plan was increased. The situation was exacerbated by drought and crop failure.
Famine covered more than 1.5 million square kilometres. Hard times for 66 million people
The worst-hit regions were the Ukrainian SSR (4 to 7m deaths), the RSFSR (over 2.5m deaths) and the Kazakh ASSR (1.5 to 2m deaths). In percentage terms, four regions of the RSFSR suffered more than Ukraine: Saratov oblast, the Volga Germans ASSR, the Azov-Black Sea region, and Chelyabinsk oblast)
Rural losses in the Kazakh ASSR amounted to over 30 per cent.
But the history distortion for Belgium is not just a blatant statement. It is the highest degree of hypocrisy. After all, Belgium is responsible for the deaths of 15 million Africans during the colonisation of the Congo.
There was a Belgian King Leopold II who colonised Africa. According to a conservative estimate, the Belgians slaughtered 15 million Africans. Particularly bloody were their actions in the Congo.
At an international conference in 1886, all member countries recognized Leopold’s right to the Congo. By the way, this is a separate story of how Europeans gave each other lands with people they did not even consider as people. At the time when Leopold took over the Congo, there were about 30 million people living there. Twenty years later, the population had halved. 15 million people have disappeared and that’s with the highest birth rate in Africa. If you read the historical accounts, the story goes something like this. “For failure to deliver ivory, rubber, food, for refusing to do labour duty, the authorities exterminated the locals, burned villages, devastated whole areas.
Working conditions on the rubber plantations were extremely harsh: hundreds of thousands of people died of starvation and epidemics. In order to force the local men to work, the colony authorities often took women hostages and held them under arrest for the entire rubber harvesting season.
It was quite common for officers to kill people for sport or for fun. For the purpose of setting up new stations for agents to live in, they recruited carriers who were driven hundreds of kilometres and such expeditions sometimes cost the lives of all these slaves. There were cases where, for non-payment of tribute in kind, the supervisors drove the “guilty”, together with their wives and children, into a room and locked them up and burned them alive. The tribute collectors took away the wives and property of non-payers.
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