 The final item of business is the member's business debate on motion 8629, in the name of Peter Chapman, on Hullodomor Remembrance Day 2017. The debate will be concluded without any questions being put, and I can ask those members who wish to take part in the debate to press the request to speak buttons now. I call on Peter Chapman to open the debate. First, I would also like to welcome the Ukrainian ambassador, Mrs Natalia Galibarenko, and the consul, Andrew Cusley, who are sitting up in the gallery there today. There are many friends of Ukraine, I think, in the chamber as well, sitting behind there, so welcome to you all. I also need to say sorry for keeping you waiting for so long for this debate. We have a habit of speaking far too long in this chamber and apologies for that, but we are here now. The ambassador and Andrew Cusley have to be thanked for bringing the topic of today's debate to my attention. Before I first met Andrew Cusley here in Edinburgh, I had never heard of Hullodomor before. I am sure that some of you speaking in today's debate had not before signing my motion, and that is why this debate is so important. It is important that this tragic event is highlighted to let the world know the cruelty and the viciousness of Stalin and his regime. Europe's recent history over the past 100 years or so is littered with war, conflict and death. The First World War resulted in about 16 million deaths, and during the Second World War, some 60 million people were killed worldwide. However, those conflicts are well known. The Hullodomor is almost unknown outside the Ukraine, and it is time for that to change. The Hullodomor is based on two Ukrainian words, hallowed, meaning hunger, starvation and famine, and mority, meaning to induce suffering to kill. And from 1932 to 1933, the Hullodomor famine took from 7 to 10 million innocent lives, many of them children. After the First World War and the fall of the Bolshevik regime, there was a downfall in the Russian Empire. That resulted in the abolition of censorship and the establishment of an independent Ukrainian state, and it allowed an astonishing renaissance of literary and cultural activity. Many new writers and poets expressed their views on politics, and soon the people of Ukraine were working towards the elimination of literacy. They were becoming a smart nation, which did not sit well with Joseph Stalin. In the summer of 1932, Stalin saw the resurgence of the Ukrainian as a threat, and in a letter to one of his main associates, he wrote, if we do not start rectifying the situation in Ukraine now, we may lose Ukraine. There is a clear record of Stalin's Government's deliberate aims to inflict suffering on the people of Ukraine. He systematically planned their starvation and death to hold on to their land. That began in the summer of 1932, when Stalin wrote a law now commonly known as the law of five years of grain. Ukraine was the most important agricultural part of the USSR, and despite only making up 2 per cent of the USSR's total area, it harvested 23 million tonnes of grain, which was 28 per cent of the gross grain harvest of the whole USSR. It was the breadbasket for Stalin's regime, and he used that to his advantage and subjected the nation to grain quotas, confiscating supplies down to the very last seed. All farmland became the property of the Soviet Union. Food in farmers' homes was taken, and if they were caught taking food from the land that they had owned, they would face fines, imprisonments and even execution. As they starved, it became harder to harvest what the Government requested, and the punishments were not. From the implementation of the first grain quota, they became Soviet prisoners and Soviet slaves. This suffering and starvation of the Ukrainian people was controlled through enforced isolation, put in place to prevent starving peasants from going in search of food. A resolution passed by Stalin and the Soviet regime in January 1933 stated, a massive exodus of peasants in search of bread has started, without a doubt organised by the enemies of the Soviet Government. Therefore, regional executive party bodies in Soviet Ukraine are ordered to prevent a massive exodus of peasants. Peasants from Soviet Ukraine, who have crossed the borders to the north, shall be arrested and deported back to their places of residence. It is recorded that the Soviet regime forcibly sent over 186,000 people back to their home to face certain starvation. We know that they systematically sent people back to their villages, knowing that there was no food, knowing that they would die a horrible lingering death. As a result of the Holodomor, 20 to 25 per cent of the population of Ukraine were exterminated. This enforced starvation reached its peak in the winter and spring of 1932 into 1933, when 25,000 people died every day. I repeat, 25,000 a day were dying at this point. In Maria Cachur, a survivor of the Holodomor stated, my mother buried the children herself. When my brother was dying in February 1933, he pleaded for food. My older brother died in March and my sister in May 1933. This harrowing account shows what many families had to endure, the horror of parents burying their own children. The Holodomor had an extremely high mortality rate for children. In September 1933, approximately two-thirds of Ukrainian pupils were missing from schools. Many desperate parents would risk being caught by the Soviet secret police and take their children through the Ukrainian borders, abandoning them in urban areas in hopes that they would find more food there. Many, however, died on the street. One of the difficulties with the Holodomor is that the death toll has never been known for sure. With many families burying their own and mass graves in many villages, the head of the secret police of Ukraine wrote a letter in June 1933 stating, the mortality rate has been so high that numerous village councils have stopped recording deaths. After all those deaths, Stalin used the depleted and barren land to resettle thousands of families from Russia. By the end of 1933, more than 117,000 people were resettled in Ukraine. Along Besencon, a well-known French historian, has stated that it was the well-organised executions that made the terror by starvation in Ukraine a genocide. That sums up the orchestrated and systematic killing of the Ukrainian people but the Stalin-led Soviet regime was a genocide and we must recognise that those whose lives were destroyed by Holodomor. Like other massacres down through the years, we must not forget. We must remember them. I also welcome the council of my omitted and can I ask members in the gallery to desist from clapping? I know why you want to but it is not permitted. I call Maurice Golden to be followed by Clare Adamson. Thank you, Presiding Officer. As I previously intimated to you, my apologies that I have to leave shortly after my speech are apologies to the chamber as well. I, too, would like to offer my thanks to the Ukrainian ambassador and council for highlighting this issue and indeed their presence here today. Everyone just thought of death. Those are the words of Nina Karpenko, one of the survivors of the Holodomor. During an interview with the BBC a few years ago to mark the 80th anniversary of this genocide against the Ukrainian people. Although Holodomor is etched into the collective memory of the Ukrainian people, it is largely unknown in the west. I thank Peter Chapman for helping to highlight that. However, let us use today as an opportunity to ensure that more people understand what happened in Ukraine. The Holodomor was a man-made famine, the product of an evil and twisted Soviet regime that placed ideology and its grip on power above the welfare of its own people. As Alessandra Rachenko, a teacher and I witness, put it, it would not be so offensive if it were due to a bad harvest but they have taken away the grain and created an artificial famine. Estimates vary a situation not helped by the decades of denial and secrecy but somewhere in the region of four to ten million innocent people perished in appalling suffering. The sad irony of Holodomor is that Ukraine was the breadbasket as farmers producing more than a quarter of the grain harvest of the entire Soviet Union. How, then, could so many of its people die of starvation? In the late 1920s, Stalin began the process of collectivisation, forcing farmers to hand over their land to Soviet authorities. Those who resisted were branded class enemies with armed troops and secret police used to enforce Stalin's will. Collectivisation was not just a case of mass theft by the Soviets. It was an assault on Ukrainian culture by attacking the concept of the rural village, a key part of Ukraine's traditional culture. The grain harvest was well below normal in 1932-33 and the Soviet response was to increase the grain quotas. When farmers couldn't meet the quotas, Communist Party agents tore through Ukraine and took any food they could find. The result was, of course, famine. Please for help fell on deaf ears with Stalin writing that Ukraine has been given more than it's due. Harsh lodd made it difficult for people to help themselves. He could be shot for stealing a sack of wheat. The famine intensified and by 1933 tens of thousands of people were dying every day. The accounts are harrowing people eating anything they could find to survive. People dropping dead in the streets, villages decimated. The Soviet response to this great loss of life among their own people was to export a million tonnes of grain to the west. Some did survive, like Nina Carpinko, and it's through their accounts that we can and we must recognise the halodimor for the genocide it is and ensure that it is never forgotten and never repeated. I want to let Mr Chapman know that I did know about the halodimor before his motion. The reason I do so is that I have a Ukrainian friend, to my knowledge, my only Ukrainian friend. He is in the gallery today, a former member of this place, Stephen Kimkevitch and the councillor in Edinburgh Council. Stephen was the first person who ever told me about the history of the Ukrainian people and the halodimor. Having met Her Excellency and the Consul General this afternoon, I am sure that that is a friendship group that will now grow. I also want to thank the diaspora of the Ukrainian people, many of whom are here today, for bringing the halodimor exhibition to this Parliament to help inform MSPs about what had happened and about their country and their family's history. It was very important to me to to see that here in its place a few years ago now, perhaps it's time for a refresh and a revisit. Having known a little bit, not much about it, the halodimor was something I'd heard about and last year I visited Canada and the United States with the Presiding Officer of this Parliament on a parliamentary visit and was lucky enough to visit the Canadian Museum of Human Rights. It's the first museum in the world solely dedicated to the evolution, celebration and the future of human rights and it's a profound experience to be there. It's an amazing place to visit and one that I will never forget because of the impact that it had on me in so many areas. In their breaking the silence gallery, they have exhibitions commemorating, remembering and informing people about the genocides of the world. To my surprise, the halodimor was included along with Rwanda, Srebrenica, the Holocaust and others. My surprise was there because I was unaware that Canada had recognised the halodimor as a genocide, something that I think personally that this country should do as well. The breaking silence gallery had a 10-minute long film showing footage from the time in the Ukraine and showing some of the posters and some of the propaganda that was put out with the Soviets denying that there was any problem in the UK. It was a famine, the major part of which was 1932 to 1933, but the Soviet Union's policies had damaged the UK in 1925, 1928 and 1929. It was a catastrophic famine that swept across the Soviet Union and it began in the chaos of collectivism, as has been mentioned by my colleagues. However, the Soviet Union was also in denial and preventing the information about this, reaching the west. We have to thank journalists such as the Manchester Guardians Malcolm McGurridge, who, at great risk to himself, defied the Soviets, went into the Ukraine, and because they sanitised the reports of reporters and things like famine and starvation, words were banned by the Soviets. They smuggled the real testimony of what was happening in the Ukraine to the west. Unfortunately, it did not suit the political system here at the time the Soviets were moving towards being allies in what was to happen in World War II, and many, many people denied what was happening. In McGurridge's own words, he said, what made it so diabolical is that it was the deliberate creation of the bureaucratic mind without consideration, whatever, of the consequences in human suffering. My experience in Canada taught me that, seeing all those genocides together, there is no limit to man's and humanity's to man, but we must not forget, we must remember, as we have in debates about Srebrenica, about the Holocaust here, but what is really important is that we write the unjust level of denial that still exists about the Holodomor, and I hope that one day the UK will recognise it as a genocide. Thank you very much. I call Claire Baker to follow by Tom Arthur. Miss Baker, please. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I would like to thank Peter Chapman for bringing forward today's debate, and I too would like to welcome the Ukrainian ambassador to Parliament. Dobri Wercha, and I hope that the pronunciation wasn't too bad. Can I apologise that I've been unable to meet the ambassador earlier on today, as I had an urgent constituency meeting that I had to attend, but I hope that we have another opportunity to meet in the future. I had to admit that until this debate was scheduled, I'm afraid I missed, we did have a previous debate in Parliament in the previous session that I had missed. I knew very little of the Ukrainian famine. I am sure that this is sadly true of many members, and unfortunately much of Scotland. We rightly have extensive knowledge about the Holocaust, paying our respect to the victims each and every year. This Parliament has also had many debates and visits centred around the genocide in Srebrenica, as we remember the shocking death that took place in Europe all too recently. Yet the genocide at Holodomor has, as far as a quick check off the official report indicates, only had one very short debate. I hope that today is the beginning of Parliament's attempt to address this. As this is the eighth, fifth anniversary of Holodomor, we are at a stage where we are losing more and more the valuable tragic, but at times very powerful memories and insights of those who experienced it. It is therefore up to us as politicians, along with historians, academics and Ukrainians, to ensure that those accounts and this tragedy does not die with them. My researcher, Jamie, recently became a dad. His son, Sam, is a quarter Ukrainian. Sam's great grandparents on his mum, Amy's side, are survivors of Holodomor, survivors of the Second World War in that region before they were able to seek refuge in England. Their daughter Olga met and fell in love with a Scot and they made their home in Preswick. Sam is six months old, but his Ukrainian grandparents Walter and Mary passed away before he was born. For baby Sam and other Ukrainian Scots, it is as much part of their history as the Highland clearances, just as Taras Siwenco is as much a part of their culture as Robert Burns. By calling the famine Holodomor to kill by starvation, it is a recognition that it was man-made. Starvation is often a consequence of war and conflict, but it can also be a deliberate act of aggression or control. If it is recognised as it has been man-made, then with 3.3 million deaths being considered a conservative estimate, it should be recognised as a genocide. Not just was Holodomor man-made, but when help was offered it appeared to be turned away. Outside age was rejected, population movement was severely restricted, household food stuff was confiscated and a state propaganda campaign tried to turn urban against rural. According to the declassification of more than 5,000 pages of Holodomor archives by the Security Service of Ukraine, it is suggested that Ukraine was not given the same aid and help that was given to other areas of the Soviet Union. The famine also took place against a backdrop described by genocide scholar Adam Jones of persecution, mass execution and incarceration clearly aimed at undermining Ukrainians as a national group. There is a growing number that are calling for the UK Government to recognise Holodomor as a genocide and calling them to show their support for the Ukraine, for the thousands of Ukrainians that fled the Soviet Union, for the thousands that have set up their homes across the UK and for the hundreds of thousands that are their descendants. As Claire Adams mentioned, Canada has recognised, I think, Australia and Ukraine themselves. Today's debate is an opportunity to state our support for Ukrainian people and to recognise the calls for Holodomor to be recognised as a genocide. This terrible period in history must not be hushed up or downplayed. Genocide must be recognised as such in order to enable us to acknowledge the suffering, remember the dead and endeavour to ensure that history does not repeat itself. Thank you very much, I call Tom Arthur. Last week in the open debate, Mr Arthur, please. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I wish to begin by thanking Peter Chapman for bringing this important debate to the Parliament. I would also like to join Mr Chapman in welcoming the Ukrainian ambassador and members of the Scottish Ukrainian community to the Parliament and to express my solidarity with the people of Ukraine and the Ukrainian state. The debate is important for several reasons. Firstly, it is important because it is important to remember that if the Korean War was the forgotten war of the 20th century, the Holodomor was the forgotten genocide of the 20th century. I want to recognise members who have used that word genocide and it is encouraging to hear from across the chamber the recognition that the Holodomor was a genocide. Mr Chapman eloquently explained that by citing historical sources, highlighting the way in which the Ukrainian people and their culture were deliberately targeted. We have a duty to make sure that more people are aware of that catastrophe. I certainly will undertake to make sure that, in my capacity as a constituency member, I engage with schools in my constituency of Renfrewshire South to increase awareness. We have several important lessons, but I think that a merge from this catastrophe is 85 years on. That is one of the ways in which ideology, taken to its extreme, can dehumanise people. It is to use Burk's term geometric politics, where individuals are subsumed into a collective, where people are instrumentalised and used as a vehicle for some other political end and individual liberty is lost. That, perhaps best captured in its most sinister form by that set of words often attributed to Stalin, is that a single death is a tragedy and a million deaths is a statistic. Even if that statement is apocryphal in its source, it sums up the fundamentals of communist ideology. It sums up the ideology that led to something like the Halodomor taking place. There is also an important lesson to be learned about how the Halodomor was reported and how it was forgotten and how we relearn about it. As all members have highlighted in their remarks, there has been a profound lack of awareness. However, there was not when it occurred that there was an enterprising, bold and brave young Welsh journalist by the name of Gareth Jones, who has been honoured in Ukraine. Gareth Jones did not live to see his 30th birthday, but as a brilliant young man, fluent in French, German and Russian, an aide to former Prime Minister David Lloyd George, he travelled to Ukraine and witnessed firsthand some of the scenes that other members have described. He came back and gave compelling testimony. Of course, what happened? The Kremlin denied it. Those with Soviet sympathies in the west poured scorn and discredited Mr Jones. There is a lesson of actions emanating from Moscow and then attempts to discredit it by Moscow and people in the west being sympathetic to the Kremlin line. A lesson 85 years ago, it is still very valid. What happened to Gareth Jones is that he regained his reputation and went to Japanese-occupied Mongolia to report an event there. He died in mysterious circumstances, but two of the last people that he met were Stalin's NKVD agents. There is a lesson there to be learned as well. If I may conclude by saying that this year may represent the 80th year and the anniversary of the Hallodomor, but it is also the tenth anniversary of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism, from which we have a European day of remembrance for victims of Stalinism and Nazism. We all have a duty in this place and in our work in our constituencies to make sure that prominence is given to the victims of the Hallodomor and that future generations will never forget, because fundamental to this are the words of George Santagnana, those who do not know the past are condemned to repeat it. I thank all the members who have contributed to this afternoon's debate marking the 85th anniversary of the Hallodomor. The Scottish Parliament debated this horrific tragedy in Parliament in 2014 and, by doing so again, I am in no doubt that it will have raised awareness of this terrible event in the Ukraine's history. I thank Mr Chapman for bringing this motion to Parliament and taking this opportunity, like others, to welcome the Ukrainian ambassador and her party to the gallery today. We are honoured that you are able to be with us. The message today has been very clear that the Hallodomor was a completely avoidable tragedy and one that serves as a reminder of the depths of inhumanity that can exist in this world. It is by continuing to debate and above all commemorate the tragedy that we show our solidarity with the people of Ukraine and come together across parties to remember those lost as part of this deplorable famine that could so easily have been prevented. The people of Scotland and Ukraine have intertwined histories and Ukrainians continue to very positively influence Scottish society. That is reflected by the shared celebration of our two national poets, Robert Burns and Tarris Shevchenko, which is hosted by the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain every year. One of the most visible gifts to Scotland from the people of Ukraine came from Ukrainian prisoners of war who made Scotland their home in the first half of the 20th century, resulting in the hall mure Ukrainian chapel near Lockerbie. The Scottish Government places a very high value, indeed, on the on-going contribution of the Ukrainian community to Scotland as a whole, and we are very grateful for the chance to unite in commemoration today. I want to say a little, as others have, about the sequence of events that we are commemorating. In 1924, Joseph Stalin ascended to power in the USSR. In 1928, he introduced an agricultural programme of government-owned farms and factories. As Clare Adamson mentioned, a bureaucracy was set up to develop the ideology around that and oppose very violently any social groups that Stalin decided were in the way of that plan. In 1929 and 1930, groups that were considered by Moscow to be dangerous or members of society that were not of the same way of thinking as Moscow were rounded up and sent to Siberian work camps. In 1932 and 1933, production quotas for Ukraine increased by some 44 per cent, causing widespread hunger and starvation, which amounted to an attack on the whole people and culture of the Ukraine. Given the sequence of events, I wholeheartedly understand the basis for the calls across the chamber to designate the Hallodomor as a genocide. Those are essentially criminal matters on which appropriate courts, such as the international criminal court, are best placed to make a judgment, taking into account all of the great deal of evidence that exists. That is why it remains our position, shared by the UK Government, that the recognition of genocide is a matter for judicial decision rather than government policy. The fact that we, along with the UK Government and the European Parliament, take that view in no way lessens our horror at the severity and inhumanity of the Hallodomor and the enormity of suffering and loss of life is very deliberately caused. Nor does it lessen our recognition that the policies and political decisions taken at the time by the then Soviet leadership were responsible for the famine resulting in the deaths of millions of Ukrainians. The scale of the tragedy is truly staggering by any measure. By 1933, as we have heard, the death rate had reached 25,000 people a day, most of those children, and by the end millions of lives had been lost. It is no exaggeration, therefore, to say that the Hallodomor is one of history's starkest warnings and marks a devastating chapter in world affairs that must never be forgotten. It has been 85 years since the beginning of the Hallodomor, and in every one of those years people across the world have worked to honour those who died. Therefore, it is important that we also take the opportunity today to pay tribute to the people who continue to work to keep alive the memory of all those who perished in the Hallodomor. I know that I speak for everyone across the chamber and across Scotland when I say that we will continue to stand with the people of Ukraine to share in their mourning and to stand in solidarity with the terrible events that they commemorate.