The other holocaust” “

The association “Fiducia” and the Committees for liberties – the international movement chaired by Vladimir Bukovskij, leading exponent of anti-Soviet dissidence – have promoted an international conference in Rome and at the same time officially introduced a day of remembrance for “the other holocaust”, the one perpetrated by Communism. The symbolic date of the day of remembrance is 7 November, the beginning of the Bolshevik October Revolution (according to the Orthodox calendar) but also the date, on Lenin’s orders, of the first gulag. The initiative is in fact called “Gulag Memento” and has, in the intention of its promoters, the task of remembering, every year on this date, the 82 million victims of Soviet extermination and concentration camps. “There is a disproportion in memory between the two genocides of the twentieth century – says Vittorio Strada , professor of Russian literature and language and founding member of the Committees for liberties – . The risk is that our awareness of the past may become atrophied. Commemorating the victims of the gulag, as well as those of the Shoah, means respecting historical truth and forming a civil conscience, especially among the young”. Albania. “I was condemned to death – says Pjeter Arbnori, first President of the Albanian Parliament, exponent of the Catholic opposition in Albania during the Communist regime – for having created a democratic opposition party, then the sentence was commuted to 28 years of imprisonment. I was a teacher of literature. I suffered torture and humiliation. I got to know many Catholic priests in Communist jails. None of them, in spite of torture, ever recanted their faith. They were examples for us all. The ruling party placed weapons in the churches and accused the priests of organising the resistance. They then stage-managed the finding of the weapons and photographed the Franciscan friars alongside the rifles”. Released in 1989, Arbnori took part in the first anti-Communist demonstration at Shkodra on 14 January 1990, during which the bust of Stalin was toppled. Ukraine. “This year the Ukrainian community is commemorating the 70th anniversary of the ‘Holodomor’ – points out Boris Hudyma, Ukraininian ambassador in Italy -; that was a real catastrophe suffered by the Ukrainian people when, for the first time in the history of humanity, the confiscation of foodstuffs was deliberately used by the State for political purposes as a weapon of mass destruction aimed against the Ukrainian people”. In the lexicon of the Ukrainian language a new word was coined to express it, “ Holodomor“, meaning “mass extermination by famine”. The extermination was the deliberate result of an artificial and carefully orchestrated famine. “The famine of 1932/1933 – continues Hudyma – was caused by political factors with the objective of exterminating the flourishing class of well-to-do peasant farmers independent of the State. It wasn’t a physiological phenomenon, but a form of political terror. Whole generations of peasants were eliminated while the stockpiles of wheat and other foodstuffs were shipped to the industrial centres of the USSR”. Historians disagree about the exact number of victims. “The most probable figure – concludes Hudyma – of those who died of hunger, epidemics, cannibalism and suicide is upwards of 7 million”. Cuba. “I was in the prisons of Fidel Castro for 23 years, suffering physical torture and the psychological torture of socialist re-education”. That’s the testimony of Armando Valladares, born in Cuba in 1937 and imprisoned in 1959 for having proclaimed the incompatibility of Castro’s Marxist regime with the Christian faith. Having become famous for the poetry he wrote in prison, he was released in 1982 following international pressure. In 1987 Reagan appointed him US ambassador for human rights to the UNO. “Many people – continues Valladares – still don’t believe in the horrors of Communism, but the world must not forget, so that the gulag be never repeated again”. Together with others who managed to get out of Castro’s jails, Valladares has promoted a campaign for the symbolic adoption of Cuban political prisoners “to press for their release”. So far 364 dossiers of people in Cuban prison for their convictions are known: “teachers, journalists, doctors, peasants”.