“Today, on the day of commemoration of victims of the Babyn Yar tragedy, the Supreme Court of Russia adopted xenophobic decision to ban the Mejlis. The policy of Stalin is alive,” Petro Poroshenko said during the mourning ceremony of commemorating the victims of the Babyn Yar tragedy on Thursday.
The Head of State noted that only the death of Stalin had saved Jews of the USSR from deportation similar to that experienced by the Crimean Tatars and other ethnic groups.
Read alsoPoroshenko: Together, we are building Ukraine where there is no place for anti-SemitismThe President emphasized that the Soviet authorities had been suppressing the tragedy of the Babyn Yar for many years and then tried to dissolve its Jewish component in the overall martyrology of the World War II. “Isn’t it because Stalin in the depths of his black soul supported the so-called final resolution of the Jewish issue? Immediately after the victory over Nazism the guillotine of repression was launched again. The Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, the so-called “rootless cosmopolitans” and “doctors-saboteurs” were its first victims,” he said.
At the same time, the President emphasized that successors of the chief had preserved antisemitism as part of public policy. But instead of policy of physical liquidation they resorted to the destruction of the Jewish identity as such. At the same time, for decades Moscow has been supplying weapons to those who want to overthrow Israel into the sea.
“Thus, the Babyn Yar tragedy is a warning for the entire mankind that any regime that neglects human rights and freedoms poses a threat to humanity itself. Our moral obligation is to prevent the repeat of crimes against humanity and humaneness,” the Head of State noted.
According to him, such prospect seems unrealistic at first glance.
“But if leaders of some countries base their policy on struggle for the so-called historic truth, which Hitler himself used as justification for his crimes… If international law is again trampled by the boot of the aggressor… If the current UN sometimes resembles the League of Nations… If the annexation of Crimea is directly translated into German by Russian propaganda as Anschluss… If so, then where is the guarantee that we are immune from repeating other tragic pages of the recent past?” the President noted.
This is particularly important given the surge of religious, racial or national intolerance and antisemitism recurrence even in those countries where those shameful phenomena have been seemingly long ago and irrevocably eradicated. Ubiquitous growing popularity of far-right xenophobic political forces also raised concern, as stated by the President.
