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Ukraine has witnessed an astonishing number of changes in recent years-and what more vivid example than that this Soviet-era building, the former Lenin Museum, which housed protesters during the Orange Revolution, is today hosting the Fifth Assembly of the World Movement for Democracy? I know that each of the 110 countries represented at this Assembly has its own unique and noble history-sometimes valiant and sometimes oppressed, sometimes glorious and sometimes tragic-its own heroes and villains, its own aspirations, successes, and defeats.
Ukraine's history has been a constant battle for independence and freedom. We are a country that has enjoyed only a few years of independence since the days of Kyivan Rus. We are the country of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who began our fight for independence in the seventeenth century, and Ivan Mazepa, who continued the fight in the eighteenth century. Our Cossack leader Pylyp Orlyk in 1710 drafted Europe's first constitution, which guaranteed Ukrainians the novel right to elect directly their leader. In the nineteenth century, when our people were in bondage and our language was banned, Taras Shevchenko penned revolutionary poems demanding freedom for Ukraine and an end to serfdom. In 1918, we finally saw a real chance for independence and created our own state. But unlike some of our neighbors, we were unable to secure it and became subjugated under the communist empire.
During the Soviet period, Ukraine experienced one of the most horrible genocides in human history-the Holodomor. Between 1932 and 1933, the Soviet regime sealed our borders and forcibly confiscated all our food, killing anyone who resisted. Within less than two years, approximately ten million people starved to death-25,000 people per day, more than half of them children. The Holodomor was a planned genocide, intended to wipe out Ukrainian identity and culture and to eliminate any resistance to Soviet domination. The forced famine was followed in 1937 and 1938 by the Soviet annihilation of Ukraine's intelligentsia-its poets, writers, artists, scientists, and teachers.
In Ukraine, we strongly believe that had the world not ignored the tragic events of the Holodomor in the early 1930s and the persecutions later that same decade, many subsequent catastrophes-the Holocaust and the genocides in Cambodia, the Balkans, Rwanda, and most recently Darfur-might have been averted. We are grateful...