The acting director of Ukraine's National Memory Institute, Ihor Yukhnovsky, told RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service that he welcomed the parliament's decision.
"The fact is that the famine did take place and great numbers of people were destroyed by their isolation from the external world," he said. "Not honoring the memory of those innocently killed would be a crime against our own people."
The vote is a victory for Ukraine's pro-Western president Viktor Yushchenko, who put forward the bill. Moscow had strongly opposed the initiative.
Yushchenko's first deputy chief of staff, Ivan Vasyunyk, said the president welcomed the draft's adoption as "historic."
(AP, AFP Interfax, ITAR-TASS)
Copyright (c) 2006. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036. www.rferl.org
Posted November 28th, 2006 by Armen Hareyan
