Ukraine To Honour Welsh Reporter

LONDON, England -- A Welsh journalist who exposed Stalin's starvation of millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s is to be honoured with a posthumous award from its government.

Mr Gareth Jones's career was cut short by his murder by bandits in 1935.
Gareth Jones, who was born in Barry, south Wales exposed the 1932-33 Ukrainian famine caused by the Soviet leader's infamous five-year plans.

Millions of Ukrainians starved to death but news of the tragedy was suppressed.

Mr Jones was one of the few to write about it and he will now be honoured in a ceremony in Westminster on Saturday.

During his journalistic career, which was cut short by his murder by bandits in Inner Mongolia in 1935 when he was 29-years-old, Mr Jones was regarded as one of the most talented newspaper reporters of his generation.

He wrote for The Western Mail, The Times and The Manchester Guardian among others, and during the 1930s travelled through Russia and Ukraine.

On his travels through the land where his mother had once lived, he was shocked to discover the famine conditions he encountered.

Enforced Starvation

An estimated 7-10 million people, including a third of Ukraine's children, died between 1932 and 1933, an event Ukrainians call the Holodomor.

At the time the Soviet authorities - and many western journalists - denied the nation's enforced starvation was occurring and Ukrainians themselves only become fully aware of the events since the fall of communism.

However, Mr Jones announced that millions were starving in Ukraine as a result of Stalin's policies at a press conference in Berlin on 29 March, 1933.

Several foreign correspondents rushed to rubbish the story with 1932 Pulitzer Prize winner Walter Duranty of the New York Times dismissing his eye-witness account as "a big scare story".

Fellow reporter Malcolm Muggeridge was the other reporter to expose the famine and both are now revered in Ukraine and both will be posthumously honoured at the ceremony in Westminster Central Hall.

The awards are due to bestowed upon the duo by the Ambassador of Ukraine, Dr Ihor Kharchenko, on behalf of the President of Ukraine in reward for their exceptional services to the country and its people.

Mr Jones's niece Dr Siriol Colley has written a book about his life, A Manchukuo Incident, and said: "The Ukrainian people have taken him to their hearts - they call him the unsung hero."

Fedir Kurlak, chief executive of the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain, said: "I'm sure Gareth would have known if he had been caught reporting on the famine that he would have faced certain death.

"As far as the Ukrainian community is concerned, anyone who has heard of Gareth's exploits will quite simply take his hat off to him, and regard him as an exemplary journalist."

Mr Jones graduated from Aberystwyth University in 1926 and from 1930 acted as a foreign affairs advisor to the then former prime minister David Lloyd George.

This led to a career as a journalist and as well as visiting the Soviet Union, he reported on President Roosevelt in the United States, on Mussolini's rise in Italy and the troubles in Ireland.

He was also in Leipzig the day Adolf Hitler was made Germany's Chancellor in 1933, and later flew with the dictator to a rally in Frankfurt and interviewed Hitler's head of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.

Source: BBC News