Posted on 03/23/2005 10:57:33 AM PST by lizol
Poland lobbies Russia over Katyn By Adam Easton BBC News, Warsaw
More than 21,000 army officers and intellectuals were executed at Katyn The Polish parliament has called on Moscow to publish the names of any surviving perpetrators of a World War II massacre. Members of parliament passed a resolution demanding the killing of thousands of Polish soldiers in the Katyn Forest be recognised as genocide.
Moscow only took responsibility for the killings in 1990, after previously blaming it on the Nazis.
Polish legislators stood for a minute's silence before passing the resolution.
Members of the victims' families were also present to mark the 65th anniversary of the massacre.
Classified files
The resolution stated that only a full disclosure of the truth and a condemnation of the perpetrators could lead to improved relations between Poland and Russia.
Moscow ended a lengthy inquiry into the crime last year, which concluded the killings were not genocide. Poland then set up its own investigation, but Moscow has refused to hand over many files which are still classified.
Both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland at the start of World War II.
The Soviet secret police arrested millions of Poles. Many of them ended up in Siberian labour camps, but more than 21,000 army officers and intellectuals were executed on Stalin's direct orders in the Katyn Forest near the city of Smolensk.
The Nazis discovered the mass graves in 1943, but Moscow only admitted Soviet guilt 47 years later.
Ping
The Soviet perps should have received the same fate the Nazi War Criminals received at Nuremberg.
It was a massive war crime on par with Babi Yar or any of the Nazi death camps without doubt, but it doesn't qualify as genocide.
The Russkies' motivation was not the extermination of the Polish race/ethnicity, only to purge Polish leadership (military and civilian) and replace it with their own. After all, Poles were and are fellow Slavs.
I have no doubts about it. But who's going to judge the victor?
Instead they continue to be lionised as heroes and great men.
ABSOLUTELY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Do you think what Pol - Pot and his comrades did in Cambodia was a genocide or not?
"With the Germans we lose our lives, with the Soviets we lose our souls." - General Wladyslaw Anders
And one reason the Soviets wanted to make darn sure they kept Poland under their control long after the war.
Ah,yes, I remember this, they were slaughted by the Germans in the summer time wearing their winter uniforms. Atleast that was the story provided by the Russians at the time. "It was a cold summer" according to the Commies. They denied it even though papers found on the bodies showed it happened during the Russian occupation.
In general yes, but "some" lost their lives too.
The UN has used the "fact" that the Darfur massacres don't technically qualify as genocide as an excuse not to do anything about it. I say who the hell cares whether it's technically genocide? Wherever people are being dislodged from the homes, turned into refugees and hunted down like rabid dogs in such numbers, the strong of the world must rescue them and haggle about the specific kind of mass murder when the history books are written.
I take it this definition is supposed to be contradictory to my point? It seems to mirror my definition perfectly.
Apparently the victims forgot to bring up to date newspapers to their executions, since those that had papers had papers from the previous spring-which was about when their last letters went home, and graffiti dated from that time frame was later found in Soviet rail cars. Diabolically clever, those Germans
Partially destroying a national group wasn't their goal. Let's say the Poles were somehow in a situation where they had been colonized by, I don't know, Lithuania. All the leadership and social elite of Poland was then Lithuanians. The USSR troops would have then massacred the Lithuanians and replaced them with Russians, and probably killed relatively few Poles. As the article states, intent is critical to the definition. The Russians weren't out to kill Poles for the sake of killing Poles -- they wanted to install their own government their and killing Polish leadership was the only way to do it. I concede this is hair-splitting and that is my point anyway, that the term genocide is a term that is useful only after the fact in classifying the precise motivations of the oppressors. While such horrible things are going on, the motivation behind them is irrelevant -- it must be stopped.
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