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- It was in 2003, when my mother and I first came to New York to an
International Conference on the Holodomor at Columbia University. This
was as part of the Postcard Campaign to have Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer
Prize revoked.
- Hardly anybody outside of the Ukrainian Diaspora had heard of the
1932-33 famine-genocide and perhaps only a handful of academics had ever
heard of Gareth Jones, the man who originally exposed the atrocity to
the outside world…
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- During my childhood the tragic murder of my great uncle in 1935 by
Chinese bandits was never mentioned within the family, as it was
obviously still too distressing for Gareth’s remaining relatives, my
grandmother Eirian, my aunt Gwyneth as well as my mother Siriol.
- It was whilst clearing Gwyneth’s home in 1988, after which she moved
in with her younger sister, my grandmother, that a small briefcase was
discovered which contained every ‘weekly’ letter that Gareth had sent to
his parents from university through to his far off travels, plus about
20 or 30 innocuous, journalist pocket diaries, which to us telling a
family story were far less important than his weekly letters and were
therefore overlooked, except for his final ones from China…
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- In 2001, after 3 years research I edited & published a book on
behalf of my mother, entitled
“Gareth Jones: A Manchukuo Incident”, based primarily on the
British Foreign Office records surrounding their own investigations into
Gareth’s murder in Inner Mongolia, along with the letters he sent home
from his travels in the Far East.
- At that time we came to the conclusion that his murder was probably
politically motivated and the most likely culprits were the Japanese in
their then territorial expansion of Northern China. Just two pages were devoted to his
Soviet reporting, though we did briefly mention in passing that he had
written some articles about Soviet famine conditions which we considered
to be merely ‘grim’, but that was about it… Neither of us had any idea
of the importance of his role in exposing the Holodomor when we first
started investigating the circumstances behind his mysterious murder.
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- Before returning to my full time IT job, I decided to create a little
website to promote my mother’s book on the then new medium of the
internet, though I still remember it was against her wishes as she
thought the internet would be a complete waste of time for selling
books.
- However, I have never done what my mother wanted, so a website I went
and made!
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- …And that is where the story may well have ended… Except that nearly
two years later in the late Summer of 2003, I received an email out of
the blue from a Ukrainian activist called Morgan Williams, enquiring
whether our Gareth Jones, was the fabled Gareth Jones who exposed the
Ukrainian famine of 1932-33?
- To which I replied, that all I knew was that ‘our’ Gareth had written
some articles on Soviet famine conditions!
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- Shortly thereafter through Morgan Williams we were put in contact
with Professor James Mace & Professor Mark Von Hagen of Columbia
University. Even today, I know
not why, perhaps call it blind faith, but through the auspices of these
two academics, my mother & I were invited to New York in 2003 to
speak at an International Conference on the Holodomor at Columbia
University.
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- Around the same time as our 2003 trip to New York, Martin Sieff of
United Press penned the following and most memorable opening to his
article on Gareth supporting the then revocation of Duranty’s Pulitzer:
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- “What can you expect if you fearlessly expose the systematic, genocidal
murder of 10 million people?
- You can expect to be branded as a liar in the most prestigious newspaper
in the United States. You can expect to be murdered yourself by bandits
probably in the pay of conspirators perpetrating equally colossal,
monstrous crimes against humanity. And you can even to be betrayed after
your death and airbrushed out of existence by one of your closest
professional colleagues and friends.”
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- On this same trip, I remember bringing along some of Gareth’s Soviet
Diaries, which we showed Andrew Stuttaford at the Columbia Conference
and also around the offices of the UNA… It was Irene Jarosewych the
editor-in-chief of Svoboda and Roma Hadzewycz of The Ukrainian Weekly , who
suggested without any basis of fact, that in their opinions, there was
no doubt that Gareth had been murdered by the Bolsheviks – this was the
very first time that I had considered this notion.
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- A few months later I happened to read Andrew Stuttaford’s National Review blog in which he said
he was currently reading ‘Manchukuo Incident’ and quoted from Gareth’s
last letter home to his parents:
- " …we came to a huge collection of mud houses, with some stone
in the middle surrounded by hills. It was Kalgan, the outpost for trade
between the Mongols and China. There, two magnificent cars were waiting
for us. We were to be the guests of Mr. Purpis, a Latvian, the
"King of Kalgan" who is the chief trader in Inner Mongolia and
sells about 30,000 horses each year to the Chinese Army. Our chauffeur
drove us through the dirty town to a kind of mud-wall fortress on the
outskirts of the town. It was Wostwag, the company for trading with the
Mongols, a German firm…"
- Indiana Jones was,
rather surprisingly, no relation.”
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- Of all the pages in our Manchukuo Incident book, I scratched my head
& wondered why he chose this particular one to quote, so as one
does, I decided to consult the then fledgling Google on the word; ‘Wostwag’.
- Almost unbelievably, a single reference came back from the Public
Records Office in London and from the online précis, it informed me that
British secret service records had been released into the public domain,
literally a few weeks before, indicating that the Brits had known from
1929 that Wostwag was a trading front of the Soviet Secret Police.
- Furthermore, Mr Purpis ‘the king of Kalgan’ and head of Wostwag ‘was
considered one of the cleverest & shrewdest men in the Far East’
& associated with the ‘Cheka’; the same man who had freely supplied
Gareth with their car at his disposal! Pure coincidence or perhaps with
more sinisterly intentional, I knew not?
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- However, further circumstantial evidence of Soviet culpability has subsequently
come to light, including a 34-year British dossier relating to the
Soviet spying activities of Gareth’s travelling companion & co-captee,
Dr Herbert Mueller who not only assured Gareth before his fateful trip;
‘Absolutely Safe. No Bandits!’, but who was also conveniently and most
unusually released unharmed after two days in captivity.
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- Moving on, I was fortunate enough to be invited by the UCCA to NY
again in 2005 to give a speech at St Patrick’s but this time I chose to
share my discoveries of quite probable Soviet culpability in Gareth’s
murder and since then I have discovered more, but time does not permit
me to elucidate here.
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- In May 2006, Dr Ludomyr Luciuk encouraged his Canadian Communities to
pay for a tri-lingual plaque to be unveiled at Gareth’s first university
at Aberystwyth in Wales, from where Gareth received a 1st class degree
in French & German.
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- A month later, through Professor Federigo Argentieri, professor of
History at the John Cabot American University in Rome, whom I knew
through James Mace, I was invited to a week-long Ukrainian conference at
the University of Chicago at Urbana Champaign at which we would be
giving presentations on the final day.
- Due to my inability to speak Ukrainian, I took the opportunity to
hide myself away and for the very first time, make a transcript of
Gareth’s famine diaries – believe it or not, nobody, including
ourselves, had taken the time to study their contents, relying upon his
edited newspaper articles in order to prepare our speeches about Gareth.
- Without repeating what you are about to see in the film here are a
few powerful diary entries which were not included in the final edit of The
Living:
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- 2007 was the start of the two year-long 75th anniversary
commemorations, and I was invited to Calgary, then Winnipeg for a week
and again to Montreal to spread the word of Gareth’s unique diaries;
which I now realised probably represent the only western independent
verification of what is arguably Stalin’s greatest atrocity…
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- Early in 2008, I was contacted by Mark Edwards, the Parisian-based,
American producer of The Living saying that he had been commissioned by
the Pres. Yushchenko and his wife to research and then produce a
definitive documentary about the Holodomor. He mentioned he had come across our
commemorative Gareth Jones website and would like discuss the
possibility of our cooperation. Despite both of us living in Europe we
eventually met up on a bitterly cold night in February 2008 at the
Ukrainian National Home Restaurant in New York; where seemingly he
became smitten by Gareth’s heroic story!
- Nothing was heard until early June 2008, when he asked if he could
come with a researcher to look at our Gareth Jones materials including
the ‘famine’ diaries… This he did and we went to Aberystwyth, Wales
together where most of Gareth’s archives reside.
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- A fortnight later, I had again been invited by Professor Federigo
Argentieri, to speak in Kyiv. Sergiy Bukovsky the director of The
Living, and his wife came to see my presentation at the University and
then asked me to their studio the next day, where I thought I would just
be meeting of the rest of their film crew, prior to their filming trip
to Wales a fortnight later. To my
utter surprise, when I arrived at the studio I discovered that they had
hired the best HD equipment in Kyiv with the intention of ‘screen-testing’ me to read Gareth’s dairies and letters
in their film…
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- The film was premiered in Ukraine in Nov 2008. I had three hours sleep before
hot-footing it back to London on the first plane out of Kyiv so as to
attend a lunchtime ceremony at Westminster, where Gareth and Malcolm
Muggeridge were both posthumously awarded the Ukrainian Medals of
Freedom.
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- On Location,
- London, June 2008.
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- The British premiere of the film was in November 2009, in Cambridge
together with a special exhibit of
some of his diaries in the Wren Library at Trinity College,
Gareth’s second alma mater; from where he received a 1st class degree in
Russian & German language & literature.
- By now the world’s media were paying attention and 200 articles were
published by the worldwide press, including The London Times and The
Washington Post, along with BBC TV and radio coverage. Gareth’s website
had over 100,000 hits that week. Conspicuous by its absence was The New
York Times whose complicity in allowing Gareth’s name to be denigrated
by Walter Duranty continues to this day. So much for the ‘Grey Lady’s
maxim; ‘All the news that’s fit to print’.
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- Gareth’s Diaries exhibited The Wren Library at Trinity College along
side Sir Issac Newton’s personally annotated copy of his Laws of Motion
Masterpiece; The Principia
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- Less than a week later through an invitation by the UCCA to attend
the opening of an event at the United Nations; I was able to remind
Arthur Sulzberger, the Publisher of the New York Times that the spectre
of Gareth will continue to hover over them until they do the decent
thing and hand back their ill-gotten Pulitzer.
- Credit where credit is due; I must hereby thank Victor Rudd, a very
long term ‘friend of Gareth Jones’ for his erudite contributions to that
speech in warning the world that the ‘history of the past matters’!
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- In Sept 2010, in a 50-year old ‘national institution’, academic TV
quiz show on the BBC called ‘University Challenge’, which still
regularly gets an audience of over 3m viewers, both Gareth & the
Holodomor were the subject of a ‘General Knowledge’ question…
- Though the undergraduate contestants were clearly ignorant of the
correct answer, that the question appeared on mainstream national
prime-time television at all, shows that both Gareth and the Holodomor
have together moved from airbrushed obscurity to academic recognition in
the matter of a few years.
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Notes