EDMONTON—Leo Korownyk stood small among the crowd that had gathered at the University of Alberta on Monday afternoon to protest the university’s decision not to fire an assistant lecturer who called the genocidal famine the Holodomor a myth.

Korownyk knew the lecturer was wrong, because he was there.

“I was born there, I lived there, where was the professor? He was not even born,” the 89-year-old Holodomor survivor said with a hint of a Ukrainian accent.

The Holodomor was a yearlong genocidal famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932. It is estimated that between three million to 12 million Ukrainians lost their lives. Late last week, Ukrainian students and communities across Canada reacted to a Facebook post made earlier in November by assistant lecturer Dougal MacDonald, calling the Holodomor “lies,” “a myth” and “phony.”

The post states that every year Justin Trudeau repeats “the same lies; that it was systemic genocide committed by the Soviet government.” In his post, MacDonald also called Petro Savaryn, the university’s former chancellor who died in 2017, a Nazi collaborator.

In a statement emailed to Star Edmonton, MacDonald called it a freedom-of-speech issue and said the post is his contribution to the debate and it is his right to make that post.

A letter was written to the university’s president by the Ukrainian Canadian Students’ Union, a national body representing Ukrainian-Canadian student clubs across Canada, asking for the immediate termination of MacDonald.

In an emailed statement sent last week, the university said that MacDonald had a right to express his opinion and said his views did not represent those of the university.

“As a private citizen, Mr. MacDonald has the right to express his opinion, and others have the right to critique or debate that opinion. It is our understanding that he has not expressed these views in the context of his employment relationship with the university,” Deputy Provost Wendy Rodgers wrote in the statement.

Korownyk said he shared the sentiment that MacDonald should be fired.

“How does that make me feel when some of my relatives starved to death? How can we let this man teach in our university,” he asked.

“And the university turns out and says this is just a personal opinion? … He is maligning us and making us liars.”

At the protest that drew about 80 people, several students from a number of Ukrainian organizations, including Orysia Boychuk, president of the Edmonton branch of Ukrainian Canadian Congress, spoke out against MacDonald’s comments, expressing concerns over his teaching practices.

Boychuk, her voice echoing in the cold air as she addressed the small crowd, called on the university to “terminate Mr. MacDonald for his denial of the Holodomor and for his slander of the former chancellor of the University of Alberta.

“His behaviour demonstrates hatred toward Ukrainian people and to others who have suffered in genocides,” she said.

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She called for any of MacDonald’s former students to come forward if they had heard any anti-Holodomor teachings during lectures.

At the end of the protest, Boychuk joined members of the Ukrainian Students’ Society in visiting the office of David Turpin, president of the University of Alberta, where they planned to present him with a book about the Holodomor and its consequences called “Red Famine” by Anne Applebaum.

“We went to present that book to President David Turpin in the hopes that it would get him to recognize the severity of the Holodomor,” said Megan Brownlee, president of the Ukrainian Students’ Society.

However, neither the president nor the vice-president of the school were present on campus and the groups left the book with administrative staff in hopes that it would reach him.

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