Plaque honouring Welsh journalist, Gareth Jones, to be unveiled at University of Wales

On Tuesday, May 2, 2006, a historical plaque honouring the Welsh journalist, Gareth R. V. Jones, will be unveiled at The University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Jones was one of the first Western journalists to travel to, and report truthfully on, the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine, the Holodomor. For that he was denounced by the Soviet authorities and by their sympathizers in the West, including the notorious New York Times correspondent, Walter Duranty, who would go on to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his supposedly objective reporting on events in the Soviet Union. Jones was later murdered by Chinese bandits in Manchukuo, in August 1935. The story of Jones and Duranty was accounted in The Day by renowned Holodomor researcher, our friend and colleague, late professor James Mace (“The Tale of Two Journalists,” July 16, 2003, also published in the book from The Day’s Library series The Day and Eternity of James Mace).

Following a Memorial Service in the University Chapel, with remarks by Lord Elystan Morgan, president of the University, the trilingual (Welsh, English, Ukrainian) plaque will be unveiled in The Quadrangle of the Old College by Dr Margaret Colley and Nigel Linsan Colley, relatives of the late Gareth Jones.

Organized by the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Foundation, with the support of the Ukrainian Orthodox churches of Great Britain and Canada, the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain, the Ukrainian American Civil Liberties Association, and other donors, the bronze plaque is adorned with a bas relief of Gareth Jones, prepared by Toronto sculptor, Oleh Lesiuk. This is the first-ever historical marker including not only the English and Welsh languages but Ukrainian as well.