Dear Editor,

Thank you for a balanced article "Debate over war crimes gets heated" by Kirk Makin, Globe & Mail, Apr 25, 2005. Regrettably, this does not happen often enough in the discussion of this particular issue.

The President of the Canadian Jewish Congress states that bringing Communist war criminals to justice is an attempt to de-focus on the incredible tragedy of the Jews. Strange and wrong.

The Ukrainians have a right to be motivated by their own incredible tragedy: the destruction of nearly half of it's population in peacetime by such Communist heavies as Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and Lazar Kaganovych, the Commissar of Agriculture for Ukraine who orchestrated the famine terror.

I have always believed that Communism deserves the same harsh condemnation as Nazism; harsher if numbers matter. Let Canada to do the right thing: ensure that there is no discriminatory system at work here; no artificial protection of Communist war criminals from the law.

Warm regards,

Oksana Bashuk Hepburn
Gatineau, PQ