Prague, 16 May – Two members of the Platform of ­­­European Memory and Conscience gave talks at an international conference held in Reykjavik on 12 May 2023 by the University of Iceland on the occasion of the retirement of Hannes H. Gissurarson as Professor of Politics at the University of Iceland. Professor Gissurarson has long been an active member of the Platform. At the conference, Yana Hrynko, Curator of the Holodomor Museum in Kyiv and a member of the Platform’s Supervisory Board, gave a brief account of the Great Famine in 1932–33 and the present Russian war against Ukraine. Dr. Neela Winkelmann, the Platform’s former Executive Director (2011 – 2018), described how it was founded in Prague in 2011 after several initiatives, in particular a 2009 resolution by the European Parliament condemning Stalin’s communism and Hitler’s national socialism. A third speaker at the conference, Gabriela von Habsburg, former Ambassador of Georgia to Germany, discussed Russian aggression against Georgia. 

Hrynko and Winkelmann had lunch with Icelandic Foreign Minister Thordis Kolbrun R. Gylfadottir and discussed with her the plight of Ukraine and some projects of the Platform. They also visited, with other speakers at the conference, the Icelandic House of Parliament where Speaker Birgir Armannsson received them, and attended a dinner party after the conference, given for the speakers by Finance Minister Bjarni Benediktsson, Leader of Iceland’s Independence Party. 

(Photos: Sigfus Steindorsson.)