Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
Thanks to Russian support and American indecision, the Bashar al-Assad regime is now gaining the upper hand in the Syrian civil war. In towns near the Lebanese border, the Syrian army and its Hezbollah allies are methodically making progress in the struggle against the Sunni rebels.
With Russia holding veto power at the Security Council, there is nothing the United Nations can do, to the frustration of Washington.
Israel has tried to steer clear of the Syrian civil war, but it did launch a series of airstrikes into Syria near the town of Quneitra on March 19 in retaliation for injuries sustained by four of its soldiers along the border in the Golan Heights – though the perpetrators were probably Hezbollah operatives. “We hold the Assad regime responsible for what happens in its territory,” Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon explained.
But Israel does not want an escalation of tensions with Damascus. It remains concerned that an ouster of Assad could see power in Syria fall to Islamic militants there, particularly al-Qaeda-linked groups such as the Jabhat al-Nusra, and further destabilize the region.
Founded in January 2012, al-Nusra has been described as one of the most aggressive and successful rebel forces in Syria.
A chaotic collapse of the Syrian state and disintegration of government troops could provide such extremists with a safe haven to launch operations into Israel itself. In that scenario, the Israeli army could be facing a permanent low-intensity war with various militant groups in the Golan Heights, similar to the situation in the Gaza Strip.
On the other hand, if the regime loses in Syria that will weaken Iran, the only country posing a potential existential threat to Israel. The fall of Assad’s regime would remove Syria as a conduit for weapons flowing from Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
And if Iran loses Syria as an ally, it would mean the end of the Iranian bid for Arab hegemony, because the majority Sunnis will have nothing to do with the Shi’a theocrats in Tehran.
The Iranian Kayhan newspaper, which usually reflects the views of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, wrote that Iran should draw lessons from the Crimean crisis and learn from Russia’s conduct:
“From a national perspective, Russia is helped by Iran in addressing most of its security and diplomatic concerns, and in return Iran is helped by Russia’s support on the Syrian, Lebanese, Iraqi, Afghan, nuclear, and other issues. Furthermore, in this affair Russia is in conflict with our enemies, that is, the West. That in itself means we must be pleased with the defeat of our enemies, even if we have criticism of the Russian side.”
Still, Russia and the United States are continuing to cooperate in pressuring Syria to comply with its pledges on chemical weapons. Under a United Nations Security Council resolution that was supported by both Russia and the United States, the entire Syrian chemical arsenal must be destroyed by June 30.
Nearly half of Syria’s chemical stockpile for weapons use has now been removed from the country. “The latest movements increased the portion of chemicals that have now been removed from Syria for destruction outside the country to more than 45 percent,” said the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the group that is collaborating with the United Nations to ensure the arsenal’s destruction.
Professor Henry Srebrnik
Monday, March 31, 2014
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Germany Again a European Colossus
Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
By the spring of 1941, Germany was master of Europe. Hitler’s New Order included conquered countries, such as France and Poland; allies, such as Hungary and Italy: and states with an affinity to its ideology, like Portugal and Spain.
When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union that June, Moscow had no allies on the continent save Great Britain, which remained at war with Hitler.
Today, a reunited and resurgent Germany is the economic driver of the 28-member European Union – which includes Britain. And the EU keeps expanding eastwards, with another half-dozen countries vying for membership. Germany is also the most important nation in NATO after the United States.
France and the United Kingdom may have permanent seats on the UN Security Council, but if one were to reconfigure that body today, at least one of them would be replaced by Germany.
Someone just arrived from Mars could be forgiven for assuming that it was Germany that had won the Second World War.
Russia, on the other hand, has since 1989 lost not only its old Warsaw Pact buffer zone, but also the non-Russian Soviet republics, including the Baltic States, Ukraine, the Caucasian countries, and central Asia. NATO expanded eastward and Russia became more isolated. Belarus is now its only ally in Europe.
To add a dollop of irony, the current German chancellor, Angela Merkel, grew up in the old East Germany, then a vassal state of Moscow’s, and a country where Russian President Vladimir Putin had served as a KGB officer.
From Hitler’s “Gotterdammerung” of 1945, which left Germany in ruins and occupied by the victors of the war, including the Soviets, to the reunification in 1990, two generations of Germans were careful not to throw their political weight around.
Those who had supported Hitler were basically in a type of political purgatory, while their children’s generation was consumed by the evils inflicted upon the world by their parents.
Today, though, a new German generation is no longer wracked by shame or guilt; they no longer feel the need to atone for Germany’s war crimes. So Germany is today a “normal” – and indeed, much admired – country.
This has had profound implications for the Russians, who have moved in the opposite direction – much weakened and increasingly reviled by liberals in Europe and North America.
Merkel told the German parliament on March 13 that Putin’s obsessions with “spheres of influence and territorial claims” were throwbacks to an era “that we thought we had transcended.” She declared that the Group of 8, a forum of major industrial nations in which Russia was originally included as a means of nudging it toward democracy and free enterprise, had ceased to exist.
By the standards of German foreign policy towards Russia, such a tough tone is new. Unless Putin stops, Merkel added, Germany and its allies will step up their resistance, though only through economic means. The country has very close business relations with Russia and has the greatest capacity to exert pressure.
Last year, trade between Germany and Russia amounted to almost close to 77 billion euros ($107 billion). Russia primarily supplies petroleum and natural gas to Germany. Germany, on the other hand, exports mechanical engineering products, medicines, trains and automobiles to Russia.
Sigmar Gabriel, the German Minister of Economics and Energy, has halted a major Russian military contract for the Rheinmetall defence technology group, at least temporarily. “The German government considers the export of the combat training center to Russia unjustifiable in the current situation,” he said, as he cancelled delivery of the120 million euro ($165 million) battle simulation facility.
Such moves might also backfire. Russia supplies 36 percent and 35 percent of Germany’s imports of natural gas and oil, respectively. Russia might react to economic sanctions by reducing those exports.
But the German economy is a powerhouse and would manage to acquire other sources. In any case, when asked about the consequences for German companies of an economic war with Russia, many Germans have replied that political principles are more important than profits.
By the spring of 1941, Germany was master of Europe. Hitler’s New Order included conquered countries, such as France and Poland; allies, such as Hungary and Italy: and states with an affinity to its ideology, like Portugal and Spain.
When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union that June, Moscow had no allies on the continent save Great Britain, which remained at war with Hitler.
Today, a reunited and resurgent Germany is the economic driver of the 28-member European Union – which includes Britain. And the EU keeps expanding eastwards, with another half-dozen countries vying for membership. Germany is also the most important nation in NATO after the United States.
France and the United Kingdom may have permanent seats on the UN Security Council, but if one were to reconfigure that body today, at least one of them would be replaced by Germany.
Someone just arrived from Mars could be forgiven for assuming that it was Germany that had won the Second World War.
Russia, on the other hand, has since 1989 lost not only its old Warsaw Pact buffer zone, but also the non-Russian Soviet republics, including the Baltic States, Ukraine, the Caucasian countries, and central Asia. NATO expanded eastward and Russia became more isolated. Belarus is now its only ally in Europe.
To add a dollop of irony, the current German chancellor, Angela Merkel, grew up in the old East Germany, then a vassal state of Moscow’s, and a country where Russian President Vladimir Putin had served as a KGB officer.
From Hitler’s “Gotterdammerung” of 1945, which left Germany in ruins and occupied by the victors of the war, including the Soviets, to the reunification in 1990, two generations of Germans were careful not to throw their political weight around.
Those who had supported Hitler were basically in a type of political purgatory, while their children’s generation was consumed by the evils inflicted upon the world by their parents.
Today, though, a new German generation is no longer wracked by shame or guilt; they no longer feel the need to atone for Germany’s war crimes. So Germany is today a “normal” – and indeed, much admired – country.
This has had profound implications for the Russians, who have moved in the opposite direction – much weakened and increasingly reviled by liberals in Europe and North America.
Merkel told the German parliament on March 13 that Putin’s obsessions with “spheres of influence and territorial claims” were throwbacks to an era “that we thought we had transcended.” She declared that the Group of 8, a forum of major industrial nations in which Russia was originally included as a means of nudging it toward democracy and free enterprise, had ceased to exist.
By the standards of German foreign policy towards Russia, such a tough tone is new. Unless Putin stops, Merkel added, Germany and its allies will step up their resistance, though only through economic means. The country has very close business relations with Russia and has the greatest capacity to exert pressure.
Last year, trade between Germany and Russia amounted to almost close to 77 billion euros ($107 billion). Russia primarily supplies petroleum and natural gas to Germany. Germany, on the other hand, exports mechanical engineering products, medicines, trains and automobiles to Russia.
Sigmar Gabriel, the German Minister of Economics and Energy, has halted a major Russian military contract for the Rheinmetall defence technology group, at least temporarily. “The German government considers the export of the combat training center to Russia unjustifiable in the current situation,” he said, as he cancelled delivery of the120 million euro ($165 million) battle simulation facility.
Such moves might also backfire. Russia supplies 36 percent and 35 percent of Germany’s imports of natural gas and oil, respectively. Russia might react to economic sanctions by reducing those exports.
But the German economy is a powerhouse and would manage to acquire other sources. In any case, when asked about the consequences for German companies of an economic war with Russia, many Germans have replied that political principles are more important than profits.
Monday, March 24, 2014
Colonialism Was Part of a Now Discredited Zeitgeist
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
Incredible as it seems to us today, until the end of the Second World War, the colonial empires of European powers plus the United States were considered “normal,” and even beneficial to the non-western peoples under their domination.
Imperial rule was justified and supported by most of the citizens in the imperial countries. The notion of rule over tropical lands commanded widespread acceptance, even among those who associated imperial colonization with oppression and exploitation.
For example, the 1904 Congress of the Socialist International concluded that the colonial peoples should be taken in hand by future European socialist governments and led by them into eventual independence.
One of the biggest motivations behind imperialism was the idea of “civilizing” people in underdeveloped places. This was a religious motive for many Christian missionaries, in their attempts to “save the souls” of non-Christian people. Other Europeans claimed that they were only in these areas because they wanted to protect the weaker tribal groups they conquered.
Virtually all of Africa, the Caribbean and South Pacific islands, and much of Asia and the Middle East, were run from capitals in Europe and America. Even such populous and large areas as today’s India, Indonesia and Indochina (Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam) were under British, Dutch, and French control, respectively.
Until 1945, no colonial power had given up a single colony, save to another empire. Germany lost all its colonies after the First World War to the victorious Allies, but in the 1930s Hitler kept demanding their return. And a latecomer to the imperial game, Italy, conquered Ethiopia, one of the only two independent countries in Africa, in 1935-36.
Yet four decades later, virtually all these places had become sovereign states, and only a few specks on the map -- mostly tiny islands -- remained under foreign rule.
So what changed? Why was colonialism suddenly discredited? A number of factors came together as a result of the 1939-1945 war.
Fascism, which glorified conquest, and Nazism, which divided humanity into “superior” and “inferior” so-called “races,” made the philosophical underpinnings of imperialism illegitimate. As well, the European countries were all devastated by the war: Belgium, France and the Netherlands had all been defeated by Germany, and even Britain emerged in a much weakened state.
Most of their Asian colonies, meanwhile, had been occupied by Japan, a non-European state, and the subject peoples there were in no mood to allow their colonial masters to return.
Finally, one of the victors in the war, the Soviet Union, set itself up as a champion of “national liberation.” After 1949, a newly established Communist China, itself a non-western country, followed suit.
Both provided economic, military and political aid to independence movements. (The Chinese and Soviets wouldn’t acknowledge that they were themselves land-based empires, with millions of non-Russian and non-Han Chinese inhabitants.)
So as the Cold War began, the western powers were forced onto the defensive. The Philippines were granted independence by Washington in 1946, India and Pakistan by London, in 1947, and Indonesia by Amsterdam in 1949. The remaining Asian colonies soon followed.
In Africa, fighting began in 1954 against French rule in Algeria and soon all of North Africa was self-governing. In sub-Saharan Africa, Ghana’s independence in 1957 was followed by most of the continent attaining freedom from European rule by 1980. Caribbean and South Pacific islands also gained their independence during that time.
A map of the pre-1939 world looks to us today like that of a different planet. That’s what happens when one zeitgeist replaces another.
Incredible as it seems to us today, until the end of the Second World War, the colonial empires of European powers plus the United States were considered “normal,” and even beneficial to the non-western peoples under their domination.
Imperial rule was justified and supported by most of the citizens in the imperial countries. The notion of rule over tropical lands commanded widespread acceptance, even among those who associated imperial colonization with oppression and exploitation.
For example, the 1904 Congress of the Socialist International concluded that the colonial peoples should be taken in hand by future European socialist governments and led by them into eventual independence.
One of the biggest motivations behind imperialism was the idea of “civilizing” people in underdeveloped places. This was a religious motive for many Christian missionaries, in their attempts to “save the souls” of non-Christian people. Other Europeans claimed that they were only in these areas because they wanted to protect the weaker tribal groups they conquered.
Virtually all of Africa, the Caribbean and South Pacific islands, and much of Asia and the Middle East, were run from capitals in Europe and America. Even such populous and large areas as today’s India, Indonesia and Indochina (Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam) were under British, Dutch, and French control, respectively.
Until 1945, no colonial power had given up a single colony, save to another empire. Germany lost all its colonies after the First World War to the victorious Allies, but in the 1930s Hitler kept demanding their return. And a latecomer to the imperial game, Italy, conquered Ethiopia, one of the only two independent countries in Africa, in 1935-36.
Yet four decades later, virtually all these places had become sovereign states, and only a few specks on the map -- mostly tiny islands -- remained under foreign rule.
So what changed? Why was colonialism suddenly discredited? A number of factors came together as a result of the 1939-1945 war.
Fascism, which glorified conquest, and Nazism, which divided humanity into “superior” and “inferior” so-called “races,” made the philosophical underpinnings of imperialism illegitimate. As well, the European countries were all devastated by the war: Belgium, France and the Netherlands had all been defeated by Germany, and even Britain emerged in a much weakened state.
Most of their Asian colonies, meanwhile, had been occupied by Japan, a non-European state, and the subject peoples there were in no mood to allow their colonial masters to return.
Finally, one of the victors in the war, the Soviet Union, set itself up as a champion of “national liberation.” After 1949, a newly established Communist China, itself a non-western country, followed suit.
Both provided economic, military and political aid to independence movements. (The Chinese and Soviets wouldn’t acknowledge that they were themselves land-based empires, with millions of non-Russian and non-Han Chinese inhabitants.)
So as the Cold War began, the western powers were forced onto the defensive. The Philippines were granted independence by Washington in 1946, India and Pakistan by London, in 1947, and Indonesia by Amsterdam in 1949. The remaining Asian colonies soon followed.
In Africa, fighting began in 1954 against French rule in Algeria and soon all of North Africa was self-governing. In sub-Saharan Africa, Ghana’s independence in 1957 was followed by most of the continent attaining freedom from European rule by 1980. Caribbean and South Pacific islands also gained their independence during that time.
A map of the pre-1939 world looks to us today like that of a different planet. That’s what happens when one zeitgeist replaces another.
Saturday, March 22, 2014
How Will Worsening American-Russian Relationship Impact the Middle East?
Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
The ideological rivalry between the western world and the Communist bloc may have ended a quarter-century ago, but national interests and realpolitik are with us still.
Indeed, the antagonistic relationship between U.S. President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, is arguably more intense these days than that between President George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, in the waning days of the Cold War.
Following Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the sanctions put in place by western countries in response, an angry and defiant Putin on March 18 denounced what he called a history of dishonesty and cheating by the West.
This belligerent attitude will undoubtedly affect the way Putin feels when it comes to the ever-volatile Middle East.
If you think the Russian leader has been dragging his feet when it comes to the international community trying to frame a robust response to Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime in Syria or Iran’s ongoing nuclear program, then, as they say on the street, “you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Emile Hokayem, a Senior Fellow for Regional Security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies based in Manama, Bahrain, remarked in the New York Times that “to irritate the West, Russia can do a lot more to augment Assad’s power over the rebels; the political and material support Russia has extended from Day 1 has already proven crucial to his survival and recovery.”
Assad, grateful for Moscow’s support, has described the Russian stance over the situation in Ukraine as a “wise policy” in the face of “coup attempts against legitimacy and democracy in favor of the terrorist extremists.” He reiterated Syria’s commitment to Putin’s “rational approach” and applauded Russia for “saving the world from dangerous events.”
And Assad is now gaining the upper hand in the civil war. With Russia holding veto power at the Security Council, there is nothing the United Nations can do, to the frustration of Washington.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal on March 18, Syrian deputy foreign minister Faisal al-Mekdad said that he sees no point in further peace talks in Geneva if the opposition and its Western backers keep insisting that Assad relinquish power, and indicated his regime had the backing of Russia in its stance.
Nuclear negotiations with Iran could get more complicated as well, if Moscow breaks ranks with Western powers and Tehran manages to play on these divisions. “Iran may feel sufficiently supported by Moscow that it backtracks on its recent conciliatory actions and rhetoric and continues to develop its nuclear program,” stated Paul de Quenoy, an associate professor of history at the American University of Beirut.
“If you’re Putin and you think you’re going to be a target of sanctions, the most obvious leverage is in the Iranian file, where Russian cooperation is so important,” remarked Mark Dubowitz, the executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based group.
Meanwhile, Egyptian Field Marshal Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi seems likely to revert to his predecessors’ Cold War roles of playing the U.S. and Russia off of each other to secure maximum concessions from both sides while making minimal commitments of their own.
Sisi, who now rules Egypt, visited Russia in February to negotiate a deal to buy as much as $2 billion worth of Russian weapons. Egypt’s main arms supplier, the United States, has suspended certain shipments in response to the ouster of former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi.
“Our visit offers a new start to the development of military and technological cooperation between Egypt and Russia,” Sisi told Putin. “We hope to speed up the cooperation.”
The only thing certain about the Middle East is the uncertainty generated by its shifting political sands.
The ideological rivalry between the western world and the Communist bloc may have ended a quarter-century ago, but national interests and realpolitik are with us still.
Indeed, the antagonistic relationship between U.S. President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, is arguably more intense these days than that between President George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, in the waning days of the Cold War.
Following Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the sanctions put in place by western countries in response, an angry and defiant Putin on March 18 denounced what he called a history of dishonesty and cheating by the West.
This belligerent attitude will undoubtedly affect the way Putin feels when it comes to the ever-volatile Middle East.
If you think the Russian leader has been dragging his feet when it comes to the international community trying to frame a robust response to Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime in Syria or Iran’s ongoing nuclear program, then, as they say on the street, “you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Emile Hokayem, a Senior Fellow for Regional Security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies based in Manama, Bahrain, remarked in the New York Times that “to irritate the West, Russia can do a lot more to augment Assad’s power over the rebels; the political and material support Russia has extended from Day 1 has already proven crucial to his survival and recovery.”
Assad, grateful for Moscow’s support, has described the Russian stance over the situation in Ukraine as a “wise policy” in the face of “coup attempts against legitimacy and democracy in favor of the terrorist extremists.” He reiterated Syria’s commitment to Putin’s “rational approach” and applauded Russia for “saving the world from dangerous events.”
And Assad is now gaining the upper hand in the civil war. With Russia holding veto power at the Security Council, there is nothing the United Nations can do, to the frustration of Washington.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal on March 18, Syrian deputy foreign minister Faisal al-Mekdad said that he sees no point in further peace talks in Geneva if the opposition and its Western backers keep insisting that Assad relinquish power, and indicated his regime had the backing of Russia in its stance.
Nuclear negotiations with Iran could get more complicated as well, if Moscow breaks ranks with Western powers and Tehran manages to play on these divisions. “Iran may feel sufficiently supported by Moscow that it backtracks on its recent conciliatory actions and rhetoric and continues to develop its nuclear program,” stated Paul de Quenoy, an associate professor of history at the American University of Beirut.
“If you’re Putin and you think you’re going to be a target of sanctions, the most obvious leverage is in the Iranian file, where Russian cooperation is so important,” remarked Mark Dubowitz, the executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based group.
Meanwhile, Egyptian Field Marshal Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi seems likely to revert to his predecessors’ Cold War roles of playing the U.S. and Russia off of each other to secure maximum concessions from both sides while making minimal commitments of their own.
Sisi, who now rules Egypt, visited Russia in February to negotiate a deal to buy as much as $2 billion worth of Russian weapons. Egypt’s main arms supplier, the United States, has suspended certain shipments in response to the ouster of former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi.
“Our visit offers a new start to the development of military and technological cooperation between Egypt and Russia,” Sisi told Putin. “We hope to speed up the cooperation.”
The only thing certain about the Middle East is the uncertainty generated by its shifting political sands.
Thursday, March 20, 2014
Malaysia is no Friend to Israel
Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune
The recent disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines airplane en route from Kuala Lumpur, the country’s capital, to Beijing, has brought that country to the world’s attention.
Malaysia was formed in 1963 when the former British colonies of Singapore, as well as Sabah (North Borneo) and Sarawak on the northern coast of the island of Borneo, joined with mainland Malaya to create the country.
More than half of its 30 million people are ethnic Malays, almost one-quarter are Chinese, another eight percent are of Indian heritage, and the final eleven percent are indigenous peoples on the island of Borneo.
The Malays are uniformly – and devoutly – Muslim, while the other groups practice Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and various Chinese faiths.
Constitutionally, one must be a Muslim to be considered Malay in Malaysia. The rationale for this is that Islam is considered intrinsic to Malay ethnic identity. In September 2001then Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad declared that the country an Islamic state, despite its very large non-Muslim Chinese and Indian population.
The country is governed by a National Front dominated by the United Malays National Organization (UNMO), which has a hammerlock on power. It has governed Malaya, and then Malaysia, since 1957. The party is dedicated to uphold and protect the Malay culture and defend Islam.
Since its establishment, the country has rejected formal diplomatic relations with Israel, and it does not allow entry into the country by Israeli passport holders.
In 1981 Mahathir Mohamad was elected Malaysia’s prime minister, and he strengthened the country’s support for the Palestine Liberation Organization. He accused his critics of being agents of Zionism and claimed that Zionists were undermining Malaysia’s integrity and trying to destroy Islam.
In 1994, the government prohibited the screening of Steven Spielberg’s movie “Schindler’s List” on the ground that it was an anti-German propaganda film aimed at winning support for Jews.
Three years later, during a financial crisis, Mahathir attributed the collapse of the Malaysian ringgit to a conspiracy of Jews led by the financier George Soros: “The Jews robbed the Palestinians of everything, but in Malaysia they could not do so, hence they do this,” he stated.
In October 2003, soon to retire, he provided an anti-Semitic diatribe at a meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference near Kuala Lumpur.
“We are up against a people who think,” Mahathir told his listeners. “They survived 2,000 years of pogroms, not by hitting back but by thinking. They invented and successfully promoted socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they may enjoy equal rights with others.”
Mahathir added that the Jews “rule the world by proxy,” since “they have now gained control of the most powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world power.”
That same year the prime minister’s political party, the UMNO, provided its members copies of Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic book from the 1920s, “The International Jew,” which had been translated into Malay.
Now retired, Mahathir has not moderated his views. This past January, he accused Israel of treating African migrants in Israel the way Nazi Germany had treated Jews. “The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu fears the possibility of African blood being mixed with Jewish blood. The Jews must remain pure.
“There is no difference then between the Nazis and the Israelis. Their oppression of the Palestinians is another indicator. Given power Jews behave in the same way as the Nazis,” he stated.
On Sept. 21, 2012, about 3,000 demonstrators marched on the American embassy in Kuala Lumpur. They burned an American flag topped with the Jewish Star of David, incensed over a 13-minute anti-Islamic YouTube film that had been produced in California.
So it is no surprise that current Prime Minister Najib Razak was the second head of government (after Qatar’s) to visit the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, on Jan. 22, 2013, following its eight-day war with Israel two months earlier.
Najib laid the foundation stone of the new office of the Hamas Prime Minister. The old office had been destroyed in an Israeli bombing. He also visited the site of a Malaysian-funded school in Gaza, Al-Madrasah Al-Malaziah.
The recent disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines airplane en route from Kuala Lumpur, the country’s capital, to Beijing, has brought that country to the world’s attention.
Malaysia was formed in 1963 when the former British colonies of Singapore, as well as Sabah (North Borneo) and Sarawak on the northern coast of the island of Borneo, joined with mainland Malaya to create the country.
More than half of its 30 million people are ethnic Malays, almost one-quarter are Chinese, another eight percent are of Indian heritage, and the final eleven percent are indigenous peoples on the island of Borneo.
The Malays are uniformly – and devoutly – Muslim, while the other groups practice Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and various Chinese faiths.
Constitutionally, one must be a Muslim to be considered Malay in Malaysia. The rationale for this is that Islam is considered intrinsic to Malay ethnic identity. In September 2001then Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad declared that the country an Islamic state, despite its very large non-Muslim Chinese and Indian population.
The country is governed by a National Front dominated by the United Malays National Organization (UNMO), which has a hammerlock on power. It has governed Malaya, and then Malaysia, since 1957. The party is dedicated to uphold and protect the Malay culture and defend Islam.
Since its establishment, the country has rejected formal diplomatic relations with Israel, and it does not allow entry into the country by Israeli passport holders.
In 1981 Mahathir Mohamad was elected Malaysia’s prime minister, and he strengthened the country’s support for the Palestine Liberation Organization. He accused his critics of being agents of Zionism and claimed that Zionists were undermining Malaysia’s integrity and trying to destroy Islam.
In 1994, the government prohibited the screening of Steven Spielberg’s movie “Schindler’s List” on the ground that it was an anti-German propaganda film aimed at winning support for Jews.
Three years later, during a financial crisis, Mahathir attributed the collapse of the Malaysian ringgit to a conspiracy of Jews led by the financier George Soros: “The Jews robbed the Palestinians of everything, but in Malaysia they could not do so, hence they do this,” he stated.
In October 2003, soon to retire, he provided an anti-Semitic diatribe at a meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference near Kuala Lumpur.
“We are up against a people who think,” Mahathir told his listeners. “They survived 2,000 years of pogroms, not by hitting back but by thinking. They invented and successfully promoted socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they may enjoy equal rights with others.”
Mahathir added that the Jews “rule the world by proxy,” since “they have now gained control of the most powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world power.”
That same year the prime minister’s political party, the UMNO, provided its members copies of Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic book from the 1920s, “The International Jew,” which had been translated into Malay.
Now retired, Mahathir has not moderated his views. This past January, he accused Israel of treating African migrants in Israel the way Nazi Germany had treated Jews. “The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu fears the possibility of African blood being mixed with Jewish blood. The Jews must remain pure.
“There is no difference then between the Nazis and the Israelis. Their oppression of the Palestinians is another indicator. Given power Jews behave in the same way as the Nazis,” he stated.
On Sept. 21, 2012, about 3,000 demonstrators marched on the American embassy in Kuala Lumpur. They burned an American flag topped with the Jewish Star of David, incensed over a 13-minute anti-Islamic YouTube film that had been produced in California.
So it is no surprise that current Prime Minister Najib Razak was the second head of government (after Qatar’s) to visit the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, on Jan. 22, 2013, following its eight-day war with Israel two months earlier.
Najib laid the foundation stone of the new office of the Hamas Prime Minister. The old office had been destroyed in an Israeli bombing. He also visited the site of a Malaysian-funded school in Gaza, Al-Madrasah Al-Malaziah.
Saturday, March 15, 2014
Missing Plane Highlights Woes in Malaysian Society
Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
The ineptitude and confusion that has surrounded the disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines airplane en route from Kuala Lumpur, the country’s capital, to Beijing, has brought to the world’s attention the deficiencies in that country’s political system, ones that are integral to its very economic and social policies.
During the late 18th and 19th centuries, Great Britain established colonies and protectorates in the area of current Malaysia. In 1948, the British-ruled territories on the Malay Peninsula, nine of them constitutionally headed by traditional Muslim princes, formed the Federation of Malaya, which became independent in 1957.
Malaysia was formed in 1963 when the former British colonies of Singapore, as well as Sabah (North Borneo) and Sarawak on the northern coast of the island of Borneo, joined with mainland Malaya to create the larger country, which now consists of thirteen states and three federal territories.
More than half of its 30 million people are ethnic Malays, almost one-quarter are Chinese, another eight percent are of Indian heritage, and the final eleven percent are indigenous peoples on the island of Borneo.
The Malays are uniformly – and devoutly – Muslim, while the other groups practice Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and various Chinese faiths.
The country is governed by a National Front dominated by the United Malays National Organization (UNMO), which has a hammerlock on power. It has governed Malaya, and then Malaysia, since 1957. The party is dedicated to uphold and protect the Malay culture and defend Islam.
Malaya itself is a society riven by tension between the native Malays and the Chinese and Indians who settled there in the 19th and 20th centuries, when the peninsula was under British control.
It is an ethnically polarized society where a system of ethnic preferences discourages the country’s minorities from government service. Ethnic Malays hold nearly all top government positions and receive a host of government preferences because of their status as indigenous “bumiputra” (in Malay, “sons of the soil”).
These policies were entrenched in the Federation’s constitution and further strengthened in the 1970s, when the government implemented the New Economic Policy, a more aggressive form of affirmative action, following anti-Chinese riots by Malays over the economic success of the ethnic Chinese; nearly 200 people died.
It provided for the use of quotas in the granting of scholarships, entrance to universities, positions in the civil service, and business licences, as well as native reservations of land. It targeted a 30 percent share of the economy for the native Malays. Malaysia thus requires citizens to carry a national identification card.
Indeed, in 1965 the island city-state of Singapore, at the tip of the Malay Peninsula, was actually expelled from Malaysia because it was feared by the Malays that the city’s overwhelmingly Chinese and Indian population (now comprising 5.3 million people) might tilt the ethnic ratio in the country against the Malays.
In the 2013 national election, Prime Minister Najib Razak, who heads the UMNO-led coalition National Front government, won 133 of the 222 seats in the federal Parliament. But the tally represented a loss of seven seats compared with 2008, as more Chinese voted for the opposition People’s Alliance.
Non-Malays have criticized the preferences given to ethnic Malays; they say the policy treats them like second-class citizens. Analysts said that Chinese voters were upset that the government had not made more progress in rolling back official preferences for ethnic Malays. But Najib insists affirmative action needs to stay.
Plural societies with deep ethnic, linguistic, and religious cleavages, such as Malaysia’s, have few common political or ideological institutions to bridge the chasm between groups. In effect, one group rules over another through political or military force, while those who are dominated feel little sense of shared identity with the political system. Competition and conflict form the usual pattern of politics and hostility can quickly flare into communal violence.
The American travel writer Paul Theroux, in his 1977 book “The Consul’s File,” paints a portrayal of Malays, Chinese and Indians living in one small Malayan town, “in uneasy proximity, rather than harmony. They grate on each other, offend each other by their very being.” He found no integration, only parallel communities. Not much has changed since then.
The ineptitude and confusion that has surrounded the disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines airplane en route from Kuala Lumpur, the country’s capital, to Beijing, has brought to the world’s attention the deficiencies in that country’s political system, ones that are integral to its very economic and social policies.
During the late 18th and 19th centuries, Great Britain established colonies and protectorates in the area of current Malaysia. In 1948, the British-ruled territories on the Malay Peninsula, nine of them constitutionally headed by traditional Muslim princes, formed the Federation of Malaya, which became independent in 1957.
Malaysia was formed in 1963 when the former British colonies of Singapore, as well as Sabah (North Borneo) and Sarawak on the northern coast of the island of Borneo, joined with mainland Malaya to create the larger country, which now consists of thirteen states and three federal territories.
More than half of its 30 million people are ethnic Malays, almost one-quarter are Chinese, another eight percent are of Indian heritage, and the final eleven percent are indigenous peoples on the island of Borneo.
The Malays are uniformly – and devoutly – Muslim, while the other groups practice Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and various Chinese faiths.
The country is governed by a National Front dominated by the United Malays National Organization (UNMO), which has a hammerlock on power. It has governed Malaya, and then Malaysia, since 1957. The party is dedicated to uphold and protect the Malay culture and defend Islam.
Malaya itself is a society riven by tension between the native Malays and the Chinese and Indians who settled there in the 19th and 20th centuries, when the peninsula was under British control.
It is an ethnically polarized society where a system of ethnic preferences discourages the country’s minorities from government service. Ethnic Malays hold nearly all top government positions and receive a host of government preferences because of their status as indigenous “bumiputra” (in Malay, “sons of the soil”).
These policies were entrenched in the Federation’s constitution and further strengthened in the 1970s, when the government implemented the New Economic Policy, a more aggressive form of affirmative action, following anti-Chinese riots by Malays over the economic success of the ethnic Chinese; nearly 200 people died.
It provided for the use of quotas in the granting of scholarships, entrance to universities, positions in the civil service, and business licences, as well as native reservations of land. It targeted a 30 percent share of the economy for the native Malays. Malaysia thus requires citizens to carry a national identification card.
Indeed, in 1965 the island city-state of Singapore, at the tip of the Malay Peninsula, was actually expelled from Malaysia because it was feared by the Malays that the city’s overwhelmingly Chinese and Indian population (now comprising 5.3 million people) might tilt the ethnic ratio in the country against the Malays.
In the 2013 national election, Prime Minister Najib Razak, who heads the UMNO-led coalition National Front government, won 133 of the 222 seats in the federal Parliament. But the tally represented a loss of seven seats compared with 2008, as more Chinese voted for the opposition People’s Alliance.
Non-Malays have criticized the preferences given to ethnic Malays; they say the policy treats them like second-class citizens. Analysts said that Chinese voters were upset that the government had not made more progress in rolling back official preferences for ethnic Malays. But Najib insists affirmative action needs to stay.
Plural societies with deep ethnic, linguistic, and religious cleavages, such as Malaysia’s, have few common political or ideological institutions to bridge the chasm between groups. In effect, one group rules over another through political or military force, while those who are dominated feel little sense of shared identity with the political system. Competition and conflict form the usual pattern of politics and hostility can quickly flare into communal violence.
The American travel writer Paul Theroux, in his 1977 book “The Consul’s File,” paints a portrayal of Malays, Chinese and Indians living in one small Malayan town, “in uneasy proximity, rather than harmony. They grate on each other, offend each other by their very being.” He found no integration, only parallel communities. Not much has changed since then.
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Hindu Nationalism on the Rise in India
Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
In a telling sign of the growing power of Hindu nationalism in India, an American author has had her book “The Hindus: An Alternative History,” withdrawn, and remaining copies pulped, by her publisher, Penguin India.
This followed a lawsuit filed by a Hindu nationalist group, which took exception to Wendy Doniger’s handling of Hindu mythology.
Doniger, who teaches at the University of Chicago, is a well-regarded scholar and author of many books on India. Her previous books have been positively received in India and elsewhere. But she has faced regular criticism from those who consider her work to be disrespectful of Hinduism in general.
In an article written for the magazine “Outlook India,” Doniger responded that “I was, of course, angry and disappointed to see this happen, and I am deeply troubled by what it foretells for free speech in India in the present, and steadily worsening, political climate.”
She went on to say that her publisher was “finally defeated by the true villain of this piece -- the Indian law that makes it a criminal rather than civil offense to publish a book that offends any Hindu, a law that jeopardizes the physical safety of any publisher, no matter how ludicrous the accusation brought against a book.”
The Indian Constitution lists “freedom of speech and expression” among the fundamental rights it guarantees, but also allows the government to impose “reasonable restrictions” on this freedom.
Many Indian authors were incensed. Arundhati Roy accused the publisher of having meekly surrendered to extremists: “You have not only caved in, you have humiliated yourself abjectly before a fly-by-night outfit,” she said. “What was it that terrified you?” she asked in a column in the Times of India.
The group that brought the suit against Doniger, the Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti (Movement to Save Education), claimed to be defending “the sentiments of Hindus all over the world.” They contended that “she misunderstands and deliberately misrepresents Hindu texts and practices, insults Hindu gods in her readings of myth, and crudely focuses, through a psychoanalytic lens and above all else, on sex.”
Dinanath Batra, one of the plaintiffs, who is associated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteers Organization), charged that the book was “written with a Christian missionary zeal and hidden agenda to denigrate Hindus and show their religion in poor light.”
The RSS has carried out acts of violence against Muslims and other minority groups throughout India since its creation in 1925. It is part of an array of Hindu nationalist movements that subscribe to the ideology known as Hindutva, literally “Hindu-ness,” the idea of India as culturally, racially, and religiously Hindu in nature.
In this interpretation of Indian history, Muslims are invaders, outsiders, and foreigners. Hence India had been illegitimately ruled by Muslim dynasties prior to the arrival of the British.
Hindu nationalism is also making gains in the political arena. In the forthcoming Indian general election, which will begin on April 7 and continue on nine separate dates until May 12, the ruling secularist Congress Party is predicted to suffer one of the worst losses in its history, to the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP. Its leader, Narendra Modi, has a long association with the RSS.
Currently, the Congress Party holds 201 seats against 112 for the BJP in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament, which has 543 members. Both parties form coalitions with other groups when contesting national elections. Congress led the United Progressive Alliance to victory in 2009, while the BJP headed the National Democratic Alliance.
But 70 percent of Indians now say they are dissatisfied with the way things are going in India, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. And 63 percent of those polled said they would prefer that the BJP lead the next government, compared with just 19 percent who picked the Congress Party, which is led by Sonia Gandhi and her son, Rahul Gandhi.
Modi, the chief minister of the western state of Gujarat, on the border with Pakistan, led the state when riots broke out in 2002, costing the lives of more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims.
He has been linked with a secret police assassination squad. Many Indians, especially the country’s 138 million Muslims and its many other minorities, worry he would exacerbate sectarian tensions in the country.
In a telling sign of the growing power of Hindu nationalism in India, an American author has had her book “The Hindus: An Alternative History,” withdrawn, and remaining copies pulped, by her publisher, Penguin India.
This followed a lawsuit filed by a Hindu nationalist group, which took exception to Wendy Doniger’s handling of Hindu mythology.
Doniger, who teaches at the University of Chicago, is a well-regarded scholar and author of many books on India. Her previous books have been positively received in India and elsewhere. But she has faced regular criticism from those who consider her work to be disrespectful of Hinduism in general.
In an article written for the magazine “Outlook India,” Doniger responded that “I was, of course, angry and disappointed to see this happen, and I am deeply troubled by what it foretells for free speech in India in the present, and steadily worsening, political climate.”
She went on to say that her publisher was “finally defeated by the true villain of this piece -- the Indian law that makes it a criminal rather than civil offense to publish a book that offends any Hindu, a law that jeopardizes the physical safety of any publisher, no matter how ludicrous the accusation brought against a book.”
The Indian Constitution lists “freedom of speech and expression” among the fundamental rights it guarantees, but also allows the government to impose “reasonable restrictions” on this freedom.
Many Indian authors were incensed. Arundhati Roy accused the publisher of having meekly surrendered to extremists: “You have not only caved in, you have humiliated yourself abjectly before a fly-by-night outfit,” she said. “What was it that terrified you?” she asked in a column in the Times of India.
The group that brought the suit against Doniger, the Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti (Movement to Save Education), claimed to be defending “the sentiments of Hindus all over the world.” They contended that “she misunderstands and deliberately misrepresents Hindu texts and practices, insults Hindu gods in her readings of myth, and crudely focuses, through a psychoanalytic lens and above all else, on sex.”
Dinanath Batra, one of the plaintiffs, who is associated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteers Organization), charged that the book was “written with a Christian missionary zeal and hidden agenda to denigrate Hindus and show their religion in poor light.”
The RSS has carried out acts of violence against Muslims and other minority groups throughout India since its creation in 1925. It is part of an array of Hindu nationalist movements that subscribe to the ideology known as Hindutva, literally “Hindu-ness,” the idea of India as culturally, racially, and religiously Hindu in nature.
In this interpretation of Indian history, Muslims are invaders, outsiders, and foreigners. Hence India had been illegitimately ruled by Muslim dynasties prior to the arrival of the British.
Hindu nationalism is also making gains in the political arena. In the forthcoming Indian general election, which will begin on April 7 and continue on nine separate dates until May 12, the ruling secularist Congress Party is predicted to suffer one of the worst losses in its history, to the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP. Its leader, Narendra Modi, has a long association with the RSS.
Currently, the Congress Party holds 201 seats against 112 for the BJP in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament, which has 543 members. Both parties form coalitions with other groups when contesting national elections. Congress led the United Progressive Alliance to victory in 2009, while the BJP headed the National Democratic Alliance.
But 70 percent of Indians now say they are dissatisfied with the way things are going in India, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. And 63 percent of those polled said they would prefer that the BJP lead the next government, compared with just 19 percent who picked the Congress Party, which is led by Sonia Gandhi and her son, Rahul Gandhi.
Modi, the chief minister of the western state of Gujarat, on the border with Pakistan, led the state when riots broke out in 2002, costing the lives of more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims.
He has been linked with a secret police assassination squad. Many Indians, especially the country’s 138 million Muslims and its many other minorities, worry he would exacerbate sectarian tensions in the country.
Monday, March 10, 2014
Crisis in Ukraine: The Putin Version
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
Are Russia’s actions in the Crimea and elsewhere in Ukraine illegitimate or did Moscow have cause to intercede? Demography and history suggest Russian President Vladimir Putin has more of a case than North American media and politicians would like to believe.
This question becomes even more pertinent, as the Crimean Parliament has announced that a referendum will be held on March 16 offering citizens a choice of remaining part of Ukraine, becoming independent, or joining the Russian Federation. Western countries have declared the referendum illegal.
In his March 4 press conference Putin provided his own interpretation of what has transpired in Ukraine, and his viewpoint cannot simply be written off as self-serving propaganda.
He defended Russia’s actions as a response to an “orgy” of violence by nationalists, fascists, reactionaries and anti-Semites who are now in control of an illegitimate government. He was referring to members of groups such as Pravy Sektor (Right Sector) and the All-Ukrainian Union Svoboda.
Svoboda won 10 per cent of the vote in parliamentary elections in 2012 and holds four positions in the interim government in Kyiv. Its leader, Oleg Tyagnibok, and many party members, have made many anti-Semitic statements.
Putin added that he would not recognize a new round of elections “if they were held under the same terror which we are now seeing in Kyiv.” Putin also compared the desire for Crimeans to “determine their own future” with that of Kosovar Albanians in the 1990s.
Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs a few days later went on to catalog nine past interventions by the United States and NATO, stretching from the 1958 invasion of Lebanon to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, making the case that Washington “doesn’t and can’t have the moral right to lecture us about compliance of international norms.
“Nevertheless, they dare to reproach Russia for ‘armed aggression’ when she stands up for her countrymen, who constitute the majority of the Crimean people,” the statement continued.
Ukranians in the western part of the country are quite different than those in the east; because both groups are called by the same name, we sometimes gloss over that fact. But a parallel case would be that of Croats and Serbs in the former Yugoslavia. Those two peoples, too, are very similar in ethnicity and language, yet deeply divided by religion and history.
Croats, like many western Ukrainians, are Catholic, Serbs are Orthodox. Croats, like western Ukrainians, lived under Austro-Hungarian rule before the creation if Yugoslavia; Serbs were under Ottoman Turkish domination.
The Russian Orthodox Church, to which most eastern Ukrainians belong, has endorsed Putin’s stand.
Meanwhile, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the same day as Putin’s press conference compared the Russian leader to Hitler.
At a fundraising event in California, she told her audience that Putin’s concerns for ethnic Russians in Ukraine is reminiscent of Hitler’s desire to protect ethnic Germans “in places like Czechoslovakia and Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying they’re not being treated right.”
This statement betrays an incredible ignorance of history; Germans in those countries were not being mistreated by new regimes that had overthrown the established political order. It is also, for a former diplomat, most undiplomatic language.
“You keep drawing up these analogies, they hurt more than they can help,” remarked Lawrence J. Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “Whatever Putin is, he wasn’t like Hitler. He didn’t massacre thousands of non-Russians in Georgia or anything like that.”
Should she ever again hold high office, how would Clinton be able to speak to the Russian leader – whose country, by the way, suffered more than any other from Hitler’s aggression in the Second World War.
Western politicians fail to understand the intense feeling Russians have for the Crimea. In the 19th century Crimean War Russian troops withstood a brutal artillery bombardment for nearly a year in Sevastopol, and during a second siege in 1942 in the Second World War, the Red Army held out for eight months against the invading Germans.
“Yes, Crimea is part of Ukraine, but psychologically Russians do not accept that,” explained Alexei Makarkin, deputy director of Moscow’s Centre for Political Technologies. “So much Russian history took place there. From society’s point of view, Russia was correct to defend its right to this territory.”
Sergey Kiselev of Tavrichesky National University in Simferopol said that Russians have not forgotten that one of every 10 soldiers in the Red Army who died during the Second World War was killed there.
When Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin met in Yalta, in the Crimea, in February 1945, to discuss the post-war world, they were not meeting in Ukraine.
Actually, the most likely outcome of this crisis will be a vastly more autonomous Crimea, technically still part of Ukraine, but to all intents and purposes a de facto state controlled from Moscow.
Are Russia’s actions in the Crimea and elsewhere in Ukraine illegitimate or did Moscow have cause to intercede? Demography and history suggest Russian President Vladimir Putin has more of a case than North American media and politicians would like to believe.
This question becomes even more pertinent, as the Crimean Parliament has announced that a referendum will be held on March 16 offering citizens a choice of remaining part of Ukraine, becoming independent, or joining the Russian Federation. Western countries have declared the referendum illegal.
In his March 4 press conference Putin provided his own interpretation of what has transpired in Ukraine, and his viewpoint cannot simply be written off as self-serving propaganda.
He defended Russia’s actions as a response to an “orgy” of violence by nationalists, fascists, reactionaries and anti-Semites who are now in control of an illegitimate government. He was referring to members of groups such as Pravy Sektor (Right Sector) and the All-Ukrainian Union Svoboda.
Svoboda won 10 per cent of the vote in parliamentary elections in 2012 and holds four positions in the interim government in Kyiv. Its leader, Oleg Tyagnibok, and many party members, have made many anti-Semitic statements.
Putin added that he would not recognize a new round of elections “if they were held under the same terror which we are now seeing in Kyiv.” Putin also compared the desire for Crimeans to “determine their own future” with that of Kosovar Albanians in the 1990s.
Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs a few days later went on to catalog nine past interventions by the United States and NATO, stretching from the 1958 invasion of Lebanon to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, making the case that Washington “doesn’t and can’t have the moral right to lecture us about compliance of international norms.
“Nevertheless, they dare to reproach Russia for ‘armed aggression’ when she stands up for her countrymen, who constitute the majority of the Crimean people,” the statement continued.
Ukranians in the western part of the country are quite different than those in the east; because both groups are called by the same name, we sometimes gloss over that fact. But a parallel case would be that of Croats and Serbs in the former Yugoslavia. Those two peoples, too, are very similar in ethnicity and language, yet deeply divided by religion and history.
Croats, like many western Ukrainians, are Catholic, Serbs are Orthodox. Croats, like western Ukrainians, lived under Austro-Hungarian rule before the creation if Yugoslavia; Serbs were under Ottoman Turkish domination.
The Russian Orthodox Church, to which most eastern Ukrainians belong, has endorsed Putin’s stand.
Meanwhile, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the same day as Putin’s press conference compared the Russian leader to Hitler.
At a fundraising event in California, she told her audience that Putin’s concerns for ethnic Russians in Ukraine is reminiscent of Hitler’s desire to protect ethnic Germans “in places like Czechoslovakia and Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying they’re not being treated right.”
This statement betrays an incredible ignorance of history; Germans in those countries were not being mistreated by new regimes that had overthrown the established political order. It is also, for a former diplomat, most undiplomatic language.
“You keep drawing up these analogies, they hurt more than they can help,” remarked Lawrence J. Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “Whatever Putin is, he wasn’t like Hitler. He didn’t massacre thousands of non-Russians in Georgia or anything like that.”
Should she ever again hold high office, how would Clinton be able to speak to the Russian leader – whose country, by the way, suffered more than any other from Hitler’s aggression in the Second World War.
Western politicians fail to understand the intense feeling Russians have for the Crimea. In the 19th century Crimean War Russian troops withstood a brutal artillery bombardment for nearly a year in Sevastopol, and during a second siege in 1942 in the Second World War, the Red Army held out for eight months against the invading Germans.
“Yes, Crimea is part of Ukraine, but psychologically Russians do not accept that,” explained Alexei Makarkin, deputy director of Moscow’s Centre for Political Technologies. “So much Russian history took place there. From society’s point of view, Russia was correct to defend its right to this territory.”
Sergey Kiselev of Tavrichesky National University in Simferopol said that Russians have not forgotten that one of every 10 soldiers in the Red Army who died during the Second World War was killed there.
When Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin met in Yalta, in the Crimea, in February 1945, to discuss the post-war world, they were not meeting in Ukraine.
Actually, the most likely outcome of this crisis will be a vastly more autonomous Crimea, technically still part of Ukraine, but to all intents and purposes a de facto state controlled from Moscow.
Sunday, March 09, 2014
A Famous Professor who Loathes Israel
Henry Srebrnik, [Calgary] Jewish Free Press
The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) Special Rapporteur on “the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967” recently issued his annual report, accusing Israel of “inhuman acts” and “apartheid,” and has called on the UN to support a “legitimacy war” against the country.
But that shouldn’t surprise anyone: First, because the 47-member Council, which includes in its membership Algeria, China, Cuba, Pakistan, Russia and Saudi Arabia, has consistently singled out Israel for condemnation. Secondly, because Richard Falk, author of the document, has a history of anti-Israel statements.
Falk, the Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law and Practice at Ivy-League Princeton University, is the author or coauthor of numerous books, including Human Rights and State Sovereignty; Religion and Humane Global Governance; Revolutionaries and Functionaries; and The Declining World Order: America’s Imperial Geopolitics.
So how did a well-regarded professor of international law and political science (and Jewish), become an inveterate enemy of Israel?
Falk, radicalized in the 1960s by the works of Karl Marx and the sociologists C. Wright Mills and Herbert Marcuse, was more than an “ivory-tower” scholar. He has described himself as a “citizen pilgrim” working towards “the gradual construction of a new world order that assures basic human needs of all people, that safeguards the environment, that protects the fundamental human rights of all individuals and groups without encroaching upon the precarious resources of cultural diversity.”
This led, as has been the case with so many on the left in recent years, to a fundamental opposition to America’s role in the world -- and also to the activities of Israel.
Following his retirement from teaching, Falk became more active in the pro-Palestinian movement. In 2008, he was appointed to a six-year term as the Special Rapporteur. His reports have been consistently one-sided.
Hillel Neuer, executive director of the Geneva-based human rights group UN Watch, noted that Falk’s latest 22-page document “makes no mention of war crimes or human rights violations by Hamas, Islamic Jihad or the Palestinian Authority. In fact, the word ‘Hamas’ appears nowhere in the report.”
In 2007, Falk wrote “Slouching Towards a Palestinian Holocaust” for the Swedish-based left-wing Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, where he asked, “Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.”
Falk blamed last April’s Boston Marathon Bombings, which killed three people and injured more than 260 others, on the United States and Israel. In an article in the journal Foreign Policy, “A Commentary on the Marathon Murders,” he asserted that the “American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world.” Furthermore, “as long as Tel Aviv has the compliant ear of the American political establishment, those who wish for peace and justice in the world should not rest easy.”
Susan Rice, the then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said that she was “outraged” by Falk’s “highly offensive Boston comments. Someone who spews such vitriol has no place at the UN.” British and Canadian diplomats also objected to his remarks.
Perhaps the most respected scholar who lent his name to the Palestinian cause was the late Edward Said, a Palestinian American professor of English at Columbia University. As an icon among an entire generation of teachers of literature, Said’s critiques of Israel have been disseminated far and wide.
So it was only appropriate that it was Falk who on Feb. 18 delivered the Edward Said Memorial Lecture at Princeton, entitled “Edward Said’s Legacy and the Palestinian Struggle.” Palestinians should continue to pursue self-empowerment, legal justice and peaceful resistance in their ongoing territorial conflict with Israel, Falk said during the lecture.
There is something strange about all this. While the head of the Palestinian Authority, President Mahmoud Abbas, seems like a relative voice of reason, declaring that he would accept a demilitarized Palestinian state alongside Israel, with perhaps NATO troops serving as a buffer between them, the forces in the international community represented by people like Falk are playing “bad cop” to his “good cop.”
They sound more like Abbas’ fundamentalist enemies in Hamas-ruled Gaza, even though most would consider themselves secular leftists.
The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) Special Rapporteur on “the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967” recently issued his annual report, accusing Israel of “inhuman acts” and “apartheid,” and has called on the UN to support a “legitimacy war” against the country.
But that shouldn’t surprise anyone: First, because the 47-member Council, which includes in its membership Algeria, China, Cuba, Pakistan, Russia and Saudi Arabia, has consistently singled out Israel for condemnation. Secondly, because Richard Falk, author of the document, has a history of anti-Israel statements.
Falk, the Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law and Practice at Ivy-League Princeton University, is the author or coauthor of numerous books, including Human Rights and State Sovereignty; Religion and Humane Global Governance; Revolutionaries and Functionaries; and The Declining World Order: America’s Imperial Geopolitics.
So how did a well-regarded professor of international law and political science (and Jewish), become an inveterate enemy of Israel?
Falk, radicalized in the 1960s by the works of Karl Marx and the sociologists C. Wright Mills and Herbert Marcuse, was more than an “ivory-tower” scholar. He has described himself as a “citizen pilgrim” working towards “the gradual construction of a new world order that assures basic human needs of all people, that safeguards the environment, that protects the fundamental human rights of all individuals and groups without encroaching upon the precarious resources of cultural diversity.”
This led, as has been the case with so many on the left in recent years, to a fundamental opposition to America’s role in the world -- and also to the activities of Israel.
Following his retirement from teaching, Falk became more active in the pro-Palestinian movement. In 2008, he was appointed to a six-year term as the Special Rapporteur. His reports have been consistently one-sided.
Hillel Neuer, executive director of the Geneva-based human rights group UN Watch, noted that Falk’s latest 22-page document “makes no mention of war crimes or human rights violations by Hamas, Islamic Jihad or the Palestinian Authority. In fact, the word ‘Hamas’ appears nowhere in the report.”
In 2007, Falk wrote “Slouching Towards a Palestinian Holocaust” for the Swedish-based left-wing Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, where he asked, “Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.”
Falk blamed last April’s Boston Marathon Bombings, which killed three people and injured more than 260 others, on the United States and Israel. In an article in the journal Foreign Policy, “A Commentary on the Marathon Murders,” he asserted that the “American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world.” Furthermore, “as long as Tel Aviv has the compliant ear of the American political establishment, those who wish for peace and justice in the world should not rest easy.”
Susan Rice, the then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said that she was “outraged” by Falk’s “highly offensive Boston comments. Someone who spews such vitriol has no place at the UN.” British and Canadian diplomats also objected to his remarks.
Perhaps the most respected scholar who lent his name to the Palestinian cause was the late Edward Said, a Palestinian American professor of English at Columbia University. As an icon among an entire generation of teachers of literature, Said’s critiques of Israel have been disseminated far and wide.
So it was only appropriate that it was Falk who on Feb. 18 delivered the Edward Said Memorial Lecture at Princeton, entitled “Edward Said’s Legacy and the Palestinian Struggle.” Palestinians should continue to pursue self-empowerment, legal justice and peaceful resistance in their ongoing territorial conflict with Israel, Falk said during the lecture.
There is something strange about all this. While the head of the Palestinian Authority, President Mahmoud Abbas, seems like a relative voice of reason, declaring that he would accept a demilitarized Palestinian state alongside Israel, with perhaps NATO troops serving as a buffer between them, the forces in the international community represented by people like Falk are playing “bad cop” to his “good cop.”
They sound more like Abbas’ fundamentalist enemies in Hamas-ruled Gaza, even though most would consider themselves secular leftists.
Tuesday, March 04, 2014
Crimean Standoff Worsens American-Russian Relations
Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
Russia has deployed troops to the Crimea following a request for help from its pro-Moscow prime minister, Sergei Aksyonov, following the overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in Kyiv. Interim Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk of Ukraine has called this a declaration of war.
Is Russia’s action illegitimate or do they have cause to intercede?
No independent Ukrainian state existed, except for very brief periods, until 1991. Its western areas were under Austro-Hungarian rule, then Polish, while the east was governed by the tsars in Moscow.
The Crimea was wrested from the Tatars by Russia in 1783 and has always had an ethnic Russian majority. It was never part of the Soviet Ukrainian republic until Nikita Khrushchev, the then leader of the Soviet Union, foolishly handed it to Kyiv in 1954 as a “gift,” to ingratiate himself with Ukrainians as he solidified his hold on power following the death of Joseph Stalin.
It also supposedly marked the 300th anniversary of the 1654 treaty unifying the eastern Ukraine with Russia.
But Ukraine is now an independent country, and the Crimea’s rule from Kyiv has been a major source of Russian resentment -- inside and outside Crimea -- and a major thorn in Ukraine’s relations with Russia.
Why can’t Russia have it back, if the local population supports this, as they no doubt will make it explicit in a referendum on secession scheduled for March 30? Crimea already has autonomy, with its own parliament and organs of government.
The Ukrainian nationalists who overthrew Yanukovych clearly have little interest in allowing any voice to the ethnic Russians and Russified Ukrainians in the east and south, so they shouldn’t be surprised that secession is now on the table.
President Barack Obama has accused Russia of a breach of international law and condemned the country’s military intervention, calling it a “clear violation” of Ukrainian sovereignty, and demanding that it desist from any action that might imperil that country’s territorial integrity..
It’s rather rich for the United States to be giving Russia lessons on international law. Such legal niceties didn’t stop the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Serbia for 78 straight days, 15 years ago, also in contravention of international law. This eventually forced the Serbs out and eventually allowed an independent Kosovo to emerge (despite pledges that it wouldn’t happen).
Why should the Russians trust what they consider an illegitimate government in Kyiv to protect their ethnic Russian compatriots; the U.S. certainly didn’t trust Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic when it came to protecting Kosovar Albanians. If spheres of influence are to mean anything, the Russians certainly have more cause to intervene in Crimea than NATO did in Kosovo.
The Kosovo case, which the West sought to make sui generis, a non-precedent, has indeed become one. What’s sauce for the goose, and all that.
(Washington has also had no compunction in toppling governments it didn’t like around the world, from Panama to Iraq.)
Since 1989, the Russians have lost, first, their east European empire, then their non-Russian Soviet republics. They were humiliated during the 1990s, as the Baltic states and other east European countries joined NATO. Russia’s borders are already further east than they were at any time in the past three centuries. How far does the United States think they can be pushed?
Note how quickly Cold War tropes have reasserted themselves, even though this has nothing to do with ideology. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s actions have been compared to the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Or are we also returning to an older, 19th century image: Russia as the “bear” seeking to dominate its neighbours and crush freedom. This was a favourite theme of British politicians and writers, as they competed with the Russians in Asia and also defended the Ottoman Empire against them.
How many people in the West today know about the Crimean War of 1853-1856, when Britain and France attacked Russia? Most of the fighting took place for control of the Black Sea, with land battles on the Crimea.
You can be sure the Russians remember it. As the British historian Orlando Figes has written, “Memories of the Crimean war continue to stir profound feelings of Russian pride and resentment towards the west.”
Russia has deployed troops to the Crimea following a request for help from its pro-Moscow prime minister, Sergei Aksyonov, following the overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in Kyiv. Interim Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk of Ukraine has called this a declaration of war.
Is Russia’s action illegitimate or do they have cause to intercede?
No independent Ukrainian state existed, except for very brief periods, until 1991. Its western areas were under Austro-Hungarian rule, then Polish, while the east was governed by the tsars in Moscow.
The Crimea was wrested from the Tatars by Russia in 1783 and has always had an ethnic Russian majority. It was never part of the Soviet Ukrainian republic until Nikita Khrushchev, the then leader of the Soviet Union, foolishly handed it to Kyiv in 1954 as a “gift,” to ingratiate himself with Ukrainians as he solidified his hold on power following the death of Joseph Stalin.
It also supposedly marked the 300th anniversary of the 1654 treaty unifying the eastern Ukraine with Russia.
But Ukraine is now an independent country, and the Crimea’s rule from Kyiv has been a major source of Russian resentment -- inside and outside Crimea -- and a major thorn in Ukraine’s relations with Russia.
Why can’t Russia have it back, if the local population supports this, as they no doubt will make it explicit in a referendum on secession scheduled for March 30? Crimea already has autonomy, with its own parliament and organs of government.
The Ukrainian nationalists who overthrew Yanukovych clearly have little interest in allowing any voice to the ethnic Russians and Russified Ukrainians in the east and south, so they shouldn’t be surprised that secession is now on the table.
President Barack Obama has accused Russia of a breach of international law and condemned the country’s military intervention, calling it a “clear violation” of Ukrainian sovereignty, and demanding that it desist from any action that might imperil that country’s territorial integrity..
It’s rather rich for the United States to be giving Russia lessons on international law. Such legal niceties didn’t stop the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Serbia for 78 straight days, 15 years ago, also in contravention of international law. This eventually forced the Serbs out and eventually allowed an independent Kosovo to emerge (despite pledges that it wouldn’t happen).
Why should the Russians trust what they consider an illegitimate government in Kyiv to protect their ethnic Russian compatriots; the U.S. certainly didn’t trust Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic when it came to protecting Kosovar Albanians. If spheres of influence are to mean anything, the Russians certainly have more cause to intervene in Crimea than NATO did in Kosovo.
The Kosovo case, which the West sought to make sui generis, a non-precedent, has indeed become one. What’s sauce for the goose, and all that.
(Washington has also had no compunction in toppling governments it didn’t like around the world, from Panama to Iraq.)
Since 1989, the Russians have lost, first, their east European empire, then their non-Russian Soviet republics. They were humiliated during the 1990s, as the Baltic states and other east European countries joined NATO. Russia’s borders are already further east than they were at any time in the past three centuries. How far does the United States think they can be pushed?
Note how quickly Cold War tropes have reasserted themselves, even though this has nothing to do with ideology. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s actions have been compared to the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Or are we also returning to an older, 19th century image: Russia as the “bear” seeking to dominate its neighbours and crush freedom. This was a favourite theme of British politicians and writers, as they competed with the Russians in Asia and also defended the Ottoman Empire against them.
How many people in the West today know about the Crimean War of 1853-1856, when Britain and France attacked Russia? Most of the fighting took place for control of the Black Sea, with land battles on the Crimea.
You can be sure the Russians remember it. As the British historian Orlando Figes has written, “Memories of the Crimean war continue to stir profound feelings of Russian pride and resentment towards the west.”
Monday, March 03, 2014
Is Ukraine Really on the Road to Democracy?
Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, elected in 2010, has been deposed by the Ukrainian Rada, the parliament, following months of demonstrations, and presidential elections are scheduled for May.
Oleksandr Turchinov, the speaker of the parliament, has been named interim president. He is a close ally of former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who had been jailed by Yanukovych.
Most Canadians have seen this as a struggle between pro-European supporters of democracy and what has been seen as an authoritarian government under the influence of Moscow. But there may be more to it than that.
Although most of the protests we have seen in newscasts have concentrated on Kyiv’s Independence Square, areas in western Ukraine around the city of Lviv have been in the forefront driving the insurgency against Yanukovych.
Why was western Ukraine so opposed to Yanukovych, whereas his support lay in the east? Although a sovereign state for more than two decades, Ukraine still faces questions regarding its national identity.
The eastern part of the country was controlled by tsarist Russia after 1654. As a result, the people are overwhelmingly Orthodox in religion, and many people speak Russian. But the western portion was for many centuries part of Poland and then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Following the First World War, it became part of the reconstituted independent Poland.
A large proportion of western Ukrainians are members of the Uniate (Ukrainian Greek Catholic) Church, which combines Orthodox rites with a fealty to the Pope in Rome. Western Ukrainians speak largely Ukrainian and retain strong nationalist sentiments.
Following the Second World War, the victorious Soviet Union annexed the western Ukraine and united it with the Soviet Ukraine. But many in the region fought against incorporation.
Some, like Stepan Bandera, a wartime leader of the militant, terrorist branch of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), had been a Nazi collaborator and involved in the mass murders of Ukrainian Jews.
The western Ukraine -- where today there are statues honoring Bandera in various cities, including Lviv -- is also the political stronghold of the All-Ukrainian Union Svoboda, the ultra-nationalist, far-right anti-Semitic party which holds 36 of 450 seats in the Ukrainian parliament. It is the fourth-largest party in the legislature.
The party traces its roots to the Nazi-friendly partisan army during World War II. Some of Svoboda’s supporters are people who believe that the German invasion of Ukraine in the 1940s was not an occupation but a liberation from “Jewish Bolshevism.” Last month it held a torch-lit march in honor of Bandera.
Its leader, Oleh Tyahnybok, has been active in the anti-Yanukovych movement. He has a long history of making inflammatory anti-Semitic statements, including the accusation before parliament that Ukraine is controlled by a “Muscovite-Jewish mafia.” There are about 200,000 Jews living in Ukraine, mostly in Kyiv.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has asked, “Why do we not hear statements of condemnation toward those who seize government buildings, attack and burn police officers, and voice racist and anti-Semitic slogans?” The Russian foreign ministry has called the protests the “Brown Revolution,” comparing it to the Nazis’ rise to power in the 1930s.
“Svoboda’s prominence within the opposition movement is certainly concerning,” writes Joshua Keating, a staff writer at Slate, “not only because of the possibility they could now play a more prominent role in the future politics, but because they have allowed an increasingly authoritarian leader and his blatantly authoritarian international backers to make the case that their opponents are the ones who pose a threat to democracy.”
Yanukovych has denounced the takeover as “vandalism” and described it as a “coup” by “bandits.” In Kharkiv, in the mainly Russian-speaking east, regional leaders said they did not want the break-up of Ukraine, but they questioned the legitimacy of the parliament’s actions. They are particularly upset by a measure passed by the legislature to cancel the official status of the Russian language in Ukraine.
So it remains to be seen whether, once the dust settles, Ukraine will become less authoritarian than it has been. It all depends on who assumes power.
Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, elected in 2010, has been deposed by the Ukrainian Rada, the parliament, following months of demonstrations, and presidential elections are scheduled for May.
Oleksandr Turchinov, the speaker of the parliament, has been named interim president. He is a close ally of former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who had been jailed by Yanukovych.
Most Canadians have seen this as a struggle between pro-European supporters of democracy and what has been seen as an authoritarian government under the influence of Moscow. But there may be more to it than that.
Although most of the protests we have seen in newscasts have concentrated on Kyiv’s Independence Square, areas in western Ukraine around the city of Lviv have been in the forefront driving the insurgency against Yanukovych.
Why was western Ukraine so opposed to Yanukovych, whereas his support lay in the east? Although a sovereign state for more than two decades, Ukraine still faces questions regarding its national identity.
The eastern part of the country was controlled by tsarist Russia after 1654. As a result, the people are overwhelmingly Orthodox in religion, and many people speak Russian. But the western portion was for many centuries part of Poland and then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Following the First World War, it became part of the reconstituted independent Poland.
A large proportion of western Ukrainians are members of the Uniate (Ukrainian Greek Catholic) Church, which combines Orthodox rites with a fealty to the Pope in Rome. Western Ukrainians speak largely Ukrainian and retain strong nationalist sentiments.
Following the Second World War, the victorious Soviet Union annexed the western Ukraine and united it with the Soviet Ukraine. But many in the region fought against incorporation.
Some, like Stepan Bandera, a wartime leader of the militant, terrorist branch of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), had been a Nazi collaborator and involved in the mass murders of Ukrainian Jews.
The western Ukraine -- where today there are statues honoring Bandera in various cities, including Lviv -- is also the political stronghold of the All-Ukrainian Union Svoboda, the ultra-nationalist, far-right anti-Semitic party which holds 36 of 450 seats in the Ukrainian parliament. It is the fourth-largest party in the legislature.
The party traces its roots to the Nazi-friendly partisan army during World War II. Some of Svoboda’s supporters are people who believe that the German invasion of Ukraine in the 1940s was not an occupation but a liberation from “Jewish Bolshevism.” Last month it held a torch-lit march in honor of Bandera.
Its leader, Oleh Tyahnybok, has been active in the anti-Yanukovych movement. He has a long history of making inflammatory anti-Semitic statements, including the accusation before parliament that Ukraine is controlled by a “Muscovite-Jewish mafia.” There are about 200,000 Jews living in Ukraine, mostly in Kyiv.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has asked, “Why do we not hear statements of condemnation toward those who seize government buildings, attack and burn police officers, and voice racist and anti-Semitic slogans?” The Russian foreign ministry has called the protests the “Brown Revolution,” comparing it to the Nazis’ rise to power in the 1930s.
“Svoboda’s prominence within the opposition movement is certainly concerning,” writes Joshua Keating, a staff writer at Slate, “not only because of the possibility they could now play a more prominent role in the future politics, but because they have allowed an increasingly authoritarian leader and his blatantly authoritarian international backers to make the case that their opponents are the ones who pose a threat to democracy.”
Yanukovych has denounced the takeover as “vandalism” and described it as a “coup” by “bandits.” In Kharkiv, in the mainly Russian-speaking east, regional leaders said they did not want the break-up of Ukraine, but they questioned the legitimacy of the parliament’s actions. They are particularly upset by a measure passed by the legislature to cancel the official status of the Russian language in Ukraine.
So it remains to be seen whether, once the dust settles, Ukraine will become less authoritarian than it has been. It all depends on who assumes power.
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