A Horrific Mass Murder

Should Putin’s Russia be blamed for a genocide 90 years ago?

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

On Nov. 26 Ukraine observed Holodomor Memorial Day, commemorating the Soviet induced famine organized by Communist dictator Joseph Stalin that left some four million Ukrainians dead. It has been recognized by the European Parliament as a “crime against humanity.”

“The Holodomor of 19321933 was a genocide of the Ukrainian people,” Ukrainian presidential official Andriy Yermak recently stated. “The Russians will pay for all of the victims of the Holodomor and answer for today’s crimes.” He added that Russia now “wants to organize Holodomor 2.0.”

The famine was officially denied by the former Soviet Union until 1987. In 2006, a sovereign Ukraine recognized it as genocide.

Surely no one can deny that this was a horrific mass murder, though today’s Russia views it as a tragedy that affected the Soviet Union as a whole. Moscow considers it one of the many horrors the Communist rulers conducted against all the peoples of the Soviet Union, including the Russians themselves.

MONSTROUS REGIME

We in the west, though, have decided to condemn a country that, thanks to its current reprehensible behaviour, we also now retroactively accuse of crimes committed by a predecessor state almost a century ago – at a time when its own ethnic majority nationality was also victimized by the same monstrous regime.

So, although the crime was carried out by the Communists who ruled the USSR, led by Joseph Stalin, himself a Georgian, we consider “Russia” responsible, though the Soviet Communist Party was an ideological, not ethnic, organization.

The famine began in the chaos of collectivization in 1929 when millions of people were forced to join state farms, and Ukraine was seen as a source of capital that could be used to build a modern industrial Soviet Union.

Crops were confiscated to sell abroad while people starved. Ukraine paid the price, because 70 per cent of exported Soviet grain was accounted for by that region, since it was the breadbasket of the country.

Collectivization led to a drop in production, the disorganization of the rural economy, and food shortages, because the Soviet Communist Party set impossibly high quotas for the amount of grain Ukrainian villages were required to contribute to the Soviet state.

When they were unable to meet the quotas, authorities confiscated even the seeds set aside for planting. Special teams were sent to search homes and even seize other foodstuffs. Starving farmers attempted to flee their villages, but Soviet authorities apprehended them. This sparked a series of rebellions, including armed uprisings.

DESTROYED POPULATIONS

One problem with the version of the Holodomor that sees it only in the context of specifically targeting Ukrainians is that similar actions also led to mass starvation elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Millions of other nationalities – including, for that matter, Russians – also starved to death.

Approximately 1.5 million people died in Kazakhstan, an estimated 38 to 42 per cent of all Kazakhs, actually the highest percentage of any ethnic group killed by the Soviet famine.

The famine was indeed a form of genocide, but one mainly targeting an economic class. It forced peasants into submission and drove them into the collective farms, to ensure a steady supply of grain to sell abroad.

Stalin was an ideologue, not a racial nationalist – he was destroying his own populations, regardless of ethnicity, in order to “build a Communist society.” The USSR officially targeted peasants as a social class, not a national or ethnic group, though Ukrainians were its main victims.

Oddly, turning this into an ethnic conflict also lets the totalitarian Communists off the hook. It was the “bad Russians” who were culpable. It’s almost like blaming all Germans, not mainly Hitler’s Nazis, for the Holocaust.

BLAMING MOSCOW

Also, speaking of Nazis, if we are to recall novelist William Faulkner’s famous line that “the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past,” what should we then say about those Ukrainians involved in the murder of over one million Jews in Ukraine during the Second World War? This genocide, more recent than the Holodomor, was indeed “racial.”

In 2010 the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, a leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) that killed, apart from Jews, some 100,000 Poles in 1943-45, was named a “Hero of Ukraine.” In 2016, though, the Polish parliament recognized the massacres as genocide. Are we then to also accuse today’s Ukraine as guilty of genocide?

The Holodomor was indeed a monstrous crime, carried out under the aegis of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – an organization made up of members of every one of that Bolshevik empire’s national groups, including, of course, Ukrainian Communists.

The famine was a genocide caused by a regime indifferent to death, similar to those in British-ruled Ireland in the 1840s and in Bengal, India in 1943, as opposed to those mass murders which were intentionally designed to destroy an ethnic group. This is not a distinction without a difference, though both are equally horrific.

Finally, if linking Putin’s Russia to the Holodomor is valid, why have we waited so long to bring it to the world’s attention? The post-soviet Russian state is now 31 years old, after all. Is it just a “coincidence” that we are only now blaming Moscow for this Soviet Communist atrocity - when we just happen to be in an undeclared war with Russia?

 

 

Are Iranian Protests the Start of a Revolution?

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

Throughout the more than four decades that a theocracy has ruled the Islamic Republic of Iran, there have been periodic protests. They have always faded away or been crushed by the authorities, who brook little dissent. Is the current one different?

Sparked by the Sept. 16 death of a Kurdish Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, while in the custody of Iran’s “morality police,” today’s unrest has grown into one of the most sustained challenges to the regime in decades. Amini was arrested for not wearing the head covering known as the hijab in accordance with government standards. She was severely beaten and died because of police brutality.

Since then, demonstrations throughout the country have intensified and become more frequent in most major cities, spreading to smaller towns across the country, even to some remote and generally quiet areas.

Not surprisingly, authorities have responded harshly; thousands of Iranians have been arrested. Many have been sentenced to death, while hundreds of others have been killed on the street, according to estimates kept by human rights groups. Most of it goes unreported.

Ever since the crushing of the pro-democracy Green Movement in 2009, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has bolstered the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the paramilitary Basij, both tasked with defending the Islamic state by any means necessary. His selection of hard-liner Ebrahim Raisi as president in 2021 was part of the same process.

All of this has polarized the country. The leadership has nearly wiped out all opposition political groups including those who never wanted anything more than reforms, and it has even marginalized many insiders, such as former presidents -- reformist Mohammad Khatami, hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and moderate Hassan Rouhani.

Those now in power will fight hard for the status quo, making a revolution even more bloody. But for those seeking a democratic, more secular state, there’s little left but to fight. Iranian dissent inside the country is overwhelmingly democratic in aspiration.

In the past three months Iranian protesters have made it quite clear they consider the regime unreformable and are pursuing its demise. They consider Khamenei himself responsible for all their grievances.

And then there is the minority question. Around half of Iran’s population isn’t Persian. The Baluch, Arabs, Kurds, and Azeris dominate in provinces along the periphery and appear to have an increasing sense of national identity.

The Azeris, by far the largest minority, represent at least a fifth and perhaps as much as a third of Iran’s population. While deeply integrated into the Islamic Republic’s ruling elite, they have nonetheless stubbornly resisted a 100-year effort to Persianize their heartland in the northwest.

Zahedan, in the far southeast, a city home to the Baluch ethnic minority, saw 91 peaceful demonstrators massacred on Sept. 30. The authorities also intensified their repression in the Kurdish northwest of the country. On Nov. 30 Mahabad was encircled by the army, reinforced by tanks.

A transition to democracy might solve Iran’s ethnic troubles by allowing minorities the free exercise of their languages in schools and real political power in Tehran. The collapse of the clerical regime would bring on a great debate among Iran’s peoples about identity. 

And imagine a situation where Iran’s Arab Shiites enjoyed a decentralized arrangement within a democratic state. Would that not motivate the Shiites of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, who have been oppressed by Sunni princes, to fight for democracy? A free, democratic Iran where its Arab Shiites had a voice might be much more alluring to them than the Islamic Republic. 

So under a democracy, Iranians may loathe the Saudi royal family as much as, perhaps more than, the leaders of today. The Sunni-Shiite animus will remain, as will the Persian contempt for Sunni Gulf Arabs.

Maybe that’s the reason that, while expressions of support for Iranian protesters have been pouring in from around the world, those nations closest to Iran, its Gulf neighbors, have remained conspicuously silent. Most striking of all is the lack of any official response from Saudi Arabia, which one would expect to be pleased with the revolt against a regime that Riyadh considers its archenemy.

But the Saudis had watched with dread as a previous Iranian revolution transformed the region after 1979 under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and they worried its impact would spread to their kingdom. They still remain fearful of popular uprisings in neighbouring countries.

Also, given the pressure at home, might Iran unleash some of its allies to launch diversionary attacks against regional adversaries like Saudi Arabia? After all, the Saudis face Shiite adversaries in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

Still, Riyadh is quietly trying to aid the opposition in Iran. It is said to be funding Iran International, a London-based Persian TV channel, set up in 2017 as an opposition station and now beaming images of the protests back into Iran.

The Islamic Republic has repeatedly called on Saudi Arabia to shut down the station. On Oct. 17, the commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned Saudi Arabia to tone down coverage of the protests. “This is our last warning, because you are interfering in our internal affairs through these media,” Major-General Hossein Salami said. “You are involved in this matter and know that you are vulnerable.” He didn’t have to say that out loud.

 

Qatar Isn’t Just a Sports Venue

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

I’m guessing many millions of Canadian had never heard of Qatar before now. But the small Persian Gulf state has changed all that, by hosting one of the planet’s great sports spectacles: the World Cup of Soccer.

The tournament, which lasts a month, is taking place in Doha. For a country with fewer than 400,000 citizens, it is the culmination of 12 years of preparation and more than $200 billion in infrastructure spending.

The discovery in 1971 of the world’s largest gas field led to the transformation of Qatar, turning it into one of the wealthiest countries in the world and emboldening its leaders to see their nation not just as an appendage of its wealthier Persian Gulf neighbours.

Qatar wants to increase its international footprint, particularly in the Middle East. For example, it funds the influential Al Jazeera television network, founded in 1996, which broadcasts worldwide. The bid to host the World Cup was another step in this quest.

Qatar is a peninsula with much larger regional powers on either side. “It’s carving out space for itself outside the shadow of neighbours like Saudi Arabia and Iran. And it’s done this in part by investing in large-scale development projects, as well as media, popular culture, education, medicine,” according to Abdullah al-Arian, a professor of history at the Georgetown University campus in Qatar and the editor of Football in the Middle East: State, Society, and the Beautiful Game.

Qatar has had its share of conflicts with its fellow Gulf states. It endured a blockade starting in 2017 that lasted nearly four years, imposed by, among others, Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

They severed diplomatic relations with the country and banned Qatar-registered planes and ships from utilizing their airspace and sea routes, along with Saudi Arabia blocking Qatar’s only land crossing.

Their anger stemmed from Qatar’s support for Islamist groups across the region and its sponsorship of Al Jazeera. They sought to isolate Qatar over its backing of the Muslim Brotherhood, a transnational Islamist organization that most of the other Gulf States saw as their leading internal security threat. The feud ended last year, with Qatar refusing to comply with a list of demands made by the Saudi-led bloc, but the tensions persist.

Doha subsidizes Hamas, the Gazan branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, to the tune of $360 million to $480 million a year. With one third of that money, Qatar buys Egyptian fuel that Cairo then ships into Gaza, where Hamas sells it and pockets its revenue. Another third goes to impoverished Gazan families, while the last third pays the salaries of the Hamas bureaucracy.

Qatari spending in Gaza might look humanitarian, but in reality, Doha is funding Hamas’s coffers through oil sales. Doha is also bankrolling Hamas’s social services, the main vehicle of the organization’s rentier network that helps Hamas maintain support among Palestinians, in Gaza as well as across the West Bank and Jerusalem.

Without Qatari money, Hamas’s governorship of Gaza would have become untenable and its popularity among Palestinians would have collapsed.

But Qatar also wants to remain in Washington’s good graces, and the emirate’s American strategy involves media and policy outreach. Its influence-buying is a textbook example of how to transform cash into “soft” power, through indirect investments in U.S. political culture.

The emirate gave millions of dollars to the arch-establishment Brookings Institution, which opened a centre in Doha in 2007. The Qatari government announced in a 2012 news release that the centre’s role included “reflecting the bright image of Qatar in the international media, especially the American ones,” according to a New York Times report that showed Qatar had given Brookings $14.4 million in donations over a four-year span.

This past June Richard Olson, a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates, pleaded guilty to illegal lobbying on behalf of Qatar, while Brookings placed its president, retired four-star Marine Gen. John Allen, on administrative leave amid a federal investigation into his role in the lobbying campaign.

Over an eight-year period from 2009-2017, the Qatar Foundation, where, according to its website, centres and programs focused on education, research and innovation, and community development intertwine for the benefit of Qatar and the world, gave $30.6 million to dozens of American high schools.

That was small potatoes compared to the more than one billion dollars donated to U.S. universities between 2011-2017, making it “the largest foreign funder by far” of American academia according to the nonpartisan watchdog group Project on Government Oversight (POGO).

Jamaal Khashoggi, who was murdered by Saudi agents in 2018, wrote critical columns about Riyadh in the Washington Post which were shaped by a consultant for the Qatar Foundation, former U.S. foreign service officer Maggie Mitchell Salem.

The Qataris want to protect themselves and make themselves indispensable. They do that by also making Qatar a convening venue. For instance, when the United States wanted to deal with the Taliban, they went through Doha.

“The ideal scenario for Qatar moving forward will be one where it can balance between its international foreign policy ambitions, while avoiding another breakdown in regional relations with its neighbors,” remarked Elham Fakhro, a research fellow at the Centre for Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter in England. 

The World Cup extravaganza helps.