In a brief respite between coursework and dissertation deadlines, I feel the need to reflect a little on the Ukraine situation. Actually it's not such a big diversion as it directly relates to two of my modules this semester as well, on democracy, civil society and governance and on human rights. I feel about as close as it is possible to be to have considered the issue, read and heard people on both "sides", and actually not be able to hold an opinion either way. That's not to dismiss it as insignificant: in the back of my mind I always recall General Sir John Hackett's Third World War beginning in the recently independent Ukraine! I am genuinely conflicted. I have no idea what the "right" answer is.
Firstly, and I think a fair few strident "western" commentators need to appreciate this too for a bit of humility when pontificating what people half a world away should do, I and most of the people I know have no experience of being a geopolitical pawn (welll we do, we just don't usually recognise it as such!). That means people in the UK and the USA primarily: we simply have not in living memory been invaded, annexed, carved up and redistributed, our people force-marched 3,000 miles as collective punishment, been starved in one of the biggest instances of democide in history.
I mean, let's face it, sixty years ago or whatever it was, moving the Crimea to Ukraine would have been something akin to moving Grimsby back to Lincolnshire instead of Humberside, an administrative thing, done for who knows what reasons of course, but nonetheless. Maybe they thought the Ukrainians were always too independent minded so the territory called Ukraine should have more Russians in it. Mere gerrymandering on a grand scale? Who knows. You can be sure they then didn't envisage these Soviet Republics ever being anything other than part of the Soviet Union, so these were administrative internal issues. On the other hand, you would think that experience of the Holodomor and then of internal exile would make the Tatars totally against siding with Russia, so whose country is Crimea anyway? Should the (minroity) returning Tatars have some prior say, or should it be the ethnic Russians who were presumably also more or less forcibly moved into the Crimea in the fifties, as "current occupiers"?
It's bad enough having one "master" in the form of a state, but having several fight over you, swap you for something else, demand that one day you are loyal to one regime and the next to another, perhaps accompanied by enforced changes in language, legal system, religious freedoms and so on must be truly awful. I of course don't understand why they cannot simply go it alone - with a population of around 2 million Crimea is not dissimilar in size to sovereign Slovenia and Latvia, somewhat bigger than eight other independent European nation states.
Anyway, all of that is by way of saying I really cannot imagine, living in a country that has not ostensibly "changed hands" for the best part of a millennium, what all that historical baggage, much within living memory remember, does to communities. But what of the political dimension, what is it that one side, Europe and the US are getting all moral high ground about?
Okay, so I paid only a passing interest in the street battles in Kiev, celebrated a little when the Yanukovych government fell (all governments falling are a cause for celebration, for there is the briefest opportunity that people might reject government entirely!). I mean, from the outside, it looks like Ukraine has had a series of pretty gangster governments. Yushchenko and the bizarre poisoning incident, Timoshenko the oligarch turned politician (rarely a good combination IMO). For better or worse the current legally, however dubiously, elected gangster-in-charge happens to be Yanukovych. And he has been forced from office by a mob. Amazingly a mob demanding closer ties to the European Union: Brussels can't see that strength of feeling in their favour very often!
The new government is, naturally, dominated by western-oriented Ukrainians so even the flimsy nationwide democratic consent to the Yanukovych government can no longer be counted upon. I'm not clear when we started supporting coups d'etat, but it seems to me that people pointing out that's exactly what we're doing have a good case.
On the other hand there is the unseemly haste with which all this is happening. One would expect a neighbouring country, especially one with crucial assets in the territory concerned, to have a position on the legitimacy or otherwise of a change in government next door, but is there anything to suggest that even if Ukraine were about to be more politically divided on ethnic lines anyone was in such imminent danger as to demand (let alone justify) immediate deployment and de facto annexation of the Crimea by Russia? You know, Scotland's been planning a vote on independence for what, three centuries, Crimea's could surely have waited a few months and allowing time for legal challenges and so on? I don't trust Putin at the best of times, and the swiftness of his intervention stinks of planning and takeover not protection.
I hear people comparing it to Kosovo. But I'm not sure the comparison works, or at least I hope it doesn't. In Kosovo, a rebel government had been going for some time, it had already turned bloody, and the remarkable aspect of the NATO intervention was bombing Serbia to make them give up their grip on Kosovo. So if Putin is not suggesting that large scale bloodshed on ethnic lines was imminent, from which the Crimean people needed immediate protection, is he really saying that he's prepared to bomb Kiev in order to defend the rights of self-determination of Crimea? An independent Crimea, by the way, that would be slightly larger in population than the current "independent" Kosovo.
And oh, as I was writing this last night, news comes in of some alleged phone conversation with Timoschenko apparently quite casually talking about nuking ethnic Russians. Maybe Putin has a cause for swift intervention after all. Either way, I cannot bring myself to think well of either side in this, and it seems to me that from the western point of view, rarely has there been as good a reason to keep one's own counsel as when the greenhouse windows are in full view of the incoming stones.
