Partly to show that my interest in Ukraine isn’t just a passing fad, I’d like to remind old readers of, and draw the attention of new readers to, this article, in which I examine the problem at length in the summer of 2010.
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/09/as-ukrainians-force-russians-to-turn-their-back-on-their-language-and-change-their-names-i-ask-is-th.html
Note that the problem of language plays quite a large part in it. Now look at one of the first actions of the new post-coup Ukrainian , er, regime . Well, it came to power by unconstitutional means, a fact I’ll discuss further later.
http://rbth.co.uk/news/2014/02/23/ukraine_abolishes_law_on_languages-_of_minorities_including_russian_34486.html
Well, I never, it’s about language, a repeal of a law which would have given Russian (and other languages) a protected and equal status. If you had a big Russian-speaking minority, and you wanted to show them they belonged in your country, why would one of your *first* actions be this?
This is by no means the most disturbing event. The issue of an arrest warrant for Viktor Yanukovych is even worse. Yanukovych very stupidly ensured that Yulia Tymoshenko, his principal rival, was imprisoned on charges which were almost certainly spurious. Mrs Tymoshenko is , like Mr Yanukovych, well short of angelic status (though she looks much nicer than he does). People do not become fabulously rich in the former USSR by being nice.
As my old friend Edward Lucas (who utterly disagrees with me about Ukraine) wrote here http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2566299/Dont-fooled-angelic-looks-shes-ruthless-shes-corrupt-A-withering-portrait-Ukraines-saviour-EDWARD-LUCAS-Russia-expert-knows-well.html
She isn’t a paragon, and many Ukrainians mistrust her.
But the prosecution and jailing of beaten political opponents is not a characteristic of a law-governed state. The pursuit of Mr Yanukovych is as mean and spiteful as was his own pursuit of Mrs Tymoshenko.
People will say that the charge is different, and that Mr Yanukovych is responsible for the deaths of demonstrators.
Well, maybe he is. But if so the deaths were the result of orders given by a legitimate head of state, while defending his lawful government against an armed and violent mob. This isn’t exactly Tiananmen Square (whose culprits remain safely in power and welcome in all freedom-loving Western chancelleries, palaces and parliaments) . On the contrary, the Chinese People’s Republic really *is * a regime, owing its existence to a violent seizure of power, lawless, despotic, aggressive and sustained by armed force, arbitrary courts, a network of prison camps, fierce censorship and secret police. And the Tiananmen Square demonstrators, gunned down in unknown numbers, were (in my recollection) entirely peaceful.
This sort of thing is, or used to be, covered by the defence of Sovereign Immunity. Frankly, without this defence, no head of state or government is safe from subsequent vindictive prosecution, since all governments authorise violence, usually lethal violence, during their time in office. That is, among other things, what they are for. It is not a question of letting people off. If it a wise device for ensuring that the defeated feel free to leave office. Where it is absent, chaos will usually follow.
In proper free countries, the transfer of power from outgoing to incoming government is conducted peacefully and without revenge on the defeated. This is important, because any other arrangement simply encourages embattled leaders to hang on to power at all costs. I am sure that it is the fear of being hauled before some international court which persuaded Syria’s President Assad to fight on rather than flee. I think the same is true of North Korea.
Imagine if Harold Wilson, coming to office in 1974, had put Ted Heath on trial for Bloody Sunday, or if New Labour, in 1997, had arraigned Mrs Thatcher and her ministers for their conduct of the coal strike. This is the politics of spite and intolerance. It is odd that those who purport to admire Nelson Mandela are so relaxed when his most important example is not merely not followed, but actively rejected by their new heroes in Kiev. Imagine what would have happened if the South African Nationalists had believed they faced prosecution when they left power. They would never have let go, and South Africa would have been inches deep in gore for years.
I’ll now take up one or two points from contributors. Neil Gardner said:
‘On the evolving events in Ukraine, your insights and analysis provide a useful antidote to the barrage of spin from the likes of the BBC. However, this seems at odds with a later statement on arms sales to Saudi Arabia. " But our continued (and perfectly justified) dealings with the Saudi despotism ". In what way is "our" arming of one of the most authoritarian states in the Middle East "justifiable" ? ‘
I am not sure in what way it is at odds with it. I am in favour of cynical and self-serving foreign policy, as the only route to national survival. I reject idealist liberal intervention, in this case in some detail because I am aware of the detailed flaws in the mainstream account of events. Where is the inconsistency?
Mr Godfrey says : ‘The thugs are Christian Right wingers (aka Fascists)’. To the extent that the word ‘Fascist’ means anything, it describes the supporters of Benito Mussolini’s Fascisti. Its wider use to apply to German National Socialists robs it of almost all precise meaning, since these two movements were so different from each other. But I don’t think either the actual Fascisti, or the group which Mr Godfrey seeks to refer to, could be accurately described as particularly Christian.
Mr Henry Noel said : ‘Just as there is a point that precisely half the distance between London and Paris, but which no human instrumentality can mark, there exists a point at which the excesses of a democratically-elected government become insufferably tyrannical, to the extent that a people groaning under those excesses have both a need, and even a right, to end them. I don't pretend to know where that point exists, but that it does exist in fact ought to be borne in mind by critics of any popular uprising.’
Is that so? I should have thought that, if it were so, then it ought to be possible to define certain conditions that would need to be met. I would have thought that cancellation of elections, disenfranchising of opposition voters, and similar measures which blocked the use of constitutional means of change, might well be acceptable. But the fact that you don’t like your lawful, elected head of state doesn’t give you the right to oust him or her by violent or intimidatory means.
What strikes me is that it was Mr Yanukovych’s refusal to sign the deal with the EU which triggered, very late in his supposedly hated and intolerable presidency, the actions which brought about his downfall. Had he signed that agreement, does anyone believe that these events would still have taken place? Now, what exactly was it about a not-very-tempting offer of association with the EU ( far less economically generous than the counter offer from Moscow) that so powerfully drew the militant people on to the wintry streets? If the Yanukovych government was so bad, why and how had it survived so long without mass protest, before this particular event?
And I must continue to ask why the open intervention of foreign politicians in the country’s internal affairs was welcomed by the demonstrators? Aren’t these people supposed to be proud patriots? Did they never wonder who was using whom, and for what?
‘Cary’ rightly raises this point
‘Peter Hitchens make much of the Ukrainian president being elected, yet he has argued that democracy is the least important aspect of the British constitution, individual liberty and the rule of law being much more important.’
Well, yes, but the *supporters* of this putsch believe that democracy is the principal (if not the only) way in which power can be legitimated. I am setting them against their own standards. If they really believe this, then they cannot *on principle* support this undemocratic, unconstitutional, violent overthrow. Yet they do. This is because they do not really believe what they say. In that case, what do they think legitimates power. Increasingly (and one thinks here of the overthrow of Margaret Thatcher by her own party in 1990, the complaisance of the ‘West’ when Boris Yeltsin’s tanks shelled the Russian parliament, the subsequent willingness to accept the shameless rigging of votes in 1996 to keep Mr Yeltsin in office (compare and contrast with maiden-auntish shock at Vladimir Putin’s comparable but in many ways smaller misdeeds), the invasion of Iraq, the selective overthrow of various Arab despotisms, and the equally selective survival of others) that a general trend towards global governance is what is really at issue. Certain types of sovereignty just aren’t allowed any more. Russia’s attempt to get in the way of the EU and NATO, and in fact the continued survival of Russia as a regional economic and diplomatic power, are obstacles to this.
I’d also say that the EU pursues traditional German foreign policies, aimed towards the creation of the ‘Mitteleuropa’ concept first put forward by Friedrich Naumann in his 1915 book of that name. Alleged German plans from that period envisaged Ukraine wholly under German economic control, made Georgia (in the Caucasus) a German dependency, and the colonisation of the Crimea. The First Treaty of Brest Litovsk , dictated by Germany in February 1918, created (very briefly) the only modern state of Ukraine before the present one emerged from the 1991 collapse of the USSR. Had it survived, such a state would have been very much in the German sphere. The second treaty, in March, forced Russia to withdraw from Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic States (German and Austrian domination of Poland was assumed).
Much of this territory was regained by the Soviets in subsequent fighting, after the defeat of the Central powers in November 1918. Stalin seized still more in 1940 – the Baltic states, Eastern Poland, Sub-Carpathian Ukraine, ad a large chunk of Finland. When Hitler attacked Stalin June 1941, his strongest armies drove into Ukraine, and some did eventually reach the very edge of the Caucasus, for which the Nazis had planned special forms of autonomous, or satellite government. This is, in short, a very longstanding struggle for land and resources, and I do find myself wondering if the people-power revolution has not now replaced old-fashioned armed forces as the most effective way of enforcing a nation’s will abroad.
Cary adds: ‘Yanukevich has failed in both of these areas, using his office to enrich himself and orchestrating trumped up charges against a political opponent. He bears comparison with Hugo Chavez or some democratically elected African leader who has used his office for personal power rather than the proper exercise of his constitutional function. None of this is an argument for the West intervening in Ukraine. I doubt the US and EU have had much influence on events there, though they may flatter themselves otherwise, and will not have much influence on the outcome.’
I’d be inclined to agree with that, though it is interesting how little effort has been put by the ‘West’ into ousting the Chavez and now the Maduro governments in Venezuela, close though that country is to the USA. I know from direct personal experience that strong legitimate opposition exists to the Caracas government.
A contributor with a silly pseudonym wrote : ‘It's all very well bemoaning the overthrow of a 'democratically' elected government but you don't consider the fact that the Yanukovych government changed the parliamentary system such that it guaranteed its re-election. In a poll, 66% of Ukrainians considered the 2012 election rigged. Technically, Hitler was democratically elected (his was the next largest majority in the 1932 election when Hindenburg died in 1934) but would you have complained if a mob had overthrown him?’.
Once again, it is not I who claims to stand for and admire ‘democracy’, but the supporters of the putsch. I repeat, I am simply judging them by their own standards. There’s no doubt that the National Socialists came to power democratically and constitutionally, and continued to rule until 1945 without ever actually violating the Weimar constitution. Had Germany used the British ‘first-past-the-post’ electoral system, the national Socialists would almost certainly have commanded an overall majority in the Reichstag. These facts seem to me to be an argument against placing too much reliance ,either on democracy or on constitutions, to protect you from despots. In my view, law, tradition, monarchy and heredity, combined with independent professions and a strong and prosperous middle class, are more reliable guarantees. But in the end, if nations wish to commit suicide, there is not much you can do to save them.
Would I have supported a mob overthrow of Hitler? I can’t see why not. By 1934, he had clearly closed off, through the Brownshirt terror of 1933 and the later night of the long knives, any possibility that he might be removed by constitutional or lawful methods . Constitutional as it regrettably was the Hitler state had no freedom of speech or the press, no freedom for opposition parties. Under these circumstances, extra-constitutional action becomes, I think, permissible (I do not think Mr Yanukovych had closed off these avenues) . Mind you, mobs are difficult things. You can think you are leading them, and then find that you are being chased by them.
Gordon Carr, rather annoyingly, says that ‘of course’ it’s legitimate to call the Ukrainian government a regime. Well, now we know he thinks so. But can he please explain why?
Mr Gibson criticises Mr Yanukovych’s government for cronyism. No doubt this is accurate, but what if the opposition is also guilty of this? I made no mention of ‘paid agitators’, though it is interesting that so many people were able to stay on the square for so long, and were kept warm and fed throughout. How was this achieved?
