THE END OF A BEAUTIFUL FRIENDSHIP?

The end of a beautiful friendship?

I watched some of the post BREXIT coverage on CNBC on Sunday evening- it was quite interesting to get a US perspective on some of the consequences of the referendum. The gist was that the US elite was not happy (to put things mildly) with the Brit elite over the BREXIT result largely because the US had effectively lost its inside man in the EU tent. 

The Brits had pushed the EU into imposing economic sanctions on Russia because of Russian interference in Ukraine. Obviously with the Brits on their way out of the EU they are now irrelevant diplomatically within Europe as far as the US is concerned. So basically the US was now seriously going to ramp up its diplomatic contacts and efforts with Germany - in an effort to maintain the sanctions against Russia. 

Incidentally while European (and UK) farmers suffered as a result of the sanctions against Russia over the occupation of the Crimea and Russian support for the unrest in eastern Ukraine, the US farmers upped their production to access the potential new market, clearly true friends indeed. On another matter I wonder how long it's going to be before the next UK PM gets their White House lawn photograph.

NOT GONE AWAY

While the eyes of the world have been distracted by events in Hong Kong, eastern Ukraine and the Middle East, Russia has continued to apply pressure to the Crimean Tartar minority in the Crimea. There have been documented attacks on Tartar leaders, on-going harassment, raids on houses and flats have taken place; records and documents have been taken and passports confiscated and libraries have been shut down.

Nadir Bekir (pictured here in 2013) says four masked men pulled him from his
car, forced him to the ground, and took his Ukrainian passport and mobile phone.

Crimean Tatar Scholar Attacked, Library Shut As Pressure Mounts

SIMFEROPOL, Crimea -- A Crimean Tatar scholar says masked assailants dragged him from his car and took his passport in an attack meant to prevent him from attending a UN conference in New York.

The attack on Nadir Bekir late on September 18 came hours after Russian authorities moved to seize the Crimean Tatar assembly, the Mejlis, piling pressure on the Turkic-speaking Muslim minority group that largely opposed Moscow's annexation of the Black Sea peninsula from Ukraine.

On September 19, the main Crimean Tatar library in the regional capital, Simferopol, announced that it is being shut down in accordance with an August government resolution to replace libraries on the peninsula with Russian state entities. 

Bekir, an expert on indigenous peoples, told RFE/RL he was attacked on his way from Simferopol to the city of Dzhankoi, where he planned to board a train for Kyiv and then fly to New York.

He said a white minibus abruptly blocked his car on the highway. Four masked men emerged, pulled him from his car, forced him to the ground, and took his Ukrainian passport and mobile phone. He said one of the attackers opened his passport and told the others: "Yes, that 's him!"

Without his passport, Bekir said he cannot leave Crimea. He believes the attack was meant to prevent him from participating in the September 22-23 UN World Conference on Indigenous Peoples, part of the UN General Assembly. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin promised that the rights of Crimean Tatars would be protected after Moscow annexed the region in March, a move opposed by most Crimean Tatars and denounced as illegitimate by Ukraine, the European Union, and the United States.

But tension quickly mounted and pressure on the Crimean Tatars intensified after most members of the Turkic-speaking minority group, which makes up about 12 percent of the peninsula's population, boycotted local elections on September 14.

Police confiscated records of the Crimean Tatar's Mejlis as well as religious books, computers, and
personal belongings of long-time Crimean Tatar leader and Ukrainian lawmaker Mustafa Dzhemilev.

Houses and apartments of leading members of the Crimean Tatar community, as well as the Mejlis offices, were searched by police and unidentified masked, armed men on September 16-17.  

In the Mejlis, police confiscated records of the Crimean Tatar self-governing body's sessions as well as religious books, computers, and personal belongings of long-time Crimean Tatar leader and Ukrainian lawmaker Mustafa Dzhemilev.

Dzhemilev is a well-known Soviet-era human rights activist who served six sentences in Soviet prison camps from 1966 to 1986.

Earlier this year, Russian authorities barred Dzhemilev and the chairman of the Mejlis, Refat Chubarov, from entering Crimea, saying their activities "incite interethnic hatred."

The pressure on Crimean Tatars is a source of particular bitterness because the community was deported en masse to Central Asia in 1944 by the authorities under Josef Stalin, who accused them of collaborating with Nazi Germany.

Many of the 200,000 deportees died on their way into exile.

Many Crimean Tatars returned to Crimea in the years before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and there have been frequent disputes over land and property on the peninsula, which are aggravated by ethnic differences between the Crimean Tatars and the Slavic population.

After Russia annexed Crimea, Putin publicly said that the rights of Crimean Tatars will be fully protected by Russian laws and signed a decree on the rehabilitation of peoples deported from Crimea in the 1940s. 

But in May, the United Nations voiced concern about what it called the "serious problems" of harassment and persecution of Crimean Tatars since the annexation.

By RFE/RL's Tatar-Bashkir Service and RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service

Last updated (GMT/UTC): 19.09.2014 11:30

STOP THE WAR IN UKRAINE DEMONSTRATION

Stop The War In Ukraine Demonstration - 11: - 19:00 Open Market Area Newport City Centre - 4th September 2014

STOP THE WAR

The NATO road show is here the helicopters and wall to wall parked up riot vans might have been a clue and the fact that there are more coppers on the streets than in New York. NATO is firmly dug in the centre of Cardiff and on the north eastern fringes of Newport in and around the Celtic Manor (in the historic Vale of Usk). 

Anti-War protests - Ukrainian style (AP)

In Newport and Cardiff people are understandably complaining about the disruption caused by the NATO summit. The disruption is ironically a result of other people making decisions on our behalf – ‘Let’s give put the summit in Wales, it will keep them (the Welsh) happy and quiet, make them feel important, etc.’ – hence the farcical arguments over the logo - this has that patronising Westminster attitude to the periphery written all over.

Many people in the south east will have little choice but to live with any disruption and any traffic chaos. I suspect that the people of eastern Ukraine would prefer columns of VIP limos rolling through their towns and along their highways to columns of Russian tanks. People might moan about NATO but I suspect that it has always been relatively easy to leave NATO by way of comparison with leaving the old Warsaw Pact.

Hordes (according to the Police, not that many according to the protestors) of noisy protestors are apparently coming to protest in Newport. We even have the added joy of hosting a probably unwanted (by most of the people of Newport – as if they were ever going to be asked) so called ‘peace camp’.  All this inconvenience in truth pales into insignificance by way of comparison with what is going in eastern Ukraine and Syria and north western Iraq.

NSATO satellite photos (REUTERS) 

I suspect that some of the older former fellow travellers who will be happily protesting on successive Saturday’s in Newport against NATO would I suspect have been quite happy for the Soviet Union – that prison of peoples - to have survived. They tend to self-selecting when it comes to causes and probably would have remained silent (had they been around) when the old USSR invaded Hungary (in 1956) and Czechoslovakia (in 1968) yet raised their voices over Vietnam.

It’s the selective silence of some of the demonstrators that’s quite interesting, silence over the slaughter in Congo (formerly Zaire), silence over the genocide in South Sudan (and little support for their struggle to achieve independence), the silence over East Timor during the long murderously brutal Indonesian occupation and a continuing silence over West Papua. Not to mention the silence over Tibet, which continues to endure a brutal occupation at the hands of the Peoples Republic of China.

My sympathies are with the victims of Russia’s blatant aggression in the Ukraine and the victims of IS (formerly ISIS) in Iraq and Syria rather than the anti-NATO protestors. Few of the protestors will I suspect offer any support to the people of the Ukraine or those trying to fight of IS (ISIS). NATO might have its faults but public collective security did the job and prevented the western half of Europe form being overrun by the Soviet Union in the late 1940’s and 1950’s.

Human Rights Watch has incidentally announced that pro-Russian insurgents in eastern Ukraine have been (and are) "regularly" detaining and torturing civilians. Human Rights Watch reports that fighters supporting rebel strongholds in the region have "captured hundreds of civilians" including journalists, pro-Ukrainian political activists and in some cases their family members since they took control of the region back in April 2014. Over 2,000 people have been killed in the conflict.

Ukraine should understandably be a key issue on Friday, as NATO released satellite images showing Russian forces inside Ukraine and has suggested that more than 1,000 troops were operating there. US President Barack Obama has accused Russia of being responsible for the violence in eastern Ukraine. The President said the fighting was not the result of a home-grown uprising but of "deep Russian involvement".

The new satellite images make Russia’s role in the crisis pretty clear. Heavy fighting continues near the strategic port of Mariupol, on the Azov Sea. Rebel forces are trying to capture the city but Ukrainian government troops are digging in. Since Thursday the insurgents (funded, directed and supported by Russia) have seized the south-eastern coastal town of Novoazovsk.

Much of the current crisis in Ukraine and NATO’s poor relations with Russia are a result of shortsighted bad decisions. Russia a few years ago was openly humiliated over Kosovo by the US (and NATO). The West failed to help Russia during the painful transition from a collapsed Soviet Union to the post Soviet economic reality.

Rather than help, support and assistance all Russia got was bad advice in relation to a brutal rapid privatisation process that shattered the old Soviet economy and paved the way for the rise of the Oligarchs. The most important side effect of this was that any prospects of the emergence of a stable democratic Russia were dashed the consequences of which we all have to live with now. As for the demo’s 10,000 people waving Ukrainian flag and calling for action might impress me…

NATO'S NEW WORLD ORDER?

There will be plenty to discuss in early in September at the Celtic Manor Resort (close to Newport) and I suspect that we not talking about the NATO summit related chaos or the noisy protestors outside the fence. Perhaps unconsciously echoing the former US President George Bush, the  NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen, has warned that the “world order is at stake” and that the 28 state alliance faces “the biggest challenge since the end of the Cold War” as the Ukraine crisis continues.

Part of that particular fence...

The ‘World Order’ reference is interesting particularly as we  are living through ‘a period of significant anniversaries’ at the moment of events one hundred years ago that led to the fall of one particular type of world order and the emergence of a different and much grimmer new world order. On 31^st July 1914 Imperial Russia’s publically declared full mobilization (actual mobilization had begun one week earlier) this was a key event in the drift to war.

One hundred years on (31^st July 2014 ) the House of Commons Defence Committee published a report part of a review of Security and Defence. The report argues strongly that recent events in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine should be a wake-up call for NATO (and the UK). The report further argues that NATO is unprepared when it comes to facing the new threat posed by Russia.

Drawing imperfect parallels with 1914 only goes so far, as the secret diplomacy (mostly British) that was contributory factor to the drift to war in 1914 is now a thing of the past. We need to remember that this is not 1914, its 2014, and collective ‘publicly declared’ security commitments have tended to work. Clearly articulated public security commitments and agreements, which bring independent nations together, are on the whole a good thing, perhaps one of the reasons why the SNP has stated that an independent Scotland would join NATO.

Scotland and NATO

As for NATO itself, the report (here in html / and in PDF) says, has flagged up deficiencies in NATO’s command and control structures, in its ability to predict and its abilities to detect and give adequate warning of any potential attack.  The MP’s have identified weaknesses in the readiness of NATO forces and perhaps equally as important the fact that NATO itself may lack the collective political will to take concerted action to deter attack.

This lack of collective political will may be a combination of different developments. The consequences of the long term deployment in Afghanistan which was in response to an attack on a NATO member (Article 5) which took the security organisation into unknown and increasingly unstable territories. And the fact that an older Europe may be reasserting itself, as France and Germany develop their on-going (gas fuelled) relationship with Russia, which may result in questions being be asked about the on-going need for a Trans-Atlantic alliance and it’s perceived adherence to what are increasingly perceived as US interests.

The Russian Federation’s recent actions in the Crimea and eastern Ukraine have flagged up the possibility, admittedly unlikely, of a potential non direct Russian attack on a NATO Member State. A conventional attack on a NATO state remains a low probability, but, the report has flagged up the risks of unconventional attacks which NATO would find hard to counter. Unconventional means a combination of cyber attack, information warfare, the “ambiguous warfare” tactics (the use of irregular militias) as deployed in Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova  and elsewhere  all of which tend to be backed up with rhetorical threats about the need for protection for ‘Russian minorities’.

The MP’s have stated that NATO needs to reorder, train and exercise its capabilities to be able to defend against both eventualities. The Committee has called on the UK Government to take the lead at the NATO Summit in Wales (in Newport, in September) to ensure that NATO is ready to face such threats. The House of Commons Committee’s has produced some specific recommendations, which call for:

• The pre-positioning of military equipment in the Baltic States;
• A continuous presence of NATO troops on training and exercises in the Baltic;
• The re-establishment of large-scale military exercises including all NATO Member States and involving political decision makers;
• Improvements to the NATO rapid reaction force and the possible establishment of a new Standing Reserve Force for NATO;
• Improvements to processes for warning of imminent attack;
• Radical improvements in Russian expertise in the UK government, allowing for real analysis and assessment of the Russian threat;
•  The development of new tactics to respond to the threat of “ambiguous” attacks from Russia - including how to counter threats from cyber, information warfare, and irregular militia; and
• A reconsideration of Article 5, to allow response to less conventional attacks.

The committee has concluded that the threats to UK security are increasingly dynamic in their scale, complexity, uncertainty and urgency and for NATO to undertake radical reform to be able to anticipate, plan and respond to these threats. Hand in hand with this problem, the threats from terrorism and failed states will continue to increase, change and develop. The MP’s say that events in Ukraine and Crimea represent the re-emergence of a real state on state threat to NATO’s eastern borders.

Certainly those ‘Brits’ who since Suez blindly tailored their foreign policy and national strategic interests to mirror those of the USA regardless of the cost, may find themselves increasingly isolated. The bigger problem for NATO (and increasingly for the EU) comes not from the ‘Brits’ (who are perceived to be increasingly euro sceptic and too close to the US) but from the smaller countries of eastern Europe who have a less warm relationship with Russia but whose interests may end up being sacrificed for French and German interests.

Last week the UK announced that it will send a "full battle group" of 1,350 military personnel to take part in NATO manoeuvres in Poland to support allies in eastern Europe. This will be the UK's largest such commitment to the region since 2008. The party formerly known as New Labour stated that the report underlined NATO’s position as the "cornerstone" of UK defence policy and the "sole organisation for collective defence". On the basis of that sentiment there probably won’t be any constructive dialogue in Westminster about how NATO finds itself on the cusp of yet another confrontation with Russia. 

We may also wonder just how the West managed to get Russia so badly wrong. A few years ago Russia was publically humiliated over Kosovo by the US (and NATO). Before that Western help during the painful transition from a collapsed Soviet Union to the post Soviet economic reality was pretty minimal, rather than help, support and assistance all Russia got was bad advice in relation to a brutal rapid privatisation process that shattered the old Soviet economy and paved the way for the rise of the Oligarchs, not to mention wrecking the prospects of the emergence of a stable democratic Russia in the process.

70 +

Anniversaries are sometimes difficult to forget, eleven days ago (May 18th ), outside the Crimea's capital, Simferopol, 10,000 people participated in a rally, carrying placards calling for "self-determination" and commemorated the 70th anniversary of Stalin’s 1944 deportation of the Crimean Tartars. Many of the 200,000 deportees suffered and perhaps 25% died - some during deportation and others in exile. The Mejlis, the Crimean Tatars' main representative body, has adopted a resolution calling for "territorial autonomy" for the community, Tatar representatives in the Crimean government, and "an end to discrimination against and the repression of the Tatars of Crimea." 

There was a heavy police presence in Simferopol, and military helicopters flying low over the rally. Earlier dozens of people gathered at a memorial near Simferopol’s railway station, the deportation point for thousands of Tatars sent into internal exile. President Putin (who is admired by Nigel Farage) met with Crimean Tartar representatives in Sochi (on May 17th) and stated that Russia would improve the lives of Crimean Tartars. Simultaneously several hundred people also marched in support and remember the deportations in Ukraine's capital, Kyiv. Incidentally the rally had been banned by the pro Moscow Crimean authorities.

WHEN MINORITY MEANS YOU…

Friday 9^th May 2014 was Victory Day in Russia and the Crimea, a day which is traditionally marked by ceremonies to remember the end of the Great Patriotic War. Ceremonies took place in Moscow and elsewhere including controversially in the Crimea. While many people respectfully remembering the end of the war, and the terrible price paid for final victory over fascism, not everyone was celebrating.

Crimean Tatar leader Mustafa Dzhemilev

For the Crimean Tartars, ominously there may be little to celebrate – the Tartars many of whom served bravely in the then Red Army, were repaid for their loyalty by finishing the war in detention in Central Asia and Siberia. Since the Russian occupation of Crimea, things have not been easy. Last week a senior member of  the Crimean Tatars' self-governing body (the Mejlis) was beaten up by a so-called Russian self-defense group.

The head of the Mejlis department for external ties, Ali Hamzin, told Radio Free Europe / /Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) that unknown individuals in military uniforms had stopped Abduraman Egiz in Simferopol on May 6th and demanded his identification.  Abduraman Egiz who refused to produce his documents, demanded that police be present at the site. The men, who called themselves members of the "Crimean self-defense force" then attacked Egiz and beat him up and searched his vehicle. 

Upon discovering that Egiz was a member of Mejlis, he was released. Ali Hamzin stated that the incident would be reported to the police. It is expected that in the run up to the 70th anniversary of the Crimean Tatars' deportation to Central Asia to be marked on May 18^th that violent attacks against Crimean Tatars will likely intensify. The Crimean Tartar Mejlis has refused to recognize the annexation of Ukraine's Crimea by Moscow in March.

On May 4th, Natalya Poklonskaya, Crimea's de facto prosecutor-general, warned Mejlis leader Refat Chubarov that his organization will be liquidated if it engages in "extremist" activities. This action came amid protests by local Tatars over the authorities’ refusal to allow their veteran leader, Mustafa Dzhemilev, into the region on May 3^rd. Mustafa Dzhemilev, a famous if not legendary Soviet-era dissident and Ukrainian lawmaker, told RFE/RL on May 5^th that Crimean Tatars will continue to fight for their Human rights by peaceful means. 

(Source: RFE/RL's Tatar-Bashkir Service)

LIFE IN OCCUPPIED UKRAINE

Pro-Russian thugs attacking pro-Ukrainian protesters in Donetsk on Monday

The Russian State, whatever its ideological cloak, was always capable historically at least (or so we thought) of unleashing so pretty grim strains of thought and actions in its name. The inhabitants of the Kremlin have been historic advocates of state sponsored terror for want of a better phrase. Whether it was the Black Hundreds pre 1914 or the NKVD / KGB in the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950’s or the extreme ‘Russian nationalists’ of the 1990s, 2000’s and 2010’s – the end results have often been pretty grim from pogroms, deportations, state terror and even in recent years illegal killings of its opponents.

THE SHADOW OF A GUNMAN

A friend of mine summed up Russia’s actions in eastern Ukraine perfectly, saying that it is important to remember that historically the inhabitants of the Kremlin have never tended to do subtle either externally or internally. When it comes to ‘Soviet / Russian intervention’ to suppress striking East German workers (in 1953), the crushing of the Hungarian revolution (in 1956), the invasion of Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague spring (in 1968), the invasion of Afghanistan (in 1979) and the invasions of Georgia (in 2008) and recent events in Ukraine most people would be hard pressed to describe them as subtle.  

The shadow of a gunman...

Orchestrated by the Kremlin Russian nationalist elements active in eastern Ukraine are busy throwing their weight around and the realities of President Putin rule in Russia are coming home to roost.  News filtering out from eastern Ukraine is beginning to suggest a pattern to disappearances as journalists, local politicians, and ordinary citizens have begun to go missing at an alarming rate. The Kyiv Post and the Committee to Protect Journalists have compiled lists of documented cases of kidnappings in the region.

We are where we are because of Russia’s long planned but hastily implemented occupation of the Crimea which followed the collapse of the corrupt oligarchic pro Moscow government in Kyiv in the face of a bloody but popular revolt. The US Secretary of State John Kerry has rightly accused Russia of "distraction, deception and destabilisation" in eastern Ukraine. In the strongly worded statement, he has called on Moscow to help defuse the crisis or face further sanctions.

The  continuing unrest of eastern Ukraine has more to do with deflecting public opinion in Russia away from the example of Kyiv than anything else. That said the unrest in Eastern Ukraine was stirred up after, from the Kremlin’s perspective, a pro western revolt succeeded. The key and as yet unresolved issue remains as to whether the Ukraine looks east to Moscow or west to the EU looms large in the Kremlin’s thinking.

Last month Russia annexed Ukraine's mainly ethnic-Russian Crimea following a questionable referendum in the region which ‘choose’ to that backed joining the Russian Federation. Both the West and Kiev have said that the referendum was illegal and have refused to recognise it. The problem is that the Kremlin’s concerns for ‘Russians in zones of legitimate interest’ posses potential problems for Moldova (including in the Trans Dniester region) and other eastern states with Russian minorities.

For a man originally brought in as a safe pair of hands to safeguard the interests of a clique of oligarchs who made their fortunes plundering the privatised assets of the former Soviet Union while ordinary Russians lost their savings, President Putin sits securely (and genuinely elected with a large popular mandate) in the Kremlin. The President’s popularity is higher than ever, state’s coffers are full of accrued energy revenues, former oligarchs have been tamed, the bear has roared, Russia has expanded territorially for the first time since 1945 and the West’s criticism has been dismissed.

To a great extent we are all still living with the consequences of the second world war and the cold war – parallels between President Putin and the dictators from the 1930’s and 1940’s have already been drawn.  The legacy and legacy of Stalin’s terror continues to overshadow modern Russia to the day. Communist tyranny died of apathy and inertia in the early 1990’s this meant that there were no real consequences for the former communists and the agencies of the communist state. 

There was no day in court to answer for terrible crimes and abuses inflicted on the Russian people. There was no equivalent of a post cold war Nuremberg tribunal to bring the former communist functionaries (including the KGB) to account for their crimes against the Russian people continue to haunt the Russian people and the rest of us. Unlike in much of Eastern Europe the former dissidents never inherited political power the former communist bureaucrats did.

The West preferred to work hand in hand with former communists to saddle Russia the inheritor of much of the former Soviet state with a dubious legacy of privatisations. Now while there are some in the West who are quite happy to admire President Putin’s values the problem with appeasement is not how it starts but how it ends. If the West accepts that eastern Ukraine President Putin’s final territorial demand then we will be on seriously unstable political ground for the foreseeable future.

Disturbingly the modern Russia’s ‘brown’ vote long targeted by President Putin appears to be the home to some extreme views long dispatched to the home of the extreme right wing.  The Crimean Tartars, who suffered deportation at the hands of Stalin and years of discrimination at the hands of the Soviet authorities, now find themselves back in Russia and like some other ethnic and religious minorities at risk.

When it comes to articulating the consequences and realities of appeasement these are the times when we seriously miss people like Michael Foot who would have stated in no uncertain terms exactly what Russia’s intervention in Ukraine actually signifies. That murmur of Munich that drifted through the West’s chancelleries in the 1990’s over Bosnia clearly has not gone away. 

A combination of increasing EU dependence on Russia gas supplies and potential loss of trading opportunities seriously threatens to put the skids under any EU diplomatic response to recent events in eastern Ukraine. If we in the West choose to do nothing , then what message does that send to Russian and Belarusian democrats and would be democratic movements across Eurasia and the rest of the world?