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Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
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Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
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Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Monday, March 31, 2014
How Vladimir Putin Became Evil
The US and UK condemn him for Crimea but supported him over the war in Chechnya. Why? Because now he refuses to play ball
( March 29, 2014, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) Once
again, it seems that Russia and the United States are finding it
difficult to agree on how to deal with their respective ambitions. This
clash of interests is highlighted by the Ukrainian crisis. The
provocation in this particular instance, as the leaked recording of a US
diplomat, Victoria Nuland, saying “Fuck the EU” suggests, came from
Washington.
Several decades ago, at the height of the cold war, George Kennan, a
leading American foreign policy strategist invited to give the Reith
Lectures, informed his audience: “There is, let me assure you, nothing
in nature more egocentric than embattled democracy. It soon becomes the
victim of its own propaganda. It then tends to attach to its own cause
an absolute value which distorts its own vision … Its enemy becomes the
embodiment of all evil. Its own side is the centre of all virtue.”
And so it continues. Washington knows that Ukraine has always been a
delicate issue for Moscow. The ultra-nationalists who fought with the
Third Reich during the second world war killed 30,000 Russian soldiers
and communists. They were still conducting a covert war with CIA backing
as late as 1951. Pavel Sudoplatov, a Soviet intelligence chief, wrote
in 1994: “The origins of the cold war are closely interwoven with
western support for nationalist unrest in the Baltic areas and western
Ukraine.”
When Gorbachev agreed the deal on German reunification, the cornerstone
of which was that united Germany could remain in Nato, US secretary of
state Baker assured him that “there would be no extension of Nato’s
jurisdiction one inch to the east”. Gorbachev repeated: “Any extension
of the zone of Nato is unacceptable.” Baker’s response: “I agree.” One
reason Gorbachev has publicly supported Putin on the Crimea is that his
trust in the west was so cruelly betrayed.
As long as Washington believed that Russian leaders would blindly do its
bidding (which Yeltsin did blind drunk) it supported Moscow. Yeltsin’s
attack on the Russian parliament in 1993 was justified in the western
media. The wholesale assaults on Chechnya by Yeltsin and then by Putin
were treated as a little local problem with support from George Bush and
Tony Blair. “Chechnya isn’t Kosovo,” said Blair after his meeting with
Putin in 2000. Tony Wood’s book, Chechnya: The Case for Independence,
provides chapter and verse of what the horrors that were inflicted on
that country. Chechnya had enjoyed de facto independence from 1991-94.
Its people had observed the speed with which the Baltic republics had
been allowed independence and wanted the same for themselves.
Instead they were bombarded. Grozny, the capital, was virtually reduced
to dust as 85 percent of its housing was destroyed. In February 1995 two
courageous Russian economists, Andrey Illarionov and Boris Lvin
published a text in Moscow News arguing in favour of Chechen
independence and the paper (unlike its Western counterparts) also
published some excellent critical reports that revealed atrocities on a
huge scale, eclipsing the siege of Sarajevo and the massacre in
Srebrenica. Rape, torture, homeless refugees and tens of thousands dead
was the fate of the Chechens. No problem here for Washington and its EU
allies.
In the calculus of western interests there is no suffering, whatever its
scale, which cannot be justified. Chechens, Palestinians, Iraqis,
Afghans, Pakistanis are of little importance. Nonetheless, the contrast
between the west’s attitude to the Chechen war and Crimea is startling.
The Crimean affair led to barely any loss of life, and the population
clearly wanted to be part of Russia. The White House’s reaction has been
the opposite of its reaction to Chechnya. Why? Because Putin, unlike
Yeltsin, is refusing to play ball any more on the things that matter
such as Nato expansion, sanctions on Iran, Syria etc. As a result, he
has become evil incarnate. And all this because he has decided to
contest US hegemony by using the methods often deployed by the west.
(France’s repeated incursions in Africa are but one example.)
If the US insists on using the Nato magnet to attract the Ukraine, it is
likely that Moscow will detach the eastern part of the country. Those
who really value Ukrainian sovereignty should opt for real independence
and a positive neutrality: neither a plaything of the west nor Moscow.
Tariq Ali has been a leading figure of the
international left since the 60s. He has been writing for the Guardian
since the 70s. He is a long-standing editor of the New Left Review and a
political commentator published on every continent. His books include
The Duel: Pakistan on the Flightpath of American Power, and The Obama
Syndrome