Eurasia Press & News
The language used about Russian meddling in Ukraine is grossly disproportionate and an insult to the victims of the wars in ex-Yugoslavia.
Tony Blair has not been given an easy ride following his call for Western countries to ease up on arguments with Russia and China. Speaking to Bloomberg in London on Wednesday, the former British prime minister and Labour Party leader said disputes with Moscow – over Ukraine – and with China, should not come in the way of the formation of a common front against Islamist extremism.
No surprise that Blair’s words have met general derision in the British media, many of which have happily quoted experts who retorted that Blair himself acted as a recruiting sergeant for Muslim fanatics as a result of his unflinching support for the catastrophic US-led invasion of Iraq. Some freely called Blair as a war criminal. End of story, apparently.
But it’s a pity if his call for a less antagonistic relationship to Moscow gets nowhere as the UK’s response to the Ukraine crisis – at least as far as the media are concerned – has been skewed and one-sided.
For weeks now, the media and politicians have been thundering away as one against Vladimir Putin, comparing him to Stalin, Hitler or Slobodan Milosevic. Take your pick. It’s surprising they haven’t thrown in Ghengis Khan.
The loose talk is not limited to frothy tabloids. The front cover of the normally judicious Economist magazine last week was headlined ‘Insatiable’. No, this was not an advert for a horror movie about a deranged American with an eating disorder. It was a reference to the sinister Russian bear depicted beneath, gobbling up a map of Ukraine.
A leading article in the Evening Standard last week meanwhile blamed all the trouble in eastern Ukraine – not for the first time – on ‘separatists thugs’. A prominent analysis by an expert on Russia in the London Review of Books asked whether Putin was the ‘new Milosevic’ (the answer naturally was: yes).
Nothing untoward, one might say. The British – the English especially – are a fighting nation, love a good enemy who can serve as an emotional dartboard, and right now Russia – just as it did for much of the 19th and 20th century – fits the bill.
Working up a kind of squeamish, anathematizing view of all things Russians thus serves a point, if only to remind normally squabbling left and right-wingers in Britain that they agree on some things.
Whether it is fair is another matter. How fair is it, exactly, to call old women in headscarves and grizzled World War II veterans, some evidently in their eighties – if the pictures are anything to go by – ‘separatist thugs’, for example?
As for the Russian annexation of Crimea, it’s obviously illegal as well as opportunistic, given Ukraine’s weakness, but is it an indication of ‘insatiability’? An attack on Germany or on India, say, would show Russia was insatiable. But Crimea?
The suggestion of much of this rhetoric, that Putin is hell bent on restoring the Soviet Union, rests on a strange understanding of history. The Soviet Union was kept in place by death camps, the infamous gulags, for one thing.
Nor was the Soviet regime interested in nibbling away at slivers of land from countries bordering the USSR. The goal was world domination. Stalin would have considered the Putin regime’s interest in places like Abkhazia or Crimea a joke – an irrelevance to the grand scheme.
As for the comparisons now drawn between Putin’s designs and those of Slobodan Milosevic, they also seem a product of lazy thinking. If Putin is the ‘new Milosevic’, albeit on a bigger scale, he is taking a long time to show his colours.
Milosevic, like Hitler, hit the ground running. Hitler took three years to march into the Rhineland; Milosevic also took only about three years to scrap the autonomy of Kosovo and start a war in, and with, Croatia.
Milosevic also was no irredentist, as Putin appears to be. His real interest in the Serbs outside Serbia was minimal, illustrated by the fact that he visited ‘his’ people in Croatia precisely once – on a day trip to Glina in 1992.
For Milosevic, the grievances of the ‘precani’ Serbs served just as a steppingstone towards much bigger things, the goal being to carve out of a great swathe of territory in the former Yugoslavia, whether or not many Serbs lived there.
The actual percentage of Serbs in this zone allocated for absorption didn’t affect Belgrade’s calculations in the slightest, as the unlucky inhabitants of Srebrenica, Zvornik, Vukovar, Drnis, and a lot of other towns, were about to discover.
It’s worth remembering that the people of these towns were not placed under Serbian rule. This was not the crime. They were killed or driven out. Tens of thousands perished in this way while hundreds of thousands others lost everything they had.
To compare that carnage – all those torched villages and mounds of corpses chucked into ravines and dumped like trash into rivers – with what has happened in Crimea, with what might happen in Donetsk, is not only not to compare like with like, it’s almost an insult to Milosevic’s victims.
When the ‘separatist thugs’ of eastern Ukraine have torched villages, demolished churches and sent hundreds of thousands of people fleeing for their lives, Putin will rightly be called the new Milosevic, the new Stalin – or both. Until then, the case for this kind of language has not been made.
