Ukraine Bosnified, Putin HitlerizedBy:
Srdja Trifkovic, Foreign Affairs Editor of "Chronicles: A Magazine of American
Culture"
INTRODUCTION
Rodney Atkinson.
When supporters (like the US and the EU) of
openly fascist rioters accuse former communists (like Putin) of being like
Hitler then we know that such ideological absurdities are producing perfidious
reality on the ground. The ideologically moronic American and British mind set
on the Ukraine crisis is best demonstrated by the extreme nationalist anti
Russian march this Sunday in Latvia to commemorate Latvian collaborators with
the Nazis. The "Day of the Legionnaires" recalls the Latvian SS divisions who
joined the Nazis and helped in the mass murder of 75,000 Latvian Jews. Those are
the kind of people both in Ukraine and Latvia that Cameron, Clinton and Obama
are joining in the dangerously ignorant rants against "Hitler" Putin! As the
Freenations website has detailed over the last 20years the same distortions of
political reality were conjured up to destroy Yugoslavia with the result that so
called democracies were supporting racial and religiously genocidal groups in
Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo from the Nazi era.
SRDJA TRIFKOVIC:On March 6 President Obama said in Washington that the Crimean authorities' plans for a referendum "violate the Ukrainian Constitution and violate international law." "Any discussion about the future of Ukraine must include the legitimate government of Ukraine. We are well beyond the days when borders can be redrawn over the heads of democratically elected leaders," (leaders against whom Obama had just organised and financed a coup in Kiev - RA!) he added. "Crimea is Ukraine," Secretary of State John Kerry said in Rome on the same day.
Interesting. Six years ago the United States
enthusiastically recognized the Kosovo Albanian authorities' self-proclaimed
independence, which violated the Serbian constitution and violated international
law. The legitimate government of Serbia was not included in any discussions
which preceded the American decision. The United States initiated the redrawing
of Serbia's borders with an act of armed aggression in 1999, and then formally
condoned it in February 2008, over the heads of Serbia's democratically elected
President Boris Tadic and Prime Minister Vojislav Koštunica. Furthermore, in
September 2012 Obama's then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that "the
boundaries of an independent, sovereign Kosovo are clear and set." A few days
earlier Obama himself claimed, incredibly, that "Kosovo has made significant
progress in solidifying the gains of independence and in building the
institutions of a modern, multi-ethnic, inclusive and democratic
state."
A President capable of thus characterizing that
KLA-run black hole of thuggery and lawlessness - the worst-ruled spot by far in
all of Europe - is beyond logic or reason. It would be therefore useless to
point out to Obama that the government in Kiev has no legitimacy whatsoever,
having grabbed power through a sustained campaign of revolutionary brutality and
having violated the Ukrainian constitution and other laws in the process.
Obama's claim that the leaders of the regime in Kiev were "democratically
elected" is unsurprising, however, coming as it does from a man whose hold on
reality - at home and abroad - is becoming more tenuous by the day.
Lest we forget, on February 21 President Viktor
Yanukovich and three Ukrainian parliamentary party leaders signed a
"reconciliation agreement" co-signed by foreign ministers of France, Germany and
Poland - implying that their countries and the EU guaranteed the deal - and
approved by a Russian representative. The document provided for constitutional
reform reducing presidential powers, the creation of a government of national
unity, early presidential election, and disbandment of Maidan armed factions.
Far from disbanding, within hours those same armed factions forced Yanukovich to
flee Kiev and stage-managed a parliamentary "vote," worthy of the proceedings of
the Supreme Soviet ca. 1937, which ushered in the putschist regime.
As Russia's President Vladimir Putin said on
March 4, Yanukovich "had in fact given up his power already, and as I told him,
he had no chance of being re-elected. What was the purpose of all those illegal,
unconstitutional actions, why did they have to create this chaos in the country?
Armed and masked militants are still roaming the streets of Kiev. This is a
question to which there is no answer." Well, there is one, and he knows it. As a
BBC commentator pointed out on March 5, what makes Putin mad is the feeling that
he is being deceived:
We saw that with Libya in 2011. Moscow was
persuaded not to block a UN Security Council resolution on a no-fly zone to
protect civilians. But NATO's military action led to regime change and the death
of Col Muammar Gaddafi - far beyond what Russia had expected. It helps explain
why Russia has been quick to veto resolutions on Syria. On Ukraine, too,
President Putin feels the West has tricked him. Last month he sent his envoy to
Kiev to take part in negotiations on a compromise agreement … It remained words
only. Less than 24 hours later, Mr. Yanukovych was on the run, the parliament
removed him from power and appointed a new acting president from the opposition.
The pace of events took Moscow completely by surprise. Russia says the February
21 agreement must be implemented. The opposition signed it, yet allows an
uncontrolled militia of violent armed radicals send fear and loathing across a
large swath of Ukraine. The US says the agreement no longer
matters…
THE GHOST OF WARREN ZIMMERMANN - Washington saying "the agreement no longer matters" brings us to another parallel between the crisis in Ukraine and the conflict in ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990's: the role of the United States in subverting agreements that were meant to save peace. Similar U.S. subterfuges contributed to the outbreak of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina exactly 22 years ago. In March 1992 the late Warren Zimmermann, the last U.S. ambassador to Yugoslavia before its breakup and civil war, materially contributed, more than any other single man, to the outbreak of that war. The facts of the case have been established beyond reasonable doubt, and are no longer disputed by experts.
Following the unconstitutional and illegal
Muslim-Croat referendum on Bosnia's independence (February 28-29),
then-Portuguese foreign minister Jose Cutileiro persuaded the leaders of the
three constituent nations that Bosnia-Herzegovina should be independent, but
internally based on autonomous ethnic "cantons." The breakthrough was due to the
Bosnian Serbs' acceptance of an externally sovereign B-H state, provided that
the Muslims give up their ambition of an internally centralized, unitary one.
Alija Izetbegovic, the Muslim leader, accepted the plan. Only days after it was
signed, however, Zimmermann flew from Belgrade to Sarajevo to tell Izetbegovic
that the deal was a means to "a Serbian power grab" that could be annulled.
State Department later admitted that the U.S. policy was to encourage
Izetbegovic to break with the plan.
As early as August 29, 1993, The New York Times
brought a revealing quote from the key player himself: "Immediately after Mr.
Izetbegovic returned from Lisbon, Mr. Zimmermann called on him in Sarajevo...
'He said he didn't like it; I told him, if he didn't like it, why sign it?'"
After that moment Izetbegovic had no motive to seek compromise. He felt
authorized to renege on the tripartite accord, which inevitably ignited the
Bosnian war. Cutileiro himself insisted later that, but for Izetbegovic
reneging, "the Bosnian question might have been settled earlier, with less loss
of life and land." He also noted that "Izetbegovic was encouraged to scupper
that deal and to fight for a unitary Bosnian state by foreign
mediators."
In the fullness of time we shall learn which
"foreign mediators" played the role of Zimmermann in Kiev in February 2014.
Whoever it was - Victoria "f… the EU" Nuland, her ambassador in situ Pyatt, or
Kerry himself - the intervention was a malicious attempt to encourage one side
in Ukraine's multiethnic, multi-denominational mosaic to fight for an unitary
Ukrainian state. If the result turns out to be the same or similar as that in
Bosnia two decades ago, those "mediators" will have blood on their hands no less
than Warren Zimmermann had blood on his. He died in February 2004, having
greatly contributed to the death of a hundred thousand Bosnian Serbs, Croats and
Muslims in 1992-1995.
"UKRAINE" AS "BOSNIA" - A key
element in the Western propagandistic misrepresentation of the situation in
Ukraine is the claim that it is a coherent nation-state of "Ukrainians," which
is subjected to an unprovoked foreign aggression. On March 6 the House adopted a
package of "sanctions against Russia, and "lawmakers are also acting in other
ways to show solidarity with Ukrainians." Two days earlier John Kerry flew to
Kiev to show solidarity with Ukraine's new leaders. Everybody and his uncle,
including various MEPs, Canadian MPs, etc. flew to Kiev "to show solidarity with
Ukrainians."
In exactly the same manner, in 1992 it was
asserted ex hypothesi by the American (and to a lesser extent West European)
political elite, and parroted ad nauseam by the media machine, that if there is
a "Bosnia" there must be a nation of "Bosnians." In both cases the claim was
tantamount to the assertion, in 1861, that "the American nation" was resisting
an illegal rebellion. In fact today's Ukraine is like Ireland in 1920:
impossible to survive intact, let alone prosper in peace, on the basis of the
aspirations and assumptions of one community which are inherently incompatible
with those of another. The rights of the legislators in the Crimean Peninsula,
Odessa, Kharkov, Donetsk, Dnepropetrovsk etc. vis-à-vis Kiev are exactly the
same as those of the Stormont were vis-à-vis the Irish Free State in
1921.
COMMUNIST-DRAWN INTERNAL
BOUNDARIES - The problem of internal boundaries between the constituent
republics, arbitrarily drawn by communist dictators in complete disregard of the
wishes and aspirations of the people thus affected, has been the key foundation
of the Yugoslav conflict ever since the first shots were fired in the summer of
1991. Even someone as unsympathetic to the Serb point of view as Lord David
Owen, the EU negotiator in 1992-1993, conceded that Marshal Josip Broz Tito's
administrative boundaries between Yugoslavia's republics were grossly arbitrary,
and that their redrawing should have been countenanced before the issue
escalated into a fully-fledged war:
Incomprehensibly, the proposal to redraw the
republics' boundaries had been rejected by all eleven EC countries... [T]o rule
out any discussion or opportunity for compromise in order to head off war was an
extraordinary decision. My view has always been that to have stuck unyieldingly
to the internal boundaries of the six republics within the former Yugoslavia...
as being those for independent states, was a folly far greater than that of
premature recognition itself.
The manner in which Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev transferred Crimea to Ukraine in February 1954 is a particularly egregious example of the communist border-changing. The shoe-banger must be having a hearty laugh in his current hot abode at the readiness of the United States to risk a major confrontation with Russia - a minus-sum-game if there ever was one - for the sake of upholding the legacy of his stroke of pen 60 years ago.
REDUCTIO AD HITLERUM And
finally, just as Slobodan Milosevic was the "Hitler"-du-jour during the Bosnian
war (despite his opponents bearing all the marks and historic allegiances of
fascism while their sponsor, Germany, was precisely reprising the Hitlerian
Yugoslavia of 1941 to 1945), so Vladimir Putin is becoming one now. His current
transformation could be predicted with mathematical precision. Most notably,
Hillary Clinton likened Putin's actions in the Crimean peninsula to those of
Hitler in the Sudetenland. On March 3 Zbigniew Brzezinski called Putin "a
partially comical imitation of Mussolini and a more menacing reminder of
Hitler." ("We haven't seen this kind of behavior since the Second World War,"
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said, not that anyone cared.) Senators
Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) agreed with Clinton
wholeheartedly. The obvious comparison, with Oleh Tyagnybok and other
black-and-red Svoboda Party heirs to Bandera and the SS Division Galizien,
unsurprisingly eludes them. These people are McCain's good buddies, after all -
every bit as good as the warriors in the path of Allah in Syria.
As I've noted in these pages before, the final
corollary of various ad-hoc Hitlerizations is that we are all potential Fuhrers,
and only by vigilantly guarding against deviant thoughts ("I like Americans
better than Somalis"), emotions ("I enjoy Wagner's Ring more than Porgy &
Bess") and practices ("I enjoy walking my German Shepherd in the Bavarian Alps")
can we protect ourselves from the lure of the inner Adolf. Having experienced
the reductio myself - having been called "Hitler in full oratorical flight," to
be precise - I hereby wish Vladimir Vladimirovich a hearty welcome to the
club.
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