Bloody Brothers

The last few weeks has seen a seemingly exponential upsurge in violence not only across the Middle East but also in Ukraine and west Africa. Most have been going on outside the gaze of western media for some time and a wide range of very different interests and outlooks are involved - from the "Caliphate" of ISIS in the north of the Fertile Crescent, through the Syrian and Ukrainian civil wars to the pummelling of Gaza by far superior Israeli forces and the kidnapping of girls and others by Islamists in Nigeria as part of a wider cross-border conflict.

But one thing unites those taking part, whether the neo-fascists aligned to Kiev, or the religious fundamentalists of Boko Haram - a belief that spilling the blood of others is a legitimate way to impose their version of the world on others. It is an outlook that cuts across the religions involved - the extremist Jews who this week have called for the mothers of dead Palestinians to be killed as well and their houses destroyed; or the Koran testing of terrified Nigerian villagers by insurgents who separated those they deemed to be unbelievers before shooting them; or the "White Christians" supposedly championing European civilisation against Russian "Asiatics" as they ethnically cleanse eastern Ukraine.

Whether religion drives this behaviour or is incorporated to sanction it, isn't the issue. What is, is the willingness to deny the humanity of opponents - the Israeli Prime Minister breathtakingly complained about "telegenically dead" Palestinian corpses, while Boko Haram decreed the girls they seized from a school to be the "property" of their male captors.

This first video powerfully evokes the fundamental problem that drives the conflict - the belief in divine sanction being on your side consequently sanctions just about any form of behaviour, no matter how inhumane or extreme. I might disagree towards the end about the apparent equivalency portrayed between Israel and Gaza (Hamas do not have missiles like that, although they may well wish they did), but the video is about motive as much as method.

The second video isn't a cartoon. From Syria, it is real life for millions of people, including huge numbers of children - over half of Gazans are under 25- right now. It isn't as graphic as some of the recent footage from Gaza, but it is deeply upsetting and perhaps more powerfully than some of the more explicit images we have seen, it sums up the truly ceaseless tension and terror and the inhumane, dreadful and totally unjustifiable cost exacted on the innocent by the bloody brothers who would make this world their own.

Balkan Echoes

The Mothers of Srebrenica - the surviving relatives of the 7,000 Muslim men and boys butchered in 1995.

A Dutch Court has today ruled that the Dutch state is liable for the actions of Dutch soldiers, operating as part of the UN peacekeeping forces during the Bosnian war, who delivered some 300 Bosniac men and boys into the arms of their Serb murderers in Srebrenica back in 1995 were guilty of war crimes. The decision, taken following a case brought by the "Mothers of Srebernica", is welcome and long overdue. But it also highlights the ongoing hypocrisy and disregard of western governments towards the victims of European wide nationalist and neo-Nazi groups.

Who can forget these days back in  late June and early July1995? TV cameras covered the crowds of scared and hungry civilians crammed into the supposed safe zone; while the Dutch UN commander promised that he would not leave the terrified Muslims, mostly unarmed and surrounded by heavily weaponised Serbian paramilitaries. For months, they had been terrorised and starved until now their tormentors moved in. In the midst of this, 300 men ad several thousand women took refuge inside the UN compound itself - only to be herded out by their supposed protectors, the Dutch troops. They were assured that General Ratko Mladic himself had guaranteed their safe passage in spite of the obvious hollowness of his many, casually proffered previous promises.

Forced out of the compound in untypically decisive action by the UN in Bosnia, the three hundred joined the queues outside. Ominously, the women were separated from the men, supposedly to go to safety on different buses.

Except, as we know, the men's ones never turned up on the other side of the warring lines. Instead, 7,000 males, from teenage boys to crippled elderly men were led into the hills and then, as Christian priests blessed their executioners, they were shot and bludgeoned to death in the single worst act of genocide in Europe since the close of the Second World War. Their bodies were abused and dumped in mass graves and down old mine shafts in a clumsy attempt to put any evidence beyond the reach of any future investigators.

And, of course, the Dutch commander did not stay, instead getting as far away as possible.

The media of course was more than equivocal about the whole event - just as with Gaza now, the one sided nature of the Bosnian war, in which over 85% of casualties were Bosniac Muslims, the BBC and other western outlets suggested that the arms embargo favoured by the EU somehow "levelled the playing field" (or killing zone would have been more appropriate). In truth, given that the Serbs started with the full panoply of the well armed former Yugoslav army behind them while the Bosniacs started with a few police pistols and partisan rifles from World War 2 museums, the embargo in fact ensured ongoing Serb supremacy. This was only brought down when, finally shamed into action by the shelling of Sarajevo market, the UN finally approved the bombing of Serbian gun emplacements around besieged Sarajevo. A ceasefire and peacetalks leading to the Dayton Accords swiftly followed, but, of course, it has taken nearly twenty years for the families of the men butchered at Sarajevo to find even a smidgen of recognition of the UN's collusion with the Serb rebels.

And, as this Court finding is finally given, another tragedy with very similar traits and motives is playing itself out several hundred miles to the east of Bosnia - on the steppes of the Ukraine, the rightwing regime that came to power by overthrowing the democratically elected President has, with much western backing, more or less consolidated its hold over Russian speaking areas in the east. In spite of much hostile media coverage of Russia's attempts to protect ethnic Russians from the predations of fascist and far right vigilantes favoured by the Kiev irredentists, Putin has not overtly intervened and the Russian militias portrayed as extremists by the west have been almost completely eliminated.

But one look at who is busy fighting for the Ukraine regime immediately raises serious concerns about what is going on, and where Ukraine is headed - Scandinavian "volunteers" proclaiming that they are engaged in a race war for "the white Christian people". This statement does seem all the more odd given that most Russians are fairly white; until you reflect on Hitler's views of the Russian Slavs as what their name originally meant - an underclass, or under-race of slaves.

The Azov Unit uses the Wolfsangel banner once favoured by the Nazis.

Operating as part of the Azov militia, an outfit echoing the Serbian Arkan Tigers of the Bosnian genocide, they openly parade Nazi flags and symbols. Indeed, Nazi views are widespread among the European right - anti-Muslim, anti-Jewish, persecutors of the Roma minority, many of their proclamations make the chilling "manifesto" of Utoya murderer Anders Breivic seem like a children's book by comparison.

The West, keen to get its hands on Ukrainian shale gas (the new regime has signed a 50 year deal with western energy bosses, including the son of US Vice-President Joe Biden and a close friend of Secretary of State John Kerry, which hands over their national treasure to big foreign corporations), has happily backed all manner of misfits and extremists. The coup d'etat in the Ukraine by a mob including racists, anti-Semites and out and out neo-Nazis, some of whom are now members of the Government, highlights very much what the true focus of western interventions in states around the world are actually about. As John Bolton, former US ambassador to the UN under the Bush Presidency said of the Iraq war, it was never about freedom and democracy; it is about American (Western) interests. And money.

Dangerous genies were let loose two decades ago when Britain in particular connived in the destruction of Bosnia; and as we remember the ghosts of Bosnia today, the news from the East remains as grimly unsurprising as ever as the tragic cycles of history repeat, again and again.

Chilling echoes - right-wing militia round up ethnically suspect Russians.

Khrushchev's Crimea: Vlad Wants His Pressie Back...

Crimea has erupted across the global news headlines this past week.

When a crowd of people rioted on the streets of Kiev, perhaps uniquely demanding to be allowed to join the European Union, and overthrew the democratically elected President, the western media hailed this as a triumph for freedom and democracy.

A few days later, as the new Ukrainian regime adopted laws restricting the Russian language and culture of around 40% of the population, a crowd demonstrated in Crimea and 81 of the 83 elected members of the local parliament voted to hold a referendum on whether or not the Black Sea province should leave Ukraine and join Russia. Barack Obama declared any such referendum would, apparently, break international law - Scotland better watch out. The western media denounced it as a coup d'etat orchestrated by Russian President Putin and called for sanctions - some even suggesting some sort of vague military action  Half a league, half a league onwards!

But while the chauvinistic Putin,a supreme nationalist himself, is no benign player in events, as so often is the case, our political and media class operate in complete ignorance of what they are pontificating about. The narrative put out in the West on events completely misrepresents the reality not only of current happenings but of the past too.

Not only did previous Western military adventures in the peninsula not go so well, Crimea's population is heavily Russian (around 60%), with significant minorities of Ukrainians (25%) and Tatars (13%). It is not surprising that most of the people living there might be concerned about the seizure of power in Ukraine by a coalition containing nationalists and neofacists. The intervention of Russian troops, which has led to the deaths of precisely no one, in sharp contrast to the seizure of power in Kiev, is in this context seen as extremely welcome by local people, apprehensive of the train of events.

But all the more unsurprising is the fact that they might want to be part of Russia - because, historically, they were for over two centuries. Previously, the Crimean peninsula was a province of the Ottoman Empire, part of the Tatar Khanate, a colony of Genoa and an outpost of the Byzantine Empire in turn.

Crimea in history - from National Geographic HERE

It was never part of the Ukraine until 1954. In that year, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, on something of a high after Stalin's death and his own election as General Secretary of the Communist Party, gave Crimea to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic as a wee gift. Some people got vodka, gulag prisoners got parole; Ukraine got Simferopol and, after independence at the collapse of the USSR in 1990, they kept it.

So now, facing a decidedly chauvinistic Ukrainian regime, the local parliament, which legally governs Crimea as an autonomous republic, is holding a referendum. As long as the vote is fairly held, how is there anything there that breaks international law? The parallel with, for example, the Scottish Government holding the independence referendum in September is strong and the ability of areas with a distinct identity and internal self-government to democratically secede is well-established around the world. Or is the West really so keen to defend Khrushchev's self-indulgent act from 60 years ago?

The outcome is  not a foregone conclusion though probably fairly certain - reunion with Russia - but if so, it will be because the Russian majority will likely want that. And why not? Faced with the hostility of the new nationalist government in Kiev, they probably just want to go home.