Dear Editor,
Much has been carried in your newspaper about the situation in Georgia in the Caucasus. Almost all the reports and even letters to the editor, have put forward the American and European Union’s viewpoint. That is, that the action and the response of the Russian Federation was entirely wrong, both morally and in respect of international law. But there is a Russian viewpoint which the media should carry in the interest of truth. If there is a continued suppression of this other viewpoint, there would be no grasp of the reality and so no possibility of a solution.
Without trying to deal with the whole matter relating to the West making a hostile military ring around Russia, for example, I wish to point out the most important reason for the Russian response.
Earlier this year, the United States and the European Union turned their backs on international morality and law when they dismembered the small state of Serbia by recognizing the independence of Kosovo. They took a very bad risk thinking they would be able to get away with it. Now the chickens are coming home to roost and the Russians have done what the EU and the USA did earlier this year in the Balkans. They have simply done a Kosovo in the Georgian provinces of Ossetia and Abkhazia. Thus, when the world remembers Kosovo, the bleatings of the USA and EU sound very hollow. The lesson? Strictly obey international law.
Yours faithfully,
PI Peters
Very good letter. That throughout the coverage of the Georgian issue the press failed to cite or make reference to the irony resplendent in the two situations speaks volumes. Yes, they chickens have literally come home to roost in this situation.
The same kind of mind boggling disconnection occurs in coverage of the nuclear non proliferation issue. The press never bothers to examine the portion of the NNPT that required those who possess nuclear weapons at the time of the signing to make tangible efforts to get rid of them, or the fact that the treaty made it ok for nations to process nuclear material for peaceful purposes.
No, I do not agree that Iran should have nuclear weapons. But I am also against Israel, India, Pakistan, France, the UK et al, possessing nuclear weapons. The coverage of the nuclear proliferation issue is based on the validity of an argument that citizens of some Countries have the right to protection of a nuclear umbrella, while others don’t. That in the 21st century the media still entertains this obtuse trend explains the stagnated level of human cognition.
only the white people can have nuclear weopons and brown skin people cant be trusted that the name of the game.
NO COMMENTS
PI Peters,
I have been voicing a steady opinion, similar to yours on the Georgia issue and SN has been publishing it on several earlier blogs. So it is not entirely fair to say that there is a supression of view points.
What is really happening is that an opinion such as yours comes from a learned awareness of the real truth of these world events, and are few and far inbetween, so it gets lost among the other articles that simply repeat the western media viewpoint . You also run the risk of being labelled a conspiracy fanatic
What I do suspect is that many of the persons sending letters to the editor on the issue are simply rehashing the western media viewpoint, and since they are all brainwashed by that media, they sound believable by those who are not aware of the real underlaying facts of the conflict in that region and the rest of the world.
There are no chickens coming home to roost here, because the motivations of Russia and the USA inn supporting two separate breakaway provinces was and is different. And, anyone who says the media is not covering both sides of the issue is practicing selective reading. I have read recent articles in Foreign Affairs, Time, Newsweek, the Guardian (as well as some foreign language publications) which have taken both sides of the issue. It’s all available online if one looks.
A few points: NATO and the West supported Kosovo’s breakaway because an ethnic non-Serb majority in Kosovo was being persecuted in the past (genocide may not be too strong a word) as far back as the first world war. No such comparable situation occurred in Ossetia — the ‘persecuted majority’ there always had free access to go to Russia with their Russian passports, and were not hindered by the Georgians.
Secondly, the West promoted *independence* and self determination for Kosovo; now, however hypocritically this principle has been applied in the past, it has always been a major foreign policy plank for the West since Wilson. Russia’s intention on the other hand was to re-absorb Ossettia and Abkhazia into its own vision of empire for geopolitical and strategic grounds. As well as, by the way, for popular consumption at home where Afghanistan and Chechnya have proven wildly unpopular and damaging little wars.
Another difference between the USA and Russia’s actions in the two quoted cases is also that while Russia’s heavy handed invasion of a sovereign nation on its borders was very much a go-it-alone kind of imperial finger-snapping, the USA and the West had a unity of objective and international support behind their own actions, in a way lacking in Russia’s case.
If further evidence be needed of the cynicism of Russia’s actions, one need only to remind oneself that Russians actually disdain and despise people from the Caucasus and Central Asia, referring to them in disparaging and bigoted terms bordering on the racist. Russians don’t really care about 25000 Ossetians. What they want is to be seen as great again.
So there are no chickens coming home to roost for the US in this case: just one cynical and ruthlessly pragmatic practioner of realpolitik using the moral cloak of the West to disguise its own strategic objectives in a way that might be popular within its own borders, but which has probably harmed it in the global arena more than it calculated.
I agree with most of what the writer is saying but I think the the origins and the motives behind the Georgian attack puts it in a different perspective. One needs to understand how the present Georgian regime came to power and who is supporting it. For example, how many people are aware that Georgia has one of the largest military contingent in Iraq?
Pantha,
You’ve hit the nail on the head. I couldn’t have put it better myself.