12 October 2011
The Martyrdom of Yulia Tymoshenko
By Gwynne Dyer
There are three obvious explanations for Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s behaviour in the case of former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who has just been sentenced to seven years in prison and a $186 million fine for a decision she made while in office that would never end up in court in a normal democratic country. None of the three reflect well on Yanukovych.
The first explanation is that he is simply waging a vendetta through the courts against Tymoshenko’s party. Seventeen other members of the government she led have also faced criminal charges over their conduct while in office, and several are already serving jail terms. So maybe Yanukovych is just a political thug who wants to destroy the opposition.
That would make sense, for Tymoshenko is a real threat to him: in last year’s presidential election, she lost by only 3 percent of the votes. However, she herself favours a different explanation. “This is an authoritarian regime,” Tymoshenko said when her sentence was read out on Tuesday. “Against the background of European rhetoric, Yanukovych is taking Ukraine farther from Europe by launching such political trials.”
“Taking Ukraine farther from Europe” is political code for taking it closer to Russia. There is a tug-of-war between Russia and the European Union over the future orientation of Ukraine, and in this analysis Yanukovych, who draws his support from the heavily Russified eastern Ukraine, is secretly Moscow’s man.
Tymoshenko, whose votes come mainly from western Ukraine, is the European Union’s favoured candidate for leader of Ukraine. So in this second explanation, favoured by Timoshenko, she is being railroaded into jail to serve the interests of the Kremlin. But there is a problem with this explanation.
The European Union’s condemnation of her trial was predictable. Carl Bildt, Swedish foreign minister, said: “Clearly this particular trial is conducted under laws that…should have no place in any country aspiring to European membership .” Heavy hints have been dropped that a jail sentence for Tymoshenko would jeopardise the free trade agreement between the EU and Ukraine that is due to be signed in December.
But the Russians have also condemned the trial. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who signed the deal with Tymoshenko, said that “It is dangerous and counterproductive to cast the entire package of agreements into doubt,” and the Russian Foreign Ministry declared that Tymoshenko’s conviction had a “clear anti-Russian subtext.”
The main charge against Tymoshenko is that she was too generous to Russia in a gas deal she signed in 2009 to end a dispute over the price Ukraine paid for gas and the transit fees it collected for Russian gas flowing across Ukraine in pipelines to customers further west. Tymoshenko has actually been convicted of being TOO NICE to Russia. How can you reconcile that with a Kremlin plot to draw Ukraine into its web?
This is clearly a political prosecution, not a criminal one. Nobody is saying that Tymoshenko was bribed by the Russians, or that she received any direct advantage from the deal she signed with Moscow. Perhaps she was too generous, but much of eastern Europe was freezing at the time and the situation was urgent. At worst, she might be accused of a political misjudgment.
Nobody believes the official claim that the Ukrainian courts are acting independently in this matter, and Yanukovych appears to have angered both the Russians and the West equally by his actions. Could there be a third explanation here? Could it all be just an very clumsy attempt by Yanukovych to prove that he is independent of both sides?
One should never underestimate the role of stupidity in politics, but this explanation is highly unlikely. Yanukovych is a ruthless and devious man, but he is not stupid. Let’s go back to Explanation Two, and try a subtler version of it.
Let us assume that Yanukovych is indeed Moscow’s man, and that his ultimate goal is to integrate Ukraine into the free-trade bloc that Russia is building with Belarus and Kazakhstan. Then he must somehow get the rival proposal for a free-trade agreement with the European Union off the table – but he doesn’t want to cancel it himself, for at least half of Ukrainian voters want closer integration with the West.
So the ideal solution would be to trick the EU into breaking off the free-trade talks with Ukraine by presenting it with some human-rights issue that forces its hand. If the EU suspends the talks over the legal persecution of Yulia Tymoshenko, it’s win-win for Yanukovych.
If this is really the strategy, then Moscow would have to play its part by protesting about Tymoshenko’s trial too – as it is indeed doing. Once the Ukraine-EU talks on a free-trade area have been broken off, Kiev and Moscow can kiss and make up. And after a decent interval, Yanukovych could bring Ukraine into the rival customs union with Moscow without too much domestic opposition.
This is what Tymoshenko herself fears. She does not want the EU to break off the free-trade talks because of her trial and conviction. “Ukraine must be saved,” she said last June. “If the EU pushes Ukraine away now and leaves it alone with this regime, our country will be thrown back for several decades.”
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To shorten to 700 words, omit paragraphs 6, 7 and 9. (“The European…subtext”; and “This is…misjudgment”)
30 March 2010
Moscow: No Common Threat
By Gwynne Dyer
“Whether you are in a Moscow subway or a London subway or a train in Madrid or an office building in New York, we face the same enemy,” said US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, responding to the twin suicide bombings on the Moscow metro system that killed 39 commuters on Monday. And it’s true: the Chechens, the enemies of all mankind, are everywhere these days.
No? That’s not what she meant? Oh, she really meant that MUSLIMS are the common enemy, whether they are Chechen Muslims in Moscow or British Muslims of Pakistani descent in London or Moroccan Muslims in Madrid. That’s a relief. Then all we have to do to be safe is get rid of all the Muslims.
Hang on a minute! This just in! What she really, REALLY meant was that we all face the same enemy, a shadowy network of Islamist extremists who plot terrorist attacks against innocent people, mostly Christians, all around the world. But they aren’t true Muslims, or they wouldn’t do such terrible things. (Neither would true Christians, or true Jews, or true Hindus or Buddhists or Sikhs, which is why the world is so peaceful and so just.)
Okay, I’ll stop now, but do you see why it makes me so cross? A terrible event happens somewhere, and then we have to listen to politicians talk pompous nonsense about it. Terrorism cannot be our common enemy, because it is only a technique. Enemies have to be people – and the people who use terrorist techniques, though some of them may be our enemies, have little in common from one place to another.
The Chechens, who are strongly suspected of being behind the Moscow bombs, are waging a quite traditional colonial struggle for independence. As they are Muslims, they have increasingly adopted the Islamist ideology that is now fashionable in Muslim revolutionary circles: these days they even talk of a “North Caucasian Emirate.” But in practice their sole target remains Russia, the imperial power that oppresses them.
There have never been any Chechen bombs on the London underground, or on the commuter rail network in Madrid, or in office buildings in New York, nor will there ever be. Russia, like Israel, has been remarkably successful over the years in selling other countries on the notion that they must maintain a joint front against “terrorism,” but the fact is that the only terrorist threat either government faces is from its own subject peoples.
Israel obviously has a lot at stake in its quarrel with the Palestinians, since both peoples claim the same land and there isn’t much of it. Russia has land to spare for every imaginable purpose, and there has never been much settlement by ethnic Russians in Chechnya and the other small Muslim republics of the northern Caucasus. They don’t have much economic value, either, so why not just let them go?
The answer you always hear is that it would start the unravelling of the Russian Federation itself. Letting the so-called “Union Republics” (Ukraine, Latvia, Azerbaijan, etc.) go when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991 was inevitable, for they already possessed the legal status of independent countries in a voluntary association, and besides they were too big to stop. But the “republics” within Russia itself were a different matter.
Chechnya, which was conquered by Russia in the mid-19th century but rebelled every time the Russian government was weak or distracted, declared its independence in 1991. Moscow rejected the declaration on the grounds that it did not have the right to secede under the old Soviet constitution, and that letting it go would create a precedent for some of the other twenty ethnic republics within the Russian federation to leave as well.
Moscow tried to reconquer Chechnya in 1994-96 in a war that left Grozny, the capital, in ruins, and about 35,000 Chechen civilians dead. The Chechens actually defeated the Russian army, and a ceasefire in 1996 was followed by Russian recognition of Chechen independence in 1997. However, Vladimir Putin reopened the war in 1999, and Chechnya has been back under the Russian heel for the past ten years.
None of this has the slightest relevance to people outside Russia, nor does the anti-Russian terrorist campaign that was the inevitable aftermath of the Chechen defeat. It is as localised as the Basque terrorism that afflicts Spain or the occasional terrorist killings carried out by breakaway, diehard Republican groups in Northern Ireland. And as pointless, for the Chechens, too, have decisively and permanently lost.
All terrorist attacks on civilians are wicked, because they transgress one of the few boundaries that we have managed to place on war. (In fact, all attacks on civilians are wicked, including nuclear war, aerial bombing, and the “collateral damage” that occurs during conventional military operations, but never mind that.) Most wicked of all are attacks that are mere vengeance, after all hope of victory is gone.
That is what the Moscow metro bombings are, and therefore they are doubly to be condemned. But they should not be confused with some vast global terrorist conspiracy, although the Russian government naturally pushes that line. Let us hope that Hillary Clinton was just being polite to her Russian colleague when she took the same line. It would be very bad if she actually believed it.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 7 and 8. (“Israel…matter”)
7 July 2009
Nukes: The Cart Before the Horse
By Gwynne Dyer
Speaking in Moscow on 7 July, President Barack Obama was the very soul of reasonableness. The United States and Russia must cooperate to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons, he said, while keeping the goal of a world without nuclear weapons always in sight: “America is committed to stopping nuclear proliferation, and ultimately seeking a world without nuclear weapons.”
Unfortunately, that is the wrong way round. The deal that underpinned the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, signed way back in 1968, was that the five great powers who already had nuclear weapons would gradually get rid of them. In return, the rest of the world’s countries would not make them at all. But more than forty years later, none of those five countries (the US, Russia, Britain, France and China) has kept its side of the deal.
In the circumstances, it’s remarkable that only four more countries have developed nuclear weapons. Three of them (Israel, India and Pakistan) never signed the treaty at all, and the fourth (North Korea) signed it in 1985, quit it in 2003, and then tested its first bomb in 2006. But the queue of those who are now thinking about doing it stretches down the block and around the corner.
“Any (treaty)…has to have a sense of fairness and equity, and it is not there,” said Mohamed El-Baradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in an interview with the Guardian newspaper two months ago. “We still live in a world where if you have nuclear weapons, you are buying power, you are buying insurance against attack. That is not lost on those who do not have nuclear weapons, particularly in (conflict) regions.”
It was probably the US invasion of Iraq that made the North Koreans go nuclear, for finding yourself on President Bush’s short list for invasion (the “Axis of Evil”) is bound to be a bit unnerving. That may also explain why the Iranians put their nuclear programme into high gear – although there is an ideological difficulty here.
Just last month, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared once again that “Nuclear weapons are religiously forbidden in Islam and Iranian people do not have such a weapon.” Since Khamenei is a religious scholar, we may presume that he is not lying when he says that nuclear weapons are forbidden (haram) in Islam. Ayatollahs do not trim their conclusions on such matters to suit the tactical needs of the moment.
So how does Khamenei reconcile this principle with the obvious fact that Iran is relentlessly developing all the technologies needed to build nuclear weapons? “Virtual nuclear weapons,” of course. You get all the technologies and the enrichment facilities up and running, you continue to the point where you could build your first nuclear bomb in only a few months – and then you stop.
So far, all legal and morally correct. But if a hostile nuclear-armed country starts making open threats or secret preparations against you, you throw your legal and/or moral qualms out the window, quickly cover the remaining distance and presto! You have your own nuclear deterrent.
“This is the phenomenon we see now and what people worry about in Iran,” said 20El-Baradei in May. “And this phenomenon goes much beyond Iran. Pretty soon…you will have nine weapons states and probably another ten or twenty virtual weapons states.”
It’s legal because another part of the deal that underpinned the NPT gave all the signatories the right to develop nuclear power for peaceful purposes. Since the technologies for enriching nuclear materials for fuel in reactors are basically the same as those for enriching them to weapons grade – you just run the fissile material through the process many more times – every country has the right to become a virtual nuclear weapons power.
The only thing that can stop the rapid spread of nuclear weapons now, argues El-Baradei, is a genuine move by the existing nuclear powers to get rid of their weapons. If they finally kept their forty-year-old promise, it would change the whole psychology that drives the current wave of proliferation. Can they?
It has to start with the US and Russia, who still own 95 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons. The agreement that the United States and Russia signed in Moscow on 6 July doesn’t begin to meet that requirement, proposing only that the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) which must be signed by the end of this year will reduce their long-range nuclear weapons by up to a third within seven years. That’s not nearly enough.
But maybe they’re just trying to lower expectations. Maybe, by the time they actually finish negotiating the treaty in December, it will decree ninety percent cuts within three or four years, leaving Russia and America with only enough nuclear weapons to destroy a couple of hundred cities each. That might be enough to turn the tide and stop the proliferation.
El-Baradei got it exactly right. If that is done before the NPT comes up for review next April, “you would have a completely different environment. All these so-called virtual weapons states…will think twice…because then the major powers will have the moral authority to go after them and say: ‘We are doing our part of the bargain. Now it is up to you.’”
But the existing nuclear powers have to move first.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 5 and 10. (“It was…here”; and “It’s legal…power”)
24 April 2007
The Man Who Failed Russia
By Gwynne Dyer
He was always a heavy drinker, but until his health problems got bad in the mid-1990s he could usually hold his liquor. The real problem was that he was a man of action who didn’t have an idea in his head. A lot of people kept trying to put ideas in there, but they just fell out the other side. So he freed Russia (and a lot of other countries) from Communism, but he didn’t give it much else to work with instead.
Boris Yeltsin, who died at 76 on Monday, was brought to Moscow in 1985 to clean up the corruption in the capital by the man he eventually removed from power, the Communist reformer Mikhail Gorbachev. But the times were right for ambitious men to aim a lot higher, and Yeltsin was nothing if not ambitious, so by 1988 he had quit his position on the Communist Party’s ruling body, the Politburo. He ran for the all-Moscow seat against the official Communist candidate in the first free election in Soviet history, and won in a landslide.
I first met Yeltsin soon after that in the basement cafeteria of the Supreme Soviet, just inside the Kremlin walls, which was the easiest place for foreign journalists to find and interview deputies to this new-fangled beast, the Congress of People’s Deputies. It was one of the stars of the nascent Russian democratic movement, Galina Strarovoitova, who introduced us, and the contrast between the two of them was quite stunning.
Starovoitova (who was murdered some years ago in a contract killing) was a genuine democratic hero, an intellectual who dedicated her life to the ideal of a free society. Yeltsin was a charming bruiser who ran mostly on instinct and was all too aware of his considerable charisma. Yet he was in practice the leader of her little band of democrats, the Inter-Regional Deputies Group.
The IRDG flourished for less than a year, and it had less than a tenth of the deputies to the Congress, most of whom were still Communist Party hacks. Its leaders, including famous dissident figures like scientist Andrei Sakharov and historian Yuri Afanasiev, were using their unprecedented access to the media to spread democratic ideas to the furthest corners of a country where such notions had been condemned and suppressed for seventy years, but they knew those ideas alone would not produce a democratic majority in any Soviet election in the near future.
Yeltsin, on the other hand, could win the election, but he had no ideas at all. So they made him their leader, and during that year you rarely saw him without some leading light of the IRDG at his side, earnestly trying to fill this empty vessel with democratic ideals. Everybody meant well, I think, but the transplant didn’t take, and by 1990 Yeltsin had moved on.
In the following two years he did two things that should have earned him the gratitude of both Russia and the whole world. Standing on a tank outside the White House in Moscow in August, 1991, he turned back the hardline Communist coup attempt that almost reversed the flow of history. And he did it practically single-handedly, by the force of his own personality.
The coup was amazingly incompetent, but it could have succeeded nevertheless, in which case we would still be dealing with a ramshackle Communist-ruled Soviet Union, sinking ever deeper into poverty and corruption and fighting insurgencies all around its perimeter: Upper Volta with rockets, indeed. What we have is much better than that.
Yeltsin’s other great accomplishment, at the end of 1991, was to wind up the Soviet Union and set all of its constituent “republics” free. He did it for purely tactical reasons, but it was the last great act of decolonisation, and it spared us a generation of bloody struggles as the old Russian empire gradually fell apart. Despite tyranny in the ‘Stans and war in Chechnya, what we have is much better than that, too. But then Yeltsin should have died or at least retired, because he was a disaster and an embarrassment as the president of Russia.
There was the “shock therapy” prescribed by Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs that ended all subsidies overnight, drove inflation to 2,000 percent, and wiped out the life savings of tens of millions of families. There were the corrupt privatisation deals that created the “oligarchs” and the gangster culture. There was the armed assault on parliament in 1993 and the needless, futile, bloody attempt to subjugate Chechnya by force. Russia in the 1990s could have done a lot better than that.
Yeltsin’s retirement on New Year’s Eve, 1999 was of a piece with all that: a cynical deal handing power to the former KGB chief, Vladimir Putin, in return for a guarantee that no legal inquiries would be made after he left office into the wealth accumulated by his family and his political associates during their time in power. There is not much genuine mourning in Russia for Yeltsin today, and you can see why.
But he did get the two big things right, and that counts for a lot. History may take a kinder view of him than Russians do today.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 10 and 11. (“There was…seewhy”)