Why Don't we Want Democracy and Self-determination for Crimea?

I have spent much of the weekend wheezing with helpless mirth at the efforts of members of my trade to disapprove of two things they’ve spent their lives applauding – democracy and self-determination. They have to do this because on this occasion they operate in favour of Russia, a country on which we must all (for some reason) look down with cold sneers on our faces.

 

As someone who has questions about both democracy and self-determination (and is frowned on for being so incorrect), I've found it particularly enjoyable.

 

Actually, I have no doubt that the majority of Crimeans want to be in Russia and that the vote on Sunday expresses the majority will, if that counts for anything.  I found this sentiment strong during my visit to Sevastopol a few years ago (), and it makes sense to me.

 

Crimeans are mostly Russians.  Sevastopol is in any case a sort of Russian Cheltenham, full of super-patriotic conservative retired officers.  In purely economic terms, everyone in Ukraine would now be much better off if they had stayed in Russia in 1991, rather than launching off into the bankrupt chaos they have experienced ever since independence. I remember taking a  family holiday in Foros, on the Crimean coast round the corner from Mikhail Gorbachev’s famous seaside palace, , when I lived in Moscow in 1992, and being astonished by the request of the hotel manager that we should bring as many roubles as possible. The hotel had until recently been a ‘sanatorium’ (you had to pretend to be ill to go on vacation in the old USSR) belonging to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, and still had crude computer games which invited you to sink NATO submarines. The Ukrainian currency of the time was so worthless that the rouble was considered a hard currency. That was how bad it was. Ukraine’s barely-viable economy has suffered hugely from being cut off from its Russian hinterland, and it has also missed out on the oil and gas boom which keeps Vladimir Putin in power.

 

As for the Krim (Crimea) Tatars, whose plight so many reporters have suddenly discovered, it was Moscow, not Kiev,  that allowed them to return from their cruel Stalinist exile in the mid-1980s. You’d think from the way their plight was reported that the Gorbachev regime had expelled them. No, it was Stalin, in 1944. Mikhail Gorbachev let them come back. There’s no logical reason why they should expect Ukraine to treat them any better than Russia would. Has Ukraine been especially good to them? I’ve never heard so, nor can I see why it should be. My experience of Russians and Ukrainians in the 1990s was that they were still, in general, pretty racially prejudiced by British standards, especially against the old USSR’s Muslim and Caucasus minorities. This prejudice was not confined to the ill-educated, but was common among urban sophisticates. Has this changed?

 

If there are no problems with democracy, what is the objection to this vote? That it is in some way rigged? Well, no doubt the circumstances aren’t ideal(I’ll come to that) But even so, is the result falsified? The USA is pretty relaxed on occasion when dubious ballots take place. The Kazakh government, which shoots its own people in the back and has been caught openly stuffing ballot boxes, still gets allowed to meet senior US officials and is on the list of acceptable countries. The thuggish hereditary regime in Azerbaijan was once praised for ‘performing strongly at the polls’ by a US Deputy  Secretary of State Richard Armitage. This was in  October 2003 . Mr Armitage, congratulated young Ilham Aliyev (son of the country’s former dictator, and one-time KGB chief Gaidar Aliyev)on his ‘strong performance at the polls’, which is one way of putting it.  Ilham had 'won' a presidential election, shamelessly rigged from start to finish, during which at least one man died when police responded with boots and clubs to opposition protests. The following year the ‘strongly-performing’ Ilham was invited to attend a NATO summit. He managed to get himself photographed in the company of a smiling George W. Bush and an even more smiling Anthony Blair. Democracy can be difficult, and even flexible.  especially when it involves your friends, not to mention oil and gas. When it involves your enemies, you can get all superior and principled about it.

 

Anyway, we’ve discussed this difficulty elsewhere. All I’m saying is that the lovers of democracy have a bit of a problem denying that Crimeans want to be Russian. But back to self-determination. This was pretty much a principle of the United Nations during the decolonisation frenzy of the 1950s. I well recall my fellow leftists proclaiming that it was better for African countries to govern themselves badly than for them to be better-governed by colonial overlords. I wasn’t convinced by that then, and I’m not now. But it’s what we said we wanted, which is why I never join in the modish, easy attacks against Robert Mugabe, who sits in Harare entirely thanks to the settled will of the ‘West’, and particularly of Margaret Thatcher.  

 

The matter only grew complicated when anomalies began to crop up. The UN liberators believed (for instance) that the Falkland islands were an oppressive colony, which should be liberated from the British Empire and further liberated by being given to Argentina. A similar view was taken of Gibraltar, which was supposed to be liberated by being handed over to Spain.

 

This was obviously false.  How could people be ‘liberated’ by being handed over to rulers they expressly did not want? When British forces recovered the Falklands from Argentina, they declared that the islands had not been restored ‘to the government desired by their inhabitants’( a truth later confirmed by a referendum). Gibraltar’s people, likewise, voted emphatically to remain British. I imagine you can find people in Madrid and Buenos Aires who will say that both these votes are illegitimate, that the pro-Argentine or pro-Spanish side didn’t have a chance, that the occupation of both territories by British armed forces, and their subjection to biased pro-British media,  invalidates the results. Perhaps they have a case(I’m not sympathetic to it) , but does anyone really doubt that the majority will of the inhabitants was expressed in these votes. Of course not?

 

Then there’s the problem that the opportunity to *hold* a vote at all is only granted very selectively. I can’t see France,  Spain, Italy or Germany looking kindly on attempts to hold votes for independence in some of their regions, let alone Belgium, which would split in two in ten seconds if it were allowed to.  And the results of such votes are not always honoured, even by supposedly nice civilised people.

 

One of the most historically interesting of these votes is the Upper Silesia Plebiscite of 20th March 1921, whose 93rd anniversary is fast approaching, and which most people have never even heard of.  The area was full of valuable coal and industry. Both Germany and Poland were keen on getting hold of it. Under the supposed principle of self-determination of peoples, endorsed by Woodrow Wilson and Versailles, the matter should have been simple. But it wasn’t.

 

The vote, under international supervision but accompanied by some pretty nasty intimidation on both Polish and German sides, was duly held. Whoops! 717,122 people voted to join Germany; 483,514 voted to join Poland. This meant that quite a few Poles had voted to join Germany.

 

It was the wrong answer. After some more violence, and a renewed Allied occupation, the question was ‘settled’ by the League of Nations Council, which awarded the key industrial zones to Poland.

 

More recently, we have the Kosovo independence referendum of 1991, long before NATO’s military intervention on the side of the Kosovo Liberation Army. In that vote 99% voted for independence, on a turnout of 87% . Local Serbs boycotted it, much as Ukrainian speakers boycotted the Crimea vote last weekend.  Here the problem was that the result was premature. Albania alone recognised it. But in 2008  the vote at last bore fruit in the Kosovo declaration of independence,  declared lawful by the International Court of Justice and recognised by 108 countries including the Ukay, the USA, Germany and Saudi Arabia. Russia has emphatically not recognised it. Ukraine, interestingly,  took a neutral position under liberal heroine Yulia Timoshenko, but grew more hostile under the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych. A lucky escape, I tend to think. If the supposed ‘pro-western’ oligarchs had ruled Ukraine a little longer they might have sucked up to the USA and the EU by recognising Kosovar independence. And then they would have set a precedent for the Crimea.  

 

Other curious and ambiguous moments in modern history include the Turkish seizure of North Cyprus in 1974. I’ve always been sympathetic to this action, a reasonable response to a shameful and stupid Greek nationalist putsch in Nicosia, though I am disgusted by the ethnic cleansing and communal violence which followed. Who was to blame for them, though? The Turks, or the moronic Greek putschists who really ought to have known they were playing with fire?

 

Everyone condemned Turkey, and North Cyprus remains a hopeless anomaly, but I can’t say that Turkey was thrown out of the comity of civilised nations for  using military force to snatch a piece of someone else’s sovereign territory. Turkey has remained a member of NATO and a welcome ally of the ‘West’ ever since. How much of a part Cyprus has played in keeping Turkey out of the EU is hard to say. It certainly hasn’t prevented serious negotiations.

 

Then there’s our own Northern Irish problem. The referendum in which Northern Irish Protestants were browbeaten ( and in my view consciously misled)  into voting for the 1998 Belfast Agreement was manifestly unfair. There was no attempt to ensure that the vote was conducted fairly. The whole thing took place under the unstated but undoubted threat of more IRA murder if it was rejected. I doubt very much if any fair observer could honestly claim that press or media were remotely balanced. I still treasure the memory of U2’s Belfast concert at the height of the campaign, and the Blair Creature’s handwritten promise that no prisoners would be released unless violence was ‘given up for good’, plus the hilarious pledge that ‘those who use or threaten violence’ would be ‘excluded from government’.

 

And yet, at the heart of this agreement lies a mechanism for transferring Northern Ireland from British to Irish sovereignty, following a second referendum which can be called at any time, and can repeated every seven years until it comes up with the right answer (after which there won’t be any more).

 

This was undoubtedly achieved under huge duress, both from IRA violence and from the White House, which sanitised Sinn Fein and compelled the British government to open negotiations with that body. The US administration (famous for its enthusiastic 'War on Terror') has since maintained warm relations with Sinn Fein.  I believe Martin McGuiness was at the White House last Friday (in an early St Patrick’s Day celebration) to meet Vice-President Joe Biden. Whose hands are wholly clean? Whose principles are wholly unsullied? Who hasn't contradicted himself?  And if we’re not acting on principle, what is the basis of our objection here? Why do we so want to make an enemy out of Moscow? We are on the verge of succeeding. Do we really desire what will then happen?