IT’S RUSSIA, NOT AFRICA, BLOODY STUPID: THE UKRAINIAN FASCIST PUTSCH, WESTERN DIPLOMATIC HYPOCRISY AND SOUTH AFRICA’S EFFEMINATE CRIMEA POLICY.

TOPIC: IT’S RUSSIA, NOT AFRICA, BLOODY STUPID: THE UKRAINIAN FASCIST PUTSCH, WESTERN DIPLOMATIC HYPOCRISY AND SOUTH AFRICA’S EFFEMINATE CRIMEA POLICY.

INTRODUCTION.

In one of its promotional audio clips, which has become a kind of its signature debate emblem, Power FM, the new Johannesburg, northern suburb-based radio station presumably catering predominantly to the so-called black  middle class of the Gauteng province of South Africa, former  president Thabo Mbeki can be heard, in his typical deep monotone voice, intoning:

“It would be good if, in the future, you heard people say, if you want to know the truth about what is happening in the world, switch onto Power FM.”

Or something to that effect.

In search of the truth about the volatile situation in Crimea, and the tensions over it between Russia and Ukraine, as well as between Russia and the West over Ukraine itself , I have been switching onto Power FM the last few weeks, taking a cue from Mbeki’s advice.

After all, I paid a warm tribute to Thabo Mbeki’s diplomatic panache in my Politicsweb article entitled “The master diplomacy of Thabo Mbeki”, which appeared on 18 April 2012. So, I normally take Mbeki’s glibs and recommendations quite seriously.

His Power FM one is no exception.

But, instead of enlightenment on the Crimean crisis of February-March 2014,  I have been hugely disappointed, if not outrightly misinformed, I believe, by Power FM.

Since the outbreak of the Crimean crisis, Power FM’s highly experienced radio journalist and host, Tim Modise, has made a regrettable habit of inviting Yarik Turiasnkyi of the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA), who has made it his business to spew out endless and unrefined Russophobe propaganda and mindless rants every time he is invited by the radio station to comment on the Crimean crisis, to his Power FM Breakfast Show.

Yarik’s general line is that the Ukrainian Constitution does not allow for the kind of referendum recently held in Crimea, which Russia supported and encouraged, and that Poland and the Baltic states are frightened by Russia’s activities in Crimea. He has proven  incapable of directing a single critical remark towards the post-Fascist putsch authorities in Kiev. His open Russophobe bias did not prevent Power FM from interviewing him several times since the outbreak of the Crimean crisis. Power FM’s granting of an opportunity to Yarik to over-indulge and revel in his unbridled anti-Russian intellectual fantasies is mind-boggling. So blatant has Yarik become in his anti-Russian sentiments that when, after his latest interview on Power FM, Tim Modise read the tweets sent by Power FM listeners, several Power FM tweeps correctly and bitterly complained about Yarik’s open anti-Russian bias.

The pertinent question of course is why, if Yarik Tuarianskyi feels so defensive and precious about the Ukrainian Constitution, he is unable to bring himself to condemn the thuggish Fascist criminal putsch carried out by Svaboda- and Right Sector-supported Euro Maidan protestors, which violated the same Ukrainian Constitution, Ukrainian legality and even the agreement entered into between the deposed Ukrainian government, the three mediating Foreign Ministers of the EU and leaders of the Euro Maidan protestors like the boxer VitalyKlitchko? Is this really such an unimportant and inconvenient small detail to be easily overlooked and brushed aside by Yarik?

Seemingly not satiated by Yarik Turianskyi’s one-sided and one-dimensional interpretation of developments around the Crimean crisis on Tim Modise’s Power Breakfast Show, Power FM’s Thabiso “TT” Thema invited him again on his Power FM Afternoon Drive Show on 24 March 2014. And again Yurik did not waste time to reveal his Russophobe instincts and mindset.

At this stage, what came to my mind is: Why is the Power FM radio station  not even deigning to be impartial and objective by giving a  pro-Moscow voice the same radio platform to counter Yarik Turianskyi’s shrill anti-Russian propaganda, whilst allowing his Russophobe feelings to run amok? Isn’t it that the Russian Federation maintains a big Embassy in Pretoria, which Power FM can invite in for a chat on the Crimea crisis? In addition, we have many Russian businesspeople and scholars who are plying their trade in South Africa, who regularly visit our country? Could the radio station not find one who could challenge Yarik Turianskyi’s pro-NATO, pro-USA, pro-western Ukraine, pro-Baltics and pro-EU blather on the Crimean/Ukrainian crisis? I believe, with a little effort, this could have been easily done by Given Mkhari’s Power FM.

Invited also by Power FM’s Tim Modise on 14 March 2014 on his Power Breakfast Show was another analyst, this time former South African ambassador to Turkey, Tom Wheeler,  who was hardly a major improvement on Yarik Turianskyi, and who proceeded to more or less regurgitate the same misleading line of reasoning on the Crimean crisis as Yarik Turianskyi, his fellow researcher at SAIIA.

Given that the ANC, South Africa’s ruling party, has so many of its cadres, including leading lights in our society like former president Thabo Mbeki, former Minister Ronnie Kasrils and our ambassador to China, Bheki Langa, who spent a good time of their lives acquiring their academic, revolutionary and anti-apartheid skills in Moscow and other Soviet cities during the struggle against apartheid, why couldn’t Power FM invite any of them in for a chat also?

Power FM management must certainly have come across these two passages from Vladimir Shubin’s biography of the exiled ANC entitled “ANC – A View From Moscow”:

“Ronnie Kasrils, who trained at Odessa together with Joe Modise and Mabhida, happened to be the only white , and many years later recalled that he was sometimes asked: “Pochemy byeli chelovek?’ (Why a white person?)” (page 48, 2008, Jacana Media).

Of course Odessa mentioned by Shubin is the same Russian-speaking part of the now much-contested southern Ukraine.

Shubin also wrote:

“In spite of their intelligence services, South African government officials and ‘experts’ knew surprisingly little about the Crimean training facility. Even though a number of South Africans who trained there were later captured, the name of the camp was never correctly recorded.” (page 64, ibid).

Here Shubin reveals that a number of ANC and SACP cadres were trained in Crimea, which has just been annexed by the Russian Federation.

A stronger and clearer historical connection between South Africa and Crimea is hard to come by. This alone should be a firm basis for all South Africans to be interested in the current crisis in Crimea and around southern Ukraine.

It would not be difficult for Power FM to locate a few of these surviving freedom struggle ANC and SACP veterans to interview about their own experiences of the Crimean peninsula and southern Ukraine in the 1960s, 1970s and even 1980s.

These two SAIIA analysts, – Yarik Turianskyi and Tom Wheeler -, did not bother to mention Russia’s vital concerns about the pro-West Fascist coup against the deeply corrupt but legitimate and democratically-elected president Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine, the Fascist putsch’s blatant shredding to pieces of an agreement reached between the Yanukovych government and the more moderate Euro Maidan protest leaders, the post-Fascist putsch’s anti-Russian drive, including its decision to prohibit the position of Russian as Ukraine’s official language, nor did these two SAIIA analysts display keenness to factor in Russia’s historic, vital and  legitimate geostrategic interests in Ukraine. They neither mentioned the fact that Russia has been legitimately concerned, and even alarmed, by the West, and primarily the USA’s reckless determination to expand both NATO and the European Union (EU) eastward towards Russia’s own borders. Instead they played up the recent anodyne EU summit in the Baltics which sought to pave the way for Ukraine’s accession to the EU, a dubious project that has been pushed hard by the EU members in the form of Poland and the Baltic states.

This sort of one-sided and ideologically-driven diplomatic analysis and public discourse should be totally unacceptable in a non-aligned constitutional democracy such as post-apartheid South Africa is. South Africa has stopped to be a white outpost of Europe and the USA since 1994. We cannot afford to allow external disagreements and squabbles amongst foreign powers to color, in a jaundiced way, how we correctly assess South Africa’s long-term diplomatic interests, just so that we promote our own sectarian and sectional elite interests.

The era of pre-1994 knee-jerk anti-Russian, because it was also anti-Communist, reaction should be put behind us and in our occiput. It has no place in post-apartheid South Africa. This is so especially because Russia is a friendly capitalist market economy, a growing trading partner for post-1994 South Africa, a substantial investor in the South African economy, and an important emerging market in its own right. Russia is also a member of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), alongside South Africa and the western countries. In addition, Russia worked quite hard to have South Africa, even when many were arguing undeservedly so, to be included in the Brics grouping.

Power FM only slightly improved matters, following the savaging of Yarik Turianskyi by its tweeeps, by inviting professor Anton van Nieuwerk of Wits University to an interview on the Crimean crisis. He was also interviewed by Tim Modise on his Power Breakfast Show. Anton was undoubtedly much more balanced in his analysis of the Crimean/Ukrainian crises than either Yarik Turianskyi or Tom Wheeler. By far. He went out of his way, during the interview, to point to the fact that there were long-standing, historical ties between Russia and Crimea, which have existed for centuries, in fact since Crimea’s conquest by General Potomkin, one of Czarina Catherine the Great’s ablest Russian generals, in the late 1770s, until Crimea was gifted to Ukraine by the Soviet (and highly capricious, Ukraine-born) ruler, Nikita  Kruschev in 1954. He further indicated that Russia was legitimately concerned by post-Cold War NATO and EU’s expansion towards its borders. He conceded that Crimea was lost forever by Ukraine, “gone”, it’s gone, gone”, as he put it during the interview. He also crucially pointed out that the new authorities in Kiev were too corrupt, “maybe undemocratic”, as he put it, and that Ukraine remained highly unstable.

What I still fail to understand is why all these three South African analysts deliberately avoided to interrogate the openly Fascist nature of the Banderian, vicious, and deeply racist political outfits of Svaboda and the Right Sector of western Ukraine, who acted as the violent ram-rod during the Euro Maidan’s recent unconstitutional, illegal and illegitimate overthrow of a legitimate and democratically-elected Ukrainian government of the former, and deeply corrupt, president Yanukovych government? Why down-play the role in the Euro Maidan’s Fascist putsch of these wholly undesirable western Ukrainian political misfits, and their subsequent anti-Russian provocations, like the totally unnecessary toppling of the statues in western Ukraine of Russian generals that fought Hitler’s Fascist military and liberated Ukraine from Hitler’s genocidal regime? (Be reminded that after the end of apartheid, black South Africans did not set about willfully toppling the statues of racist and apartheid rulers like H. Verwoerd, DF Malan and J. Vorster). Why are these matters not foregrounded in these three analysts’ narratives about the current Crimean/Ukrainian crisis and the West/Russian tensions over Ukraine? For what purpose and to what end their omission?

I say Anton’s intervention was only a slight improvement because I was comparing how Power FM itself handled the Crimean crisis interviews with how it was treating another diplomatic crisis South Africa’s official foreign policy establishment was dealing with at the same time, namely the tit-for-tat expulsion of diplomats by South Africa and Rwanda.

Here Power FM did something very right, which it needed to have done with regard to the Crimean crisis as well from the outset.

In one of his usual, octane-charged Power FM slots in the last two weeks, Eusebius McKaiser, another of the radio’s hosts, invited the Rwandan Ambassador to South Africa and the leader of the Rwanda opposition to a debate about the political situation in Rwanda, and the ongoing assassinations of Rwandan political activists based in South Africa. That the Rwandan Ambassador at the end threw a petty, undiplomatic, “the-guilty-are-afraid” tantrum, and sulked away from the radio debate, is not the point here, important as that may be in the circumstances. What I seek to impress here is how the same Power FM radio station dealt so differently with two major diplomatic crises of the past few months.

In one case, it did not seek to give official Russia, not even through the Russian Ambassador or the official spokesman of the Russian Embassy in Pretoria, a right of reply to the sort of scurrilous Russophobe propaganda and distortions by Yarik Turianskyi and Tom Wheeler of SAIIA, who bruited that Russia is the party at fault on the crisis over Crimea. Yet on another similar debate, Power FM correctly gave the Rwandan Ambassador to South Africa and Rwanda’s South Africa-based opposition an equal hearing, if not equal footing.

What explains this shoddy treatment of Russia in the South African media in general on the Crimean crisis,  despite the fact that Russia remains a major global power to this day? And what explains such “deference” towards Rwanda, a tiny, troubled central African country, which recently suffered genocide, but which now allegedly flagrantly violates our territorial and diplomatic integrity, and whose leader, the spindly president Paul Kagame, is accused by his implacable Rwandan foes of being modern-day Africa’s assassin-in-chief?

I suspect the history of anti-Soviet communism in this country,  and thus the sub-consciously-embedded, knee-jerk, long-held Russophobe political instincts account for the bigger part of the answer to these questions. But this type of Cold War thinking carries enormous risks, not just for our post-1994 diplomacy, but for our deeper discernment and nuanced appreciation of the post-Cold War emerging and troubled world as well.

In short, crude Russophobia, like crude Afro-pessimism and Islamophobia, is very dangerous for our country’s standing internationally, and for its internal social cohesion as well.

It should definitely be beyond the pale in our public intellectual discourse.

Commenting on South Africa’s great achievement in gaining membership of the elite group of Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC), which, as a result of South Africa joining it, became BRICS, I wrote in my Mail and Guardian article of  06 January 2012, which was under the title “Rivalries that could rock SA’s diplomatic boat”, that:

“…belonging to groups such as Ibsa and Brics also represents a monumental challenge to South Africa’s post-1994 diplomacy…It is conceivable that in the future, severe challenges will confront South Africa’s diplomacy not from the usual expected quarters, but as a result of South Africa’s membership of Ibsa and Brics. There lies the real danger to our country’s diplomacy in the coming decades.” 

The Crimean crisis represents precisely such a massive test for our diplomacy and real danger to our international posture, because Russia, one of the leading members of BRICS, rightly expects South Africa to be on its side in its confrontation with the West over Crimea, just as China and India, two other Brics members, have correctly and unambiguously pledged their unwavering support to Russia over the Crimean crisis.

Yet South Africa’s diplomatic voice on the Crimean crisis has been so muted, and so muffled, that it can be said to be highly effeminate indeed. It is sotto voce that has taken former president Thabo Mbeki’s Zimbabwe-era “quiet diplomacy” to unprecedented lows. When the Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) recently issued a statement on the Crimean crisis, through its spokesman, Clayson Monyela, it was so muddled that it did not make sense at all. Monyela, speaking on one of the SABC3 prime-time evening news bulletins, “called on Russia to bring to a speedy end its ‘occupation of Crimea’, because South Africa opposes any ‘occupation'”.

Or words to that effect.

Say what?

Clayson Monyela further pledged that South Africa, as the rotating chair of BRICS, would convene a BRICS meeting to discuss the crisis. One assumes that the recent meeting of the BRICS Foreign Ministers in The Hague, Netherlands, held on the margins of the Nuclear Security Summit, was a follow-up to this pledge.

However, the government of president Jacob Zuma, and DIRCO in particular, should be complimented for belatedly coming around to rightly characterizing the unconstitutional, illegitimate, illegal and violent hooligan Fascist criminal putsch in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, in February 2014 as “a coup.” Indeed it is. And better late than never.

But it is interesting to contrast South Africa’s either muddled or muffled or effeminate reaction to the Crimean crisis with the clear and strong stance of support for Russia taken by India and China. No wonder that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, in his address to the Russian Duma on the Crimean crisis, specifically commended and mentioned this support of India and China for Russia, whilst he made no mention of South Africa and Brazil’s “support.”

Interestingly, the only South African daily that has mustered a very correct, if not courageous, perspective on the Crimean crisis is The New Age.

In its thunderous editorial of 07 March 2014, entitled “Hypocrisy stifles Ukraine,”  the paper provided the most correct and unambiguous analysis and assessment of the Crimean crisis yet. It started the editorial with the sentence that read:

“The double standards and duplicity of the West on Ukraine are breathtaking.”

Bravo.

And they indeed are breathtaking.

But the editorial ‘s most powerful paragraph read:

“So why is it acceptable in Ukraine where groupings, including extreme Nazi elements, occupied Maidan Square in Kiev and forced the duly- and democratically-elected Presiddent Victor Yanukovych to flee? Why was there no Western outrage over the toppling of the of Egypt’s democratically-elected President Mohammed Mursi last year and his replacement by a military junta”, The New Age editorial further asked.

Hear! Hear1 Hear!…Encore!

I now ask as to why Power FM’s Tim Modise and Thabiso Thema did not seek these answers from Yarik Turianskyi or Thom Wheeler of SAIIA, when they were interviewing them? Why not even try to get the answers from Anton van Niekerk?

Why not?

The New Age’s editorial further lambasted the West for vilifying Russia’s president Vladimir Putin as “‘a new Hitler’, for simply wanting to protect his country’s interests in the Crimea where its Black Sea naval fleet is based.” The editorial also correctly pointed out that “it is not in the interest of Russia, Europe and the rest of the world for Ukraine to split or become  a conflict zone”, but that “a good start, however, is for the West to cease its blatant lies about what’s really happening in Ukraine.”

The geostrategic interests of the West dictate to it to continue with, and not to stop, its lies about the Crimea and eastern Ukraine. No wonder the USA Secretary of State, John Kerry, who served the USA occupation army in Vietnam as a willing combatant (and must have mowed down innocent Vietnamese struggling for their national independence and their country’s unification), and who also voted for president George W Bush’s illegal and under “false pretext of weapons of mass destruction (WMD)” invasion of Iraq in the USA Congress in March 2003, has the nauseating temerity to now lecture the world that it is oh so 19th century for a country to occupy or annex another.

I could not agree more with the very substance and general sentiment of The New Age editorial of 07 March 2014 on the Crimean crisis. But this need to wean oneself from telling lies is not a challenge just for the West, as The New Age seems to argue.

There has been considerable and deliberate misinformation and falsification around the crisis in Crimea and Ukraine by influential public opinion formers and intellectual circles in South Africa as well, including by our media, which matter must be faced head on, without any equivication.

CHAPTER ONE.

Crimea has a way of imposing itself on the consciousness of South Africans, in ways that are as perplexing as they are inexplicable.

The first time I heard about Crimea was about thirty nine years ago, whilst I was doing what was then called Standard Four in my village under apartheid’s Bantu Education in 1975. My English teacher had fallen in love with Cecil Woodham-Smith’s 1951 classic, Florence Nightingale. She was greatly inspired by Nightingale’s legendary nursing work during the 1954-56 Crimean War involving Russia, Great Britain, Turkey and France. My teacher’s love for Woodham-Smith’s Florence Nightingale made her to side with the British during the Crimean War, and to turn herself, like our Yarik Turianskyi of today, into a Russophobe. From her I sucked the first lactose of Russophobe propaganda. And so she decreed that Woodham-Smith’s biography would be our set work. To my great surprise, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the classic then. It would be one of the school texts that would arouse my initial literary and civic duty interest. But unlike my primary school teacher, it would not be Florence Nightingale’s humanist exploits during the Crimean War that would captivate my mind. It was her pre-Crimean life in Europe and the UK, as well as her very painful path to what today we commonly refer to as “self-actualization”. In fact, some of Woodham-Smith’s earlier paragraphs would arouse my passion for public service as well. As it was our practice then, I literally memorized these two quotes of Nightingale from the Woodham-Smith biography:

“My mind is absorbed with the idea of the suffering of man, it besets me behind and before…all that poets sing of the glory of this world seems to me untrue. All the people I see are eaten up with care or pain or disease.”

And,

“What can an individual do towards uplifting the load of suffering from the hapless and miserable?”

After reading these two passages from Nightingale’s letters, I would not be able to see the poverty around my village in the same way. Nor would I be able to further convince myself that there  was nothing I could do to help challenge the systemic structures that caused such deep village poverty, and chiefly the racist white minority regime that ruled South Africa at the time.

There was to be another big surprise in my life related to Crimea.

As a student in Moscow, the capital of the then Soviet Union, I was given the opportunity to holiday during the summer vacation in Sochi, very close to Crimea, in 1985. Again in 1986, six months after the April 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Soviet Ukraine, the ANC HQ in Lusaka instructed me, then the head of the South African (basically ANC) Student Union in the Soviet Union, to visit Kiev and to check on the other ANC students studying there, as to whether they had not been adversely affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Chernobyl is about 150 kilometers from Kiev, so the concern was real. For the three days I spent in Kiev, I slept on the bed of Fana Hlongwane, who would later become the Legal Advisor to former Defense Minister Joe Modise in Nelson Mandela’s administration. Fana slept on the floor near me whilst we stayed together in his Kiev University dormitory room. During the winter of 1986, I visited Sevastopol in Crimea. In those days, communication was still slow, with no Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or SMS. Thus I got to know Kiev, Ukraine and the Crimean peninsula pretty well.

This, and the fact that I spent the total of eight years in Moscow, Soviet Russia as a student, makes me, I believe, acutely attuned to the tensions rocking the historic relationship between Russia and Ukraine, as well as the concerns of the people of Crimea at this time of their development.

I have been there; studied there; I observed whilst there; learned whilst there; and left part of me implanted there – a small part of my soul. Thus when the Russian, Ukrainian and Crimean peoples hurt, I too hurt deeply inside.

The current crisis is the third time Crimea muscles itself into my consciousness. Only that now clearly the risks, the fears and the dangers are infinitely more than those that followed the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine in April 1986 and my subsequent visit to Soviet Kiev that year.

The more pressing reasons for understanding the dynamics informing the Crimean crisis today, as well as the Russia/West confrontation over Ukraine, are less poetic and emotional, and more prosaic and rationalist.

In one of the footnotes to his Das Kapital, Karl Marx quotes an authority on how by 1647 Holland had risen to become the world’s pre-eminent and undisputed superpower, after dominating the East Indian trade, its colonies in east Asia like modern-day Indonesia, and by ruthlessly exploiting its possession scattered around the world. In all likelihood, our forebears at the southern tip of Africa had heard about none of the epoch-making Dutch world pre-eminence. Yet five years later, in 1652, the very same dominant and hegemonic Dutch were knocking on the doors of our shores, metaphorically speaking, seeking new colonial conquests in our lands. Napoleon Bonaparte soon rose to make France another dominant European and world power. At the peak of his war conquests across Europe and the world, he was able to conquer the Cape colony, briefly, as France’s. He was thwarted later by the British, whose Industrial Revolution and global naval supremacy made them the new global superpower. In turn the British super-imposed themselves as our colonial masters for centuries to come. And during its rise as a new global industrial power and global hegemon, the USA saw nothing wrong in stealing over 100 million, by highly conservative estimates, of our able-bodied black Africans as slaves to work on its cotton plantations. When the Russian Czars occasionally permitted open and unrestraint pogroms against their Jewish populations, many of the Baltic and Russian Jews ended up on our shores. The clearest and most tragic awareness our African forefathers gained that the first world war was afoot was the sinking of Mendi and the perishing of our gallant black soldiers onboard, who had been frog-marched in the service of the British empire’ war with imperial Germany. Again during the European slaughter and genocide of the second world war, our people were frog-marched to fight for the white European empires, even though they did not fight in the literal sense, as they were made to do manual work. Soon followed the Cold War, during which our African countries were made to fight proxy wars of the two super-powers, namely the USA and the Soviet Union.

The moral of all this is that even when Africans had absolutely nothing to do with the quarrels and fights amongst Europeans, or between the Europeans and Americans, they often were the ones who paid the highest price, whether as slaves uprooted to the Americas, or as colonials occupied by European powers, or as minions of super-powers’ proxy wars during the Cold War.

There is nothing to say that the current confrontation between the West and Russia over Crimea will not again harm Africa and the Africans the most. Our tragic and sad history does indeed prove that ignorance has never been bliss for Africans. Nor has it ever guaranteed our immunity from unprovoked aggression and interference in our affairs by Europeans and or Americans. Our neutrality and innocence as Africans have never moved their stony and cruel hearts, nor prevented them from unleashing their unspeakable savagery and outright barbarity upon our African people.

To pretend otherwise is to ignore the bitter but voluble lessons of Africa’s history in the last five centuries. It is a patent dereliction of duty before Africa’s future generations. History shall not absolve us of such calculated historical ignorance and intellectual-cum-diplomatic passivity.

So, we need to follow the Crimean and Ukraine crises with uncharacteristic keenness and sharpness of the mind, so that we can avoid the kind of catastrophes that befell our African forefathers during previous and past quarrels and wars between Europeans, or between Europeans and Americans, from which catastrophes Africa has barely recovered.

The other compelling reason for keenly following the developments around the Crimean crisis was provided by the biographer of Adolf Hitler, and the author of the book “Fateful Choices – Ten Decisions That Changed The World” (The Penguin Press), Ian Kershaw, who demonstrated that “fateful choices made by the leaders of the world’s major powers within a mere nineteen months, between May 1940 and December 1941” provided the contours for the course of the second world war, and the post-war world we live in today.

We Africans need to know what types of decisions are taken by the same “world’s major powers” – namely, Russia, USA, Germany, UK, France, and other European countries, in the next nineteen months since the start of the Crimean crisis, and how such decisions will affect Africa’s future for the next century or even the next five centuries.

There are two important starting points to this end.

The first one is to have a good appreciation that in Russia, the USA, and the West in general, still face quite a considerable and formidable foe.

Russia is by far the largest country in the world. Its conquest of pieces of territories from Georgia in 2008, following a brief war between the two countries, and now its conquest of Crimea, means that the world’s largest country by land mass, which occupies one sixth of the earth’s surface, has also been effectively the only country in the whole world since the second world war, which has been adding new territories through military conquests, to its land mass. Russia has the world’s seventh largest population at 150 million people (after China, India, USA, Indonesia, Brazil and Pakistan, in that order). Its population and economic growth rates are not quite on steroids, but they remain formidable. Russia has by far Europe’s largest population, which is almost two times bigger than the next biggest population in Europe, meaning Germany’s. Russian land mass is only about 20% European and 80% Asian, thus Russian president Putin’s pet project of Eurasian Custom Union (ECU), as a counterpoint to the EU, is very compelling for its weak neighbors. It is important though to also bear in mind that close to 80% of Russians live in the European 20% of the country. But the import of all this is that USA president Barack Obama’s “pivot to the East” will have to, at some point, contend with Russia as both a Pacific and Eurasian power. Russia has the world’s largest tactical and strategic (including intercontinental, which can easily destroy the USA many times over) nuclear arsenal, by far bigger than the combined nuclear arsenal of the USA and NATO. In the Manichean, Lockesian post-Cold War world we live in, you need to walk around with an impressive swagger, whilst carrying a massive nuclear stick behind your back. It came as no surprise then when Robert Gates, the former USA Secretary for Defense in the George W Bush and Barack Obama administrations, revealed in his newly-released memoirs, Duty, that former USA vice president Dick Cheney was pushing hard for the de-nuclearisation of Russia in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Imagine where Russia would be today under such a scenario. You in fact do not need to imagine such a scenario – just look at the self-same Ukraine, which, like South Africa and Kazakhstan, followed the USA’s questionable advice and denuclearized. It is this fact of massive Russian nuclear arsenal that has made the traditional USA military hawks, (others refer to them as the USA’s Neo-Nazis, given how Senator John McCain happily interacted and shook hands with leaders of western Ukraine’s Fascist Right Sector leaders in Kiev prior to the thuggish Nazi criminal putsch in Kiev), to readily concede that war with Russia over either Crimea or Ukraine “is off he table.” But it is also a fact which explains why the western countries of France, the UK, USA, and even NATO over Libya, are so happy to recolonize some African countries through the so-called R2P, because Africa lacks “the massive black nuclear bomb” to back up its unsteady and weak swagger on the global stage. The West cannot forget that “it’s Russia, not Africa, bloody stupid”, which they are dealing with over the Crimean crisis and the tensions over Ukraine. This lesson is not lost on black Africans, believe you me, despite bizarre protestations to the contrary by official African leaders, elected or otherwise. Russia is rich in a variety of minerals and natural resources like oil and gas, water, land, diamond, wood and forestry, gold, uranium, etc. Russia now has the world’s fourth biggest currency reserves after China, Japan and South Korea. Russia is a capitalist country, with a two-trillion dollar economy, although it will now more likely follow the more authoritarian model of tough internal political control of China, while freeing the capitalist potential of the Russian people across its vast land mass. Russia is a multinational state that include white Europeans (Russians proper), Moslems, Mongols, Chinese, Jews, Germans, Finns, Tartars, Cossacks, Ukrainians and other nationalities. The white European Russians however make up about 80% of the Russian population. Russia has a highly advanced space programme, which the USA uses to send its own cosmonauts to space. By its sheer continental size, massive European population, its permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council and its independent streak, Russia will always be very threatening to elements of the West’s elites. These qualities also make it impossible for Russia to be subservient and submerged under the USA-dominated system of unipolarity and Washington Consensus. Yet again, this quality differentiate Russia from Africa.

It is Russia, not Africa, bloody stupid.

CONCLUSION.

The real challenge before Russian president Putin is not whether the West will impose token or serious sanctions, but whether he can allow for the real and authentic development of unfettered Russian capitalism. If he unleashes the authentic and free development of Russian capitalism, something which Russia has never experienced since its founding in Kiev-Rus in the tenth century, then Russia will emerge even a greater global superpower at the end of the putative western sanctions than it emerged at the end of the second world war. And it is also this, if permitted, which will ensure that Russia does not lose Cold War 2, as it did the first Cold War.

But it is also absolutely vital that as president Putin and the Russians stare down the dark, menacing and ominous revenge-ist Fascist and neo-Nazi scumbags gathering apace in Kiev under the tutelage of the USA, EU, NATO and Germany, it should confront its own vile demons of despicable racism and Fascist thinking of Russia’s far-right in its dealing with both Russians of a darker hue from the south of Russia, as well as with Africans and the black folk from around the Diaspora, who are living, studying or visiting Russia.

Otherwise Russia’s understandable abhorrence and opposition to western Ukraine’s Tsotsi-style Fascist and Banderian criminal scumbags of Svaboda and Right Sector will just be a proxy for Russia’s greater nationalist project of dominating both eastern and western Europe.

The second matter to bear in mind is how much the leaders and elites of the USA and EU have miscalculated in their dealings with Russia over both crises in Crimea and Ukraine. I am not just referring to the West’s bizarre support to the Fascist-dominated post-coup government in Kiev. In light of the West’s previous support for legislated racism and apartheid in South Africa, and the West’s calling of the ANC, PAC, BC and Nelson Mandela “terrorists” for fighting for the freedom we enjoy today, this line of thinking in the West has a rather disreputable pedigree. This is better revealed, as The New Age editorial of 07 March 2014 asserted, by the West’s ongoing and deeply shameful support for the vile and brutal military junta in Cairo, which, like the western Ukrainian hooligan Fascist criminal enterprise passing itself off for some semblance of a functioning government in Kiev, came to power through a mass-manipulated, unconstitutional , illegitimate and illegal coup d’Etait, which overthrew a legitimate and democratically-elected government. Yet this does not trouble the West’s conscience as much as the Crimean crisis seems to.

Following the illegal NATO aerial bombardment of Libya and the ouster and extra-judicial execution of Colonel Muamar Gaddafi by the USA/NATO/EU and UN secretary general-supported Libyan and Al Qaeda-aligned Islamic extremists, thousands of black Libyans and black Africans in Libya were either summarily executed or illegally interned in inhumane prisons by these vile Libyan militias. At no stage did the USA, EU, NATO and the UN secretary general call for these lawless Libyan militias to be referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

Yet a few years later, less than 100 Euro Maidan protestors in Kiev were shot dead by snipers from rooftops of buildings around the major Kiev square. According to the leaked telephone conversation between the EU’s Foreign Policy chief, Catherine Ashton and the Estonian Foreign Minister, the Estonian Foreign Minister was informing Ashton that his information from Kiev was that the Euro Maidan ultra-radicals of Svaboda and Right Sector Fascist outfits did some of the killings of the Euro Maidan protestors from the rooftops of Kiev buildings. But this has not deterred the USA, EU, NATO, and Germany-supported hooligan Fascist putsch rump government in Kiev to call for unconstitutionally ousted former president of Ukraine, Yanukovych, to be referred to the ICC.

Are you able to pick out the difference in the way these western powers dealt with post-Gaddafi Libya and post-Yanukovych Ukraine? The death of less than 100 East Europeans against the deaths and or illegal internment of thousands of innocent black Libyans and black Africans in Libya following the ouster of Muamar Gaddafi? Where is the scale of justice?

It is all such downright hypocrisy, which stinks to high heavens, if you ask me.

The ineptness of the USA, EU, NATO and German diplomacy over Crimea and Ukraine is most disturbing. The 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine should have been for the West a dress-rehearsal for the current tensions over Crimea and Ukraine.

The Economist cover story for its 27 November-03 December 2004 edition read “Ukraine on the brink.” On 06 December 2004 Newsweek magazine led with the cover story “Can Europe Help This Man? – Ukraine’s Yushchenko brings His Country To A Historic Crossroads.” On July 2006 Time magazine led with a G-8 Report under the cover story “The Power of Russia’s oil.” On 17 July 2006 Newsweek magazine led with the cover story that read “How Putin Runs Russia – And Why Europe Should Fear The Results. Plus: Who Needs The G8?”

But arguably the best analysis of post-Soviet Ukraine, and the post-Orange Revolution dynamics in that sad country, which, to all intents and purposes, would be correctly called “a failed state” if it were located in Africa, was provided by Arkady Moshes in June 2007, in a brilliant article under the title “Ukraine: Domestic Changes and Foreign Policy Reconfiguration.’ (See http://www.StrategicStudiesInsttute.army.mil/). Moshes’ piece remains indispensable read in trying to understand how the West has so horribly blundered and mishandled its strategic, vital and transformational relationship with Putin’s Russia since 2000 to date, especially over Ukraine.

All these western media platforms provided amazing, and even predictive, analyses of post-Soviet Ukraine, which, seemingly, the West’s policy wonks and political leaders decided to ignore. As a result, the crisis, and Russia’s annexation, of Crimea has literally hit the West’s political elites between their eyes, like an Icelandic volcanic eruption, completely clouding their view and immobilizing their sense of what is right and wrong in their important dealings with an assertive, swashbuckling, rising and resurgent Russia under president Putin.

The stark, precipitous decline in the EU’s overall strategic brilliance and mastery of its geostrategic environment was best captured by the former French president Valery Giscard d’Estaing in a 26 March 2007 interview with Newsweek magazine. In that prophetic interview, D’Estaing declared, in answering one of the questions posed to him by Newsweek as to whether he “hadn’t imagined a bunch of new countries coming in” into the EU :

“Nobody had. [In 1978], when I asked the German chancellor, a remarkable man, Helmut Schmidt, about German reunification, he said, ‘it will happen one day, but not in my lifetime.’ We didn’t see it coming. Yet after it happened, Europe said, ‘Come in, right away’, without reflection, without organization.” (Article, “The Lack of Vision Thing”, Newsweek, 26 March 2007, page 37).

The race for NATO and EU’s eastward expansion towards Russia’s western borders, primarily driven and stoked by the USA’s imperial agenda to attain what Condoleezza Rice, the former USA National Security Advisor and Secretary of State under president George W. Bush, referred to as the USA’s post-Cold War imperative for a “full-spectrum global dominance”, which really boiled down to the USA’s single-minded determination to do everything possible to prevent the emergence of another competitive global superpower rival, like the Soviet Union was during the Cold War, is really at the root of the Crimean crisis and the Russian/West ongoing confrontation over Ukraine.

Western Europe and the EU may still pay a very heavy price for their blind and uncritical faith in unbridled and ‘hyper-frenetic’ USA’s imperial global unipolarity and its ahistoric, as well as unreasonable, agenda to prevent both Russia and China, or any emerging power for that matter, breaking out to become the world’s second and third or fourth global superpower(s), alongside the USA itself.

The EU should rather listen to the recent advice of the self-same former German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, who has recently been quoted by the German press as bitterly decrying the West’s confrontational posture and policy towards Putin’s Russia over both Crimea and Ukraine.

Can western Europe and the EU leaders regain their mojo for the “Vision Thing”, to paraphrase Newsweek of March 2007?

11th Cedia blog.
28 March 2014
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Written by:

Mr. Isaac Mpho Mogotsi
Founder and Executive Chairman
Centre for Economic Diplomacy In Africa (CEDIA).
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