Week 34 2014

Tendring Topics……on line

Sleep Walking…….into war!

           Just before 5 p.m on every day from 28^th June 1914, the centenary of the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo, until  4^th August,  the centenary of the date on which the UK declared war on Germany,  BBC’s Radio 4 gave listeners a brief account of that day’s events one hundred years earlier, as recorded in contemporary newspapers and official documents.

            I found the account fascinating. It seems clear that it was several weeks before it occurred to anyone in Britain that that assassination could possibly have anything to do with us.  ‘An assassination in Sarajevo, where’s that? In the Balkans? That’s the sort of thing that they do there isn’t it? An Archduke?  I thought they were to be found only in comic operas. These foreigners!  There’s really no accounting for their ways.

            Besides, there were lots of much more worrying things happening nearer home; in Ireland for instance.  Ireland was an important part of the British Empire. There was a serious and imminent risk of civil war there over the question of Home Rule.  Most Irish people were Roman Catholics and wanted Home Rule but in the north there was a Protestant majority who would resist any move in that direction. Ulster will fight – and Ulster will be right! was a slogan of the day.

            Then there were the militant suffragettes; women demanding the right to vote in elections and breaking windows, chaining themselves to railings and throwing themselves in front of race horses to draw attention to their cause.  Arrested, they refused to eat and were cruelly force-fed. 

            There was also labour unrest and the threat of a general strike.  There were plenty of things to worry about at home without having to give thought to foreigners murdering each other in, to quote a more recent Prime Minister, ‘a faraway country of which we know very little’.

            Meanwhile, the ripples from that murder began to spread.  It had occurred in Bosnia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  The perpetrator was a Serb who wanted Bosnia, many of whose population were ethnic Serbs, to be free of Austrian rule.  The Austrian government, which would have liked to add Serbia to its empire, was quite convinced (or convinced itself) that the Serbian government had orchestrated the assassination.  They presented Serbia with a very strongly worded ultimatum that would, in effect, have robbed the Serbs of their national sovereignty.

            Serbia however, had a very powerful ally in Imperial Russia. Austria-Hungary also had a very powerful ally in Germany, and Russia had another powerful ally in France.  Just outside this system of alliances was the United Kingdom and its great Empire.  Close friends though we were with France and Russia, we had no treaty obligations to join with them in case of conflict.

            The Serbs agreed to all but one clause of the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum.  That wasn’t enough for the Austro-Hungarians.  They declared war on Serbia and ordered their army to invade and attack Belgrade.  Like falling dominoes, the alliances came into effect.   Serbia asked for Russian support.  Austria then asked Germany and Russia asked France to honour their treaty obligations.   We don’t generally think of the German Kaiser as a peace-maker but, perhaps sensing what was to come, he asked his cousin, the Tsar of Russia, to cease mobilisation of his army.  It was too late.  The major powers of Europe were at war with each other.

            Only the UK remained at peace – and there was a strong peace movement in Britain.  We might well have remained neutral had the German High Command not decided that they must avoid a war on two fronts. They could best achieve this by quickly defeating France and then turning, with all their strength, on Russia.  This, they thought, could be done by attacking France through Belgium.   And that brought Britain into the war.  We were bound, by a treaty dating back almost to the Battle of Waterloo, to defend the neutrality of Belgium.   Thus began World War I. In the 1920s and ‘30s we called it ‘The Great War’.  Millions were killed, millions more were maimed.  It was supposed to be ‘the war to end wars’ but, in fact, the peace treaty imposed by the victors made World War II, just 21 years later, inevitable.

 All of this would have been solely of historical interest were it not for the fact that some events today are uncomfortably similar to those in 1914.  We have a rebellious faction in Eastern Ukraine who have taken up arms against a new government in Kiev.  The ‘west’ is quite sure that the rebels are supported and provided with arms by Russia – just as the Austro-Hungarians were quite sure that the rebels in Bosnia who were responsible for the assassination of their Arch-Duke were puppets of the Serbian Government.

            Ukrainian Government Forces are mercilessly shelling and bombing towns and villages in the rebel held areas, killing civilians on a similar scale to the much-more-publicised shelling and bombing of the Palestinians in Gaza, and preventing the proper inspection of the wreck of the air-liner that the rebels are accused of shooting down.   To help the victims of this bombing and shelling the Russian Government is, with the knowledge of the International Red Cross, sending a convoy of lorries bringing humanitarian aid. The President of the Kiev Ukrainian Government says that this convoy will be refused admission to Ukraine.  What will happen then?  If his troops attempt to stop the convoy by force does he really think that NATO will support him – and risk a third world war?  If so, I sincerely hope he is wrong.

            This possibility though, does illustrate the dangers of ringing Russia with small potentially hostile, NATO states – and declaring that an attack on any one of them is an attack on NATO, which will respond appropriately.  It was a system of military alliances that led to World War I.  I hope (though I’m far from confident!) that the world’s governments are not so stupid as to allow a similar system to lead them into World War III.

Recent and still breaking news

            The news about that Russian convoy of lorries bearing humanitarian aid to the homeless and shell-shocked folk of Eastern Ukraine is mixed.  A solution to the problem of the delivery of that aid appears to have been solved in an extremely sensible manner, and one that is a credit to both the Russian and the Ukrainian negotiators.  The contents of each vehicle are to be inspected by  Ukrainian Government officials and then driven, by their Russian drivers to a destination in eastern Ukraine. There the humanitarian aid will be distributed by representatives of the International Red Cross.  That should quell Ukrainian fears that the lorries might prove to be ‘Trojan horses’ loaded with weaponry for rebel fighters. TV cameras have brought to viewers images of the contents of two lorries, selected at random. They were filled with food for  the hungry and tents for the homeless.

            Rather more worrying is the fact that reliable witnesses have seen one or more Russian armoured vehicles crossing the border from Russia to Ukraine.  This, needless to say, is causing David Cameron ‘serious concern’ and making him talk threateningly about ‘further consequences’.   It should, I think, be remembered that the areas each side of that particular part of the frontier are populated by the same ethnically Russian people, many of them probably related, and all on the Russian side shocked by the way rebel cities and towns are being ruthlessly shelled by the Ukrainian army.  The rebels, for all their small-arms and captured tanks and armoured vehicles, have no artillery with which to respond to that relentless bombardment and no air force with which to attack their enemies. I don’t think it would need the prompting of Vladimir Putin, hundreds of miles away in Moscow, to make some of those on the Russian side of the border decide to go to the assistance of their embattled brethren. 

              More encouraging is the news that Russians, Ukrainians and representatives of the Ukrainian rebels are meeting in Berlin in a day or two's time to try to find a peaceful solution to this terrible civil war.  I hope they succeed.

The latest news - this morning 18th August.

I do not believe that a single aid vehicle has yet been allowed to enter east Ukraine.  The Kiev Government insists that they are carrying arms, despite the fact that their officials have been invited to inspect them.  I really believe that the Kiev government is deliberately provoking Russia in the hope that their reaction will bring NATO to the rescue! 

 ‘This is today’s news…….

          One day last week IS (Islamic State) terrorists had driven thousands of Christian and other non-Muslims from their homes in northern Iraq and compelled them to seek temporary shelter in barren mountains – devoid of water, food or shelter.  The USA had carried out air strikes on IS forces that were claimed to have slowed down (but not halted) their advance.  There was an uneasy truce in the Holy Land between Israel and the people of the Yemen.  The World Health Organisation had authorised the use of drugs that have not yet been rigorously tested, in a last-ditch attempt to stem the pandemic of Ebola that was currently rampant in parts of West Africa.  Ebola in a potentially fatal infectious disease for which there is, so far, no vaccination and no effective treatment.  Which of these, I wondered, would be the lead story on BBC tv’s news bulletin at 6.00 pm?

No, it was nothing to do with any of the above.  The lead story, that took up at least one third of the half-hour news bulletin, was about an American entertainer, an alcoholic and a drug addict, who had taken his own life during a period of depression.  We had a résumé of his life, his film and other successes, comments on his struggle with drink, drugs and depression and a few words of adulation from Barak Obama President of the USA.

There's no doubt that Robbie Williams was a very gifted entertainer with fans world-wide  – but I would have expected his decease to have deserved a mention only towards the end of a British news bulletin on a day in which nothing much else was happening either in the UK or the world!