21st May 2015

Tendring Topics……….on line

……and in the rest of the World

            I have been preoccupied with the British General Election in recent weeks and have barely mentioned the two devastating earthquakes that have taken place in Nepal, and the appalling loss of life there.  They certainly demonstrated humankind’s helplessness in the face of the forces of nature, and our inability either to forecast the occurrence of natural disasters or to counter or modify their power. It may be that events in Nepal will teach us all a little much needed humility, but terribly sad that this should have been at the cost of so much destruction, so many innocent lives lost, and so much human sorrow.

            Then there have been the thousands who have seen Europe as a promised land of wealth and prosperity and have tried to reach it from African and Middle Eastern poverty and strife – and the hundreds who have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea in the attempt. Our efforts have all been towards saving their lives and preventing their attempting that hazardous journey.  We may slow them down but they’ll still keep coming.    Ought we not to give some thought to the reasons for their flight and help them to make their homelands better places in which to live?

            There has been one unequivocally good thing that has developed on the world scene in recent weeks, and that is the restoration of normal relations between the USA and Cuba.  Ever since Cuban rebels overthrew the corrupt Batista regime in Cuba and, under their leader Fidel Castro, established their own Communist government, the USA has tried by one means or another to secure a regime change.  The failed Bay of Pigs invasion from the USA (which could certainly not have happened without United States help and encouragement) resulted in Castro asking for help from the Soviet Union.  They sent some missiles and we had the Cuban missile crisis that could have developed into a nuclear World War III.  Fortunately the Soviet Union withdrew its missiles and the US government made sure there were no further attempts at armed invasion from the USA.

Instead the USA cut off all diplomatic relations with Cuba, tried to isolate it from South and Central America and from the rest of the  world, and its CIA made several comic opera attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro Cuba’s President. These included, would you believe it, a gift of exploding cigars!   A new U.S. President stopped these assassination attempts.

With external threats reduced, the regime mellowed (it had long been a paradise of freedom and human rights compared with – for instance – Britain and the USA’s ally, Saudi Arabia.  President Obama, to his credit, is resuming normal diplomatic relations.

I had hoped that the commemoration of the anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe might have brought about a similar effort on Britain’s part to bring an end to current hostility towards Russia.   Have we forgotten that from 1941 to 1945  Russia, or the USSR as it then was, was our ally – and had been our ally against Nazi Germany for rather longer than the USA?   What’s more, not only had the people of the USSR suffered far more than those of any other country at the hands of the invading Nazis, but they had contributed more than any other country towards Victory in Europe and the destruction of Nazism.  Winston Churchill acknowledged this when he declared that The Red Army tore the guts out of the Wehrmacht’

 I spent the final eighteen months of World War II as a POW at a ‘working camp’ (Arbeitskommando) in a small town in eastern Germany.  I well remember how our spirits rose when we heard artillery fire in the east during the bitter winter of 1944/1945, as the Red Army advanced through Poland into Germany itself.  At first a faint murmur, the sound increased almost daily to a roar.  We knew that the day of our liberation was close at hand.  And so it was.  On 7^th May 1945 we could hear the chatter of machine gun fire as well as the thunder of the guns as we were marched, with armed guards, southwest into the Zittau mountains and away from the battle-zone.  The following day our guards, having heard that the war was over, deserted us – and we made our own way home.  With a mate, I hitch-hiked through Soviet occupied Czechoslovakia at first to Prague, then on to Pilsen, where we encountered the American army. They transported us by air to Rheims and the British Army.  I walked through the door of my home in Ipswich at about 10.00 pm on the 18^th May – just ten days after VE Day.  By a fortunate coincidence it was my twenty-fourth birthday!

Had it not been for Hitler’s mistake in invading the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 I have little doubt that Britain would have been invaded and occupied.  Even if the USA had eventually won, the war would have dragged on for at least another two or three years.  Very likely I would never have returned home.  Many POWs didn’t.

I have never forgotten the debt that I owe to the Russian army and to the Russian people.  I am sorry that Angela Merkel, an East German who has probably learned from her parents and grandparents something of the horrors of modern warfare, was the sole ‘western leader’ who joined with President Putin and hundreds of others in the commemoration of Russia’s loss of tens of thousands of men, women and children, who had died in what the Russians call their Great Patriotic War.  I am not, of course, referring to the depressing display of military hardware on the anniversary of VE Day but the much quieter and more peaceful commemoration on the following day.

David Cameron quite thought, until he was corrected, that the United Kingdom was ‘junior partner’ to the USA in the struggle against Hitler in 1940.  I hope that all blog readers are aware that Britain ‘stood alone’ in that fateful year, that the USA was neutral and that many Americans (including the US ambassador to the UK – the patriarch of the Kennedy clan!) were determined that their country would remain neutral.  It follows that David Cameron may not be aware of the USSR’s leading role in Hitler’s defeat – or even perhaps, that they were our allies in World War II.  He certainly gives that impression.

‘The west’ is cold-shouldering Russia and applying economic sanctions because of Russian activities in the Ukraine. What on earth are they expecting to achieve?   Do they seriously hope to return the Crimea to the rule of the Kiev Government in the Ukraine against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the peninsula’s population?    The Crimea had been part of Russia since the rule of the Tsars.    It was ‘gifted’ to Ukraine by Nikita Khruschev during the period of his presidency of the USSR, without any thought of consulting the residents.  It made little difference at the time because both Crimea and Ukraine were part of the Soviet Union as they had both previously been part of the Tsars’ Empire. Crimea was recovered by Russia after a referendum established that that was the wish of the Crimean people.  David Cameron claimed that the referendum took place ‘under the shadow of the Kalashnikov’ but a recent opinion poll commissioned by the Ukrainian Government in Kiev emphatically confirmed that wish.

The people of the eastern provinces of Ukraine wished to retain their Russian ethnicity and the Russian language and traditions.  We saw on tv news bulletins the non-violent resistance of men, women and children to the incursion of Kiev government tanks and armoured cars.  The Kiev government used its military superiority to enforce its rule – and the eastern Ukrainians responded in kind.  Thus civil war broke out, costing thousands of lives.  Remorseless shelling of residential areas in rebel-held areas by government forces has resulted in over a million civilians crossing the border and seeking political asylum in Russia.

Peace overtures, supported by Germany and France but not by the UK, resulted in an uneasy ceasefire and the resumption of peace talks.  The Kiev Government insists that what is taking place is an invasion of eastern Ukraine by the Russian army – they criticised the Pope for referring to ‘the civil war’ in eastern Ukraine!  Since the cease-fire, UN observers and British journalists have been present in the rebel-held areas.  They would surely have noticed – and reported – the presence of Russian army units.  I think it quite likely that the Russians have supplied the rebels with arms and that Russian volunteers have strengthened the rebel forces.  We do know that the UK has supplied the Kiev Government with armoured cars and is sending British army units to train government forces in ‘defence’, although the rebels have neither the ability or intention of invading western Ukraine.  The Kiev government tries continually to involve NATO in the civil war that has resulted from its obstinacy.  I notice that the BBC’s news bulletin always refers to the Ukrainian rebels as the ‘Russian backed rebels’. Perhaps they should also refer to the Kiev government as the ‘British backed Kiev Government’.  The UK is, I think, the only NATO or EU country that is so blatantly backing one side in this civil war.

For goodness sake – it’s time that we reviewed the sanctions that are harming British interests as well as Russian, and made real efforts to bring about a permanent peace in the area.  We should be talking to the Russians.  It was Winston Churchill again who remarked that jaw, jaw is always better than war, war – and Churchill had had more experience both of patient negotiation and of the realities of warfare than most of us.   Both sides must make concessions.  The Kiev government must be made to realize that they can’t ethnically cleanse eastern Ukraine of Russian culture and influence and the rebels must, in the cause of peace, be prepared to accept something short of full independence.  With a permanent peace established, both the ‘west’ and Russia must come together to rebuild Ukraine and undo the damage done by this disastrous civil war …….or would we really prefer to walk blindly into World War III?