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 7th 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 18th 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 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?
