Carpeted With Unquiet Graves

Peter Hitchens writes:

A month ago I warned that simple-minded Western intervention in Ukraine risked provoking civil war in that dangerous, unstable region.

Now I repeat the warning. Our encouragement of this post-modern putsch now threatens the worst civil violence  in Europe since similar lobbies sponsored the break-up of Yugoslavia.

Worse may be on the way. Ukraine is steeped in blood and carpeted with unquiet graves.

Twice in the past century it has been the scene  of terrible wars, and also the site of a hideous man-made famine and of genocidal slaughter.

It is also a great strategic prize – fertile wheat  fields, coal mines, the crucial warm-water naval port of Sevastopol.

Now it is the gateway for the colossal new gas and oil fields around the Caspian Sea.

Most Western politicians and commentators seem to assume that the Kiev mob are democrats. Are they? In what way?

They demanded the resignation of the Ukrainian government, because they said so. They wouldn’t go home until they got their way.

How is that democratic? President Yanukovych is certainly no saint. But he came to power legitimately.

In 2010, Yanukovych won office for five years with 12.5 million votes (48.9 per  cent) against 11.6 million votes  (45.5 per cent) for Yulia Tymoshenko.

That’s rather better than David Cameron (10.7 million, 36.1 per cent) did against Gordon Brown (8.6 million,  29.0 per cent) in our 2010 poll.

So what precisely is ‘democratic’ about demanding the immediate removal of a lawfully elected head of state, who has a year of his mandate still to run? It sounds more like mob rule to me.

And yet, on the BBC’s supposedly enlightened and thoughtful World Tonight radio programme, an academic was allowed to describe this government as a ‘regime’ without challenge, and a series of politicians from Eastern Europe were brought on to demand sanctions against Ukraine, while no voice was heard from the other side.

Anyway, who are these demonstrators?

There is no doubt that police have been injured by petrol bombs thrown from the crowd, and shot at with guns. Yet the reports seldom seem  to ask who is doing the throwing and the shooting.

Nor do they often mention the Pravy Sektor (Right Sector),  a nasty formation of violent football fans, prominent in the riots. These ‘democrats’ consider the larger Svoboda party as too namby-pamby. But you wouldn’t.

Svoboda (Freedom)  is led by Oleh Tyahnybok. He was once expelled from the Kiev parliament for claiming that a ‘Muscovite-Jewish Mafia’ controlled the country. Charming, eh? Kiev was the scene,  in 1941, of the Babi Yar massacre of 30,000 Jews by German troops.

Many of the more fervent Ukrainian nationalists, especially those from the Western city of Lviv, are keen worshippers of the memory of a character called Stepan Bandera, who collaborated with the Nazis on and off between 1941 and 1945.

It is these people who  have been receiving the support of the United States.

Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland  is famous for her ‘****  the EU!’ statement in a bugged phone conversation in which she discusses naked intervention by the USA in Ukraine’s affairs.

But last December she trotted round the main square of Kiev with a little plastic bag, handing out biscuits and buns to demonstrators.

Other outsiders  who have sided with the anti-democratic mob have included German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle, and the EU’s foreign policy chief, Baroness Ashton.

Didn’t these people realise what effect their endorsement might have? Do they know what ghosts they may raise?

If they don’t, they are ignorant and rash.

If they do, they should remember what happens to children who play with fire.