Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the
international condemnation it generated contains key lessons for policymakers.
They are lessons that should have been learned in past global crises but were
not. However, the Ukraine crisis offers an opportunity to correct that mistake.
اضافة اعلان
A first lesson is that failure to firmly stand up to
violations of international law as they occur convinces trespassers that they
can get away with them. It emboldens violators to commit ever more flagrant
infringements.
Kicking the can down the road by failing to
immediately and firmly respond to violations amounts to allowing an open wound
to fester. The longer the wound festers, the more difficult, costly, and risky
it is to cure it.
The last 14 years of Vladimir Putin’s rule are a
case in point. He began the recreation of his Russian world in 2008 when he
recognized the two Georgian breakaway republics of Abkhazia and North Ossetia.
The recognition constituted the first step in Putin’s defining of Russia’s
borders in civilizational rather than international legal terms. Putin has made
no bones about the fact that he sees territories populated by Russian speakers
and adherents of Russian culture as the determinants of Russia’s borders, not
international law.
The Russian leader demonstrated in 2008, and since,
his willingness to enforce his definition of Russia’s border with military
might. In 2008, the international community effectively looked the other way.
The failure then to stand up to Putin emboldened him six years later to annex
Crimea, which legally is part of Ukraine, and foster insurgencies in the
Ukrainian republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. The US and Europe responded by
slapping Putin’s wrists. The sanctions imposed at the time did little to stop
Putin from increasing his war chest or making the cost of continued pursuit of
his strongman tactics too costly and risky.
This month’s Russian invasion of Ukraine resulted
from the international community’s failure to draw a line in the sand back in
2008 or at the latest in 2014.
“The Russian aggression is the result of years of
appeasement of Russia by many countries,” said Ukrainian Foreign Minister
Dmytro Kuleba.
Russia is the most dramatic, most recent example of
the cost of not responding firmly and unequivocally to infringements of
international law as they occur.
Other examples are numerous. They include the ethnic
cleansing of Rohingya and the subsequent military coup in Myanmar, the 2013
toppling of Egypt’s first and only democratically elected president in a
takeover by the armed forces, the meek response to the brutal repression of
Turkic Muslims in China, the increasingly blatant discrimination and
disenfranchisement of Muslims in India, and missed opportunities to resolve the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to name a few.
All these examples, like Ukraine, contain lessons
the international community asserted that it had learned from World War II.
They all contain a lesson that should have been learned long before Ukraine but
is undeniably evident in the East European crisis: abetting violations of human
rights encourages and emboldens violations of sovereign, national, ethnic,
religious, cultural, and gender rights.
Back in 1989, Genocide Watch director Greg Stanton
warned then Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana that “if you don’t do
something to prevent genocide in your country, there is going to be a genocide
within five years”. Five years later, there was a genocide in Rwanda.
It is a word of warning that echoes in predictions
by Indian journalist Rana Ayyub that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu
nationalist policies could lead to large-scale violence against the country’s
200 million Muslims, the world’s largest Muslim minority.
It is a warning that reverberates in the contrast
between the reception, and welcome that European states are justifiably
according to refugees from Ukraine compared to the rejection of earlier waves
of refugees from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.
A Moroccan journalist posted a video on Twitter of
students from the Arab world and Africa watching buses on the Ukrainian-Polish
border pickup Ukrainians every 15 minutes but transporting people from
countries beyond Europe only every four hours. The journalist, Anas Daif, reported
that some students have been stranded for four days on the border trying to
escape the war.
In a similar vein, prominent BBC journalist Lyse
Doucet, reporting from Kyiv, highlighted the fact that humans in distress are
humans in distress, irrespective of their ethnicity or religion.
Europeans would be better served to recognize that their continent is as prone to conflict as are other parts of the world.
In a video message, Doucet explained that her
reporting on the current crisis in Ukraine prevented her from personally
accepting in the Iraqi Kurdish capital of Irbil the 2022 Shifa Gardi Award
named after a journalist killed in 2017 in Iraq by a roadside bomb.
“If anyone knows about the pain and hardship of
living with war, it’s the people of Iraq, of Kurdistan. And if anyone knows
what it’s like to live in a war that never seems to end, of living with
powerful neighbors, and the importance of independent journalism, it is the
Kurdish people,” Doucet said.
Her message brought it all together: the linkages
between failing to stand up early and firmly to flagrant violations of
international law, abuse of human rights, and suppression of freedom of
expression.
Kurds formed the bulk of thousands of desperate
refugees in Belarus who were trying to cross the border into Poland just four
months ago. In contrast to Ukrainians being welcomed with blankets, cots,
clothing, and hot meals, the Kurds were brutally beaten back as they sought to
storm the borders.
Iraq, Syria, and Turkey may have been different
places if Kurdish national and/or cultural rights, which Kurds have asserted
for more than a century, had been honored. Instead, the international community
abetted repressive policies of both autocratic and democratic governments.
Similarly, Ukraine would have been a different place if the international
community had stood up to Putin from day one.
It would also be a different place if Europeans had
less of a sense of superiority. Many have expressed shock that “this could
happen in 21st century Europe”.
Europeans would be better served to recognize that
their continent is as prone to conflict as are other parts of the world.
Ukraine is not the first such incident in Europe. It was preceded by the brutal
wars in Chechnya, Georgia, and the wars of former Yugoslavia in the 1990s that
three decades later could erupt again.
That realization may be seeping in.
“War is no longer something visited upon
impoverished and remote populations. It can happen to anyone,” wrote Telegraph
journalist Peter Hannan.
It is never too late to learn lessons. The world is
finally standing up to Putin. Yet, there is little indication that the broader
lessons Ukraine offers are finally being learned.
The writer is an award-winning
journalist and scholar, a senior fellow at the National University of
Singapore’s Middle East Institute and adjunct senior fellow at Nanyang
Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and
the author of the syndicated column and blog, The Turbulent World of Middle
East Soccer.
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