Thoughts on the war on August 15, 2023
An American friend, professor of history at the University of Arizona, once said: The peace movement died on both sides of the Atlantic with the Bosnian war. The logic of identity politics applies - it is important to have your positions on the »right« side and there is only one »right« side, therefore no diplomacy is needed. Every discussion about peace gets stuck in variants on the following figure of speech: If you are for peace, then you are a friend of Vladimir Putin (the name is interchangeable with Slobodan Milosevic; Saddam Hussein; Muammar al-Gaddafi; Bashar al-Assad).
It is possible to compare the situation in Bosnia with that in Ukraine, not least in view of obstructed peace processes in both cases. How the Washington government sabotaged the peace treaty that would have prevented war from breaking out in Bosnia. In Lisbon, in February 1992, a treaty had been approved by all parties (Muslims, Serbs, Croats), mediated by EU diplomats. Somewhere a snowball was set in motion. International law ceases to apply because we consider ourselves to have a superior right (on unclear grounds).
Before the Lisbon talks, the conflict in Yugoslavia had been fueled – even partly caused – by the EU. Remember that Yugoslavia was one of the countries behind the Helsinki Agreement: the EU's recognition of Croatia and Slovenia as independent states was a violation of the Helsinki Agreement, regardless of what we otherwise think about the matter. Historical facts, even aside from paper bureaucracy, should be sobering: If a region breaks away from a sovereign state, war usually breaks out. If it can be argued with good reason that regions within a country should have increased independence (in this case the sub-republics of Croatia and Slovenia in the former Yugoslavia, which incidentally had never been independent countries before; before the formation of Yugoslavia they formed parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire ) there must be more responsible methods. Why were there no measures at the time that prevented the wars and instead only measures that exacerbated the conflict?
The motives on the part of the EU were not as noble as it might sound in some tone-setting media. It wasn't about democracy vs. autocracy – then either. Former EU parliamentarian has been able to tell about how Otto von Habsburg ran a campaign in and around the parliament which stated that Croatia and Slovenia should be separated from the Federation of Yugoslavia because they "belong to us". Similar propaganda was printed in German newspapers, like Josep Borell's now infamous confession about how he sees Europe vis-à-vis the rest of the world: the Croats and Slovenes belonged to the European Garden, while the Serbs were barbarians and belonged to the Jungle. Germany, under the leadership of Foreign Minister Genscher, played a decisive role in the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Blackmail was required to get the thing through (a vote is said to have taken place where the majority of EU foreign ministers took a stand against the recognition of Croatia and Slovenia, but Genscher forced the process through). The Germans wanted to make the most of the winds of new political opportunity associated with the country's reunification and return Croatia and Slovenia to a German economic sphere of influence.
At the same time, NATO was spoken of as obsolete, Germany and France had begun to discuss a European alternative without the United States. George Bush d.ä did not like the sudden political offensive of the Germans, which was considered to be at the expense of the United States. Bush argued publicly that Yugoslavia should not be broken up. The transition from Bush's regime to Clinton's was imminent and the US initially had no clear foreign policy on the Yugoslavia issue. But when the peace negotiations on Bosnia, before the war broke out there, were well advanced in Lisbon in 1992, the government in Washington stepped in, through its ambassador in Belgrade Walter Zimmerman, and told the Bosnian Muslim leader Izetbegovic: This peace agreement you shall not join on, we are on your side, we support you with everything we can, we will help you win the war. The top European diplomats saw their peace work sabotaged, Europe's diplomatic prestige took a hit. Instead of peace, an extremely bloody civil war followed, largely due to a great power game which, for Washington, involved revitalizing NATO and preventing Germany and France (and Europe) from gaining too much power in the Western sphere.
Note that the peace agreement that came about under American auspices in Dayton in 1995 was very similar to the one produced in Lisbon three years earlier.
In Ukraine, things degenerated with the Maidan in 2014, events that it is still controversial to call a "coup". When history is written, it will not be possible to overlook research such as that at the University of Ottawa by Ivan Katchanovski on the Maidan shootings, or the testimony of American diplomat Jeffrey Sachs. For nine years, the fact that the first post-Maidan Ukrainian government was decided by Victoria Nuland on February 4, 2014 (the leaked phone call between her and the then US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, who popularly nicknamed Nuland "F the EU”), while what is known as the Maidan Revolution took place from 22 February onwards.
After the Maidan, Putin did what he threatened in 2008 after the NATO meeting in Bucharest where Ukraine was officially welcomed as a future NATO member: Russia grabbed Crimea, where it was feared that NATO would otherwise build a naval base in the future.
Civil war ensued in Ukraine, between the Kiev government and the regions in the East/South. Between 2014–22, 14,000 victims were counted.
Regardless of what we think of the Minsk II peace accord, which would end that war: Because the accord went through the UN Security Council, Minsk II was part of international law.
Recently, Merkel and Hollande admitted that it was never the collective West's intention to implement the agreement, it was instead about buying time to build up Ukraine's army.
These things undermine "our" political legitimacy in similar situations. Like when Victoria Nuland returns from Niger, where she is said to have tried to persuade the junta to return to the country's constitution. How much heavier would it have weighed politically if we had a better play to bring than Nuland?
Incidentally, an elephant in the room in the reports on the chaos in the Sahel region is what happened a dozen years ago, what political consequences it had in that part of the world when a certain military organization that calls itself the Defense Alliance bombed Libya to pieces.
Testimony is mounting about the Biden family's financial corruption in Ukraine (add to that Nuland's congressional testimony about the biolab, and more), but there is a simple question to ask from a democratic point of view: Why did Zelensky abandon the policy of peace with which he won the elections in Ukraine 2019? It was a peace platform that he ran on and which won him 73% of the vote, a policy that bridged the clear blocs between West and East/South.
In the March–April 2022 peace talks between Ukraine and Russia, brokered by Turkey and Israel, the key point was Ukrainian constitutional neutrality. Like when Walter Zimmerman torpedoed the Lisbon peace talks in 1992, Boris Johnson was flown in to tell the government in Kiev: This treaty we cannot agree to and if you agree to this you stand alone: the war must go on, in return you get everything we can give you, so you can win it.
The risk of another world war is imminent, but for some reason people are less afraid of nuclear war, than to talk about the background of the war in Ukraine.
When it is an inescapable fact that Ukraine loses the war, with all the suffering it cost the population: Imagine a situation where Minsk II is implemented. I have also heard reference to an opinion poll in Ukraine about NATO membership from 2010, according to information the support for NATO membership in the country must have been around 10%. What would Ukraine have looked like without the violent Maidan coup of 2014?
The explosion of the Nord Stream says what this war is really about for those who possessed the power to end it but wanted it to continue at all costs. The mantra "democracy vs. autocracy' corresponds to reality much worse than economist Michael Hudson's description: What we are following is the bitter struggle between oligarchy in the West and autocracy in the East.
How can I stand up for democracy myself? For example, by demanding transparency in a democratic spirit: People must be told what really happened/is happening in the war. We must also know the truth about what happened with Nord Stream - where Sweden also plays a role.
Unfortunately, it has proven very difficult to raise questions about the war and NATO in a Swedish public. I regret that this is so, because historical examples - such as the ones I have just described - as well as research that has charted different courses of war, teach us that we should listen to critical voices because there always turn out to be things going on in the background that we wish in retrospect we had paid attention to.
In my opinion, we need to slow down and ask ourselves what alternatives we have, before the war escalates into a full-scale world war - where Sweden also risks being drawn into it. Also if it means that we pull out the card about Sweden's classic approach in modern times: What is best for Sweden? It's one thing to give up hundreds of years of neutrality for a defense alliance - another to give up hundreds of years of neutrality to join a military