It can best be described as killing your friends once they become a burden.
An effort is underway to clean up the image of the junta now in control of Ukraine. Although Right Sector (Pravy Sektor) played an instrumental role in the coup, its radical nationalism continues to be an embarrassment for the new regime put in place by the IMF, the EU and the United States.
“Night of the Long Knives” refers to a series of political murders conducted by Hitler and the Nazis after they assumed power. In addition to opponents of the regime, the Nazis assassinated a number of paramilitary brownshirts who earlier specialized in fighting against paramilitary units of political parties opposed to the Nazis and intimidating Slavic and Romani citizens, union members and Jews.
It is also a popular theme in South Africa, where state security agents regularly bait conservative whites to “rise up” against black crime and the ongoing genocide against white farmers, hoping to draw renewed international sympathy for “mistreated and oppressed blacks”.
However, the South African government did deploy thousands of troops inside the country and added tons of fluoride to the water supply before they finally announced the death of Nelson Mandela last year, fearing indeed that blacks would go on an open killing spree against all whites, not only white farmers.
That would obviously not have supported the narrative that Anglo-Americans have fabricated about South Africa: where kindly, forgiving blacks are oppressed by cruel, destructive whites.
Similary, the Western narrative about “freeing Ukraine” was beginning to suffer from a stark reality infusion.
The corporate media has tried to underplay the violent character of the Ukranian organization, but Dmytro Yarosh, the leader of Right Sector, made this virtually impossible when he allegedly made an appeal to Chechen terrorist leader Doku Umarov to assist the ultra-nationalist group in its crusade against Russia. In addition to courting al-Qaeda affiliated terrorists, Right Sector is rabidly pro-American.
Numerous incidents of violence and intimidation by Right Sector have gone unreported in the West. “In the days since the US-backed coup, according to citizens in Ukraine I am in contact with, after the new regime dissolved the National Police, members of the Right Sector took over police functions in Kiev. Groups of young men, mainly members of Right Sector, have been patrolling the streets armed with baseball bats and weapons,” writes F. William Engdahl. “In some documented instances according to these reports from ordinary Ukrainians, they come in groups to homes of people identified as ‘pro-Russian’ and force them out of their homes or take their possessions, as they term it ‘privatization’ actions. The population lives in a state of terror they liken to the Stalin-era terror.”
It appears an effort to “clean up” its image and make it more palatable to the oligrachs moving in on Ukraine is now underway. On Tuesday it was reported that Oleksandr Muzychko, aka Sashko Biliy, Right Sector’s second in command, was shot dead in a cafe in Rivne in western Ukraine.
According to the BBC, Ukraine’s Deputy Interior Minister Vladimir Yevdokimov said Muzychko was shot dead after opening fire on police and Sokol special forces during a raid at the cafe. They planned to arrest him and other ultra-nationalists for criminal activity. Ukrainian authorities described Muzychko as a gang leader.
Ukrainian MP Oles Doniy, however, provided a different account. He said Muzychko was abducted while traveling in western Ukraine and executed. His body was later found with hands bound and a fatal bullet wound to the heart. A photo posted on Twitter seems to confirm this second account.
NATO supreme commander in Europe, General Philip Breedlove, warned Russia against any attempt to “annex” Transnistria.
The Foreign Affairs Minister of the Transnistrian Moldovan Republic, the very glamorous Nina Shtanski, welcomed the outcome of Crimea’s referendum on self-determination and recalled that on 17 September 2006, in an analogous vote, 97.2% of Transnistrians had come out in favor of becoming part of the Russian Federation.
The President of Transnistria’s Parliament, Mikhail Burla, wrote to his Russian counterpart asking him to pass a law on the accession of Transnistria to the Russian Federation emulating, what has been done for Crimea.
The President of Moldova, Nicolae Timofti, asked the European Union to speed up the signing of an association agreement so as to have a lock on Transnistria’s legal attachment to his country.
The President of the Transnistrian Moldovan Republic, Yevgeny Shevchuk, went to Moscow to discuss the situation of his country’s Russian-speaking population following Kiev’s closure of the Ukrainian border.
Moldova declared its independence on 19 August 1990. Just as, at the time of the USSR, Crimea was administratively attached to Ukraine, Transnistria was attached to Moldova, from which it declared independence one week later, on 1 September. However, Moldova was admitted to the UN, but not Transnistria, which has existed for 24 years as an unrecognized state. In June 1992, NATO tried unsuccessfully to resolve this issue through force, killing more than a thousand people, but had to back off due to the resistance of the population. Since then, the country’s security has been provided by a contingent of Russian peacekeepers.
A private military company will be in charge of suppressing protest movements in Eastern Ukraine, said a source in the country’s Security Service. According to him, the name of the company is Greystone Limited.
According to a source cited by ITAR-TASS, Ukrainian authorities believe that the Security Service is not able to suppress the protest mood and neutralize the leaders and activists of the pro-Russian movement in the eastern regions. In particular, the source said, the acting president Alexander Turchinov shares this opinion.
“Therefore it was decided to attract foreign mercenaries, who will serve as political police and state security protection, ” said the representative of the Security Service.
He informed that the initiative to attract mercenaries belongs to oligarchs Igor Kolomoisky and Sergei Taruta, appointed governors of Dnepropetrovsk and Donetsk regions.
Not so long ago, during a meeting with Turchinov, a plan to stop the protest movements in the eastern regions was discussed. Kolomoysky noted: “why reinvent the wheel if there are real people who understand how and how much to pay,” said the source.
According to publicly available information Greystone Limited is a structural part of Blackwater, that was later renamed into Academi. According to military experts, the company is associated with the CIA and the US Defense Department. Its employees participated in the war in Afghanistan after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003, the company has appeared in Iraq and became involved in training the new Iraqi armed forces and police, as well as support of the occupation forces.
Aborted and miscarried babies are being incinerated as “clinical waste,” with some being used to power hospitals in the UK, a policy that some have defended as an efficient means of sustainable recycling.
“Ten NHS trusts have admitted burning foetal remains alongside other rubbish while two others used the bodies in ‘waste-to-energy’ plants which generate power for heat,” reports the Telegraph. The revelations emerged as a result of a Channel 4 Dispatches program set to be broadcast in the UK tonight which found that more than 15,000 babies were incinerated.
The program also unveiled the fact that parents who lost babies were being treated without compassion and were not properly consulted on what would happen to their child’s remains.
the revelations, the Department of Health slapped an instant ban on the policy, with health minister Dr Dan Poulter labeling it “totally unacceptable.”
The story represents an alarming fusion of the lunacy of pro-abortion and global warming alarmist sentiment, with some even taking to Twitter to express support for the practice as an “efficient and effective” means of recycling.
Another respondent to the Telegraph story remarked, “If the unwanted remains can be used for a worthwhile purpose, such as heat generation, then they should be. That’s the very essence of sustainability,” characterizing the aborted baby as “unwanted medical waste”.
A respondent to this Prison Planet story asserted, “I don’t get what the problem is; it’s recycling and more economical than using, say, nuclear power or electricity.”
Many respondents to the Telegraph story made the point that the policy of burning babies is not surprising given that the practice of abortion itself is treated with such carefree abandon.
“Once people decide that unborn children are less than human what do you expect,” said one.
The revelations are certain to bolster arguments that the NHS should be privatized.
A sharp increase in under-18s ‘at risk’ of being radicalised into jihadists has been seen in Britain.
The number of children and vulnerable adults in UK identified as potential violent extremists by a controversial anti-radicalisation initiative has surged by more than 25 per cent in the past year, The Independent reports.
Since last April at least 940 people have been referred for assessment under the Channel program because of concerns they are at risk of being drawn into terrorism, according to official figures.
The numbers, disclosed by the Association of Chief Police Officers via a Freedom of Information request, include 467 under-18s, representing more than a third of all juvenile referrals since the scheme, which is primarily tasked with addressing Islamic extremism, was launched in 2007.
Exactly 15 years ago, on March 24, NATO began its 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia. The alliance bypassed the UN under a “humanitarian” pretext, launching aggression that claimed hundreds of civilian lives and caused a much larger catastrophe than it averted.
Years on, Serbia still bears deep scars of the NATO bombings which, as the alliance put it, were aimed at “preventing instability spreading” in Kosovo. Questions remain on the very legality of the offense, which caused casualties and mass destruction in the Balkan republic.
Codenamed ‘Operation Allied Force,’ it was the largest attack ever undertaken by the alliance. It was also the first time that NATO used military force without the approval of the UN Security Council and against a sovereign nation that did not pose a real threat to any member of the alliance.
NATO demonstrated in 1999 that it can do whatever it wants under the guise of “humanitarian intervention,” “war on terror,” or “preventive war” – something that everyone has witnessed in subsequent years in different parts of the globe.
Nineteen NATO member states participated to some degree in the military campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), which lasted for 11 weeks until June 10, 1999.
In the course of the campaign, NATO launched 2,300 missiles at 990 targets and dropped 14,000 bombs, including depleted uranium bombs and cluster munitions (unexploded cluster bombs continued to pose a threat to people long after the campaign was over.) Over 2,000 civilians were killed, including 88 children, and thousands more were injured. Over 200,000 ethnic Serbs were forced to leave their homeland in Kosovo.
In what the alliance described as “collateral damage,” its airstrikes destroyed more than 300 schools, libraries, and over 20 hospitals. At least 40,000 homes were either completely eliminated or damaged and about 90 historic and architectural monuments were ruined. That is not to mention the long-term harm caused to the region’s ecology and, therefore, people’s health. Economic damage is estimated at over US$120 billion, according to Serbian media.
News correspondents Anissa Naouai and Jelena Milincic, the authors of RT’s documentary ‘Zashto?’ – which means “Why?” in English –traveled through former Yugoslavia to Belgrade, Kosovo, and Montenegro and spoke to people who endured the atrocities and horrors of the war and lost their friends and relatives.
“There is a bridge near the city of Nis, which was bombed at the time when a passenger train was passing through it,” Milincic recalls.The tragedy on April 12, 1999 killed 15 people and wounded 44 others, while many passengers were never accounted for.
“We felt the blast and saw flames under the locomotive. The train was blown so powerfully, half a meter from the ground. I don’t know how we stayed on the rails,” recalled witness Boban Kostic.
“Our colleague got off the train when I did,” he said. “He was really scared. But another rocket hit and blew him to pieces,” added another witness, Goran Mikic.
“Why? Why civilians? Why a train?” said Dragan Ciric. “It still torments me, if the first rocket was a mistake, what were the next three for?” he told RT.
The Chinese embassy in the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade was also hit and set on fire by NATO airstrikes on May 7, 1999. Three citizens of the country were killed. The alliance called the attack “a mistake.” China is a permanent member of the UN Security Council and, along with Russia, did not support a military solution for the Kosovo crisis.
Prior to the military assault, the Milosevic regime was accused of “excessive and disproportionate use of force in Kosovo.” But was the force that NATO used when bombing the sovereign state’s territory proportionate and restrained? Rights organization Amnesty International accused the allied forces of committing war crimes.
“Indications are that NATO did not always meet its legal obligations in selecting targets and in choosing means and methods of attack, On the basis of available evidence, including NATO’s own statements and accounts of specific incidents, Amnesty International believes that – whatever their intentions – NATO forces did commit serious violations of the laws of war leading in a number of cases to the unlawful killings of civilians,” the rights watchdog said in a report published in June 2000.
The alliance dismissed the accusations, saying that cases involving civilian deaths were due to technological failure or were simply “accidents of conflict.” NATO failed to say that they were due to the alliance’s own failure to take all necessary precautions.
“We never said we would avoid casualties. It would be foolhardy to say that, as no military operation in history has been perfect,” said Jamie Shea, NATO’s chief spokesman, the Guardian reported at the time.
Former NATO Secretary General Javier Solana ordered military action against Yugoslavia following a failure in negotiations on the Kosovo crisis in France’s Rambouillet and Paris in February and March 1999.
NATO’s decision was officially announced after talks between international mediators – known as the Contact Group – the Yugoslav government, and the delegation of Kosovo Albanians ended in a deadlock. Belgrade refused to allow foreign military presence on its territory while Albanians accepted the proposal.
Back then, Slobodan Milosevic’s forces were engaged in armed conflict with an Albanian rebel group, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which sought the province’s separation from Yugoslavia. Former US President Bill Clinton’s special envoy to the Balkans, Robert Gelbard, had earlier described the KLA as “without any questions, a terrorist group.” (The KLA was later repeatedly accused of being involved in the organ trafficking of Serbs in the late 1990s.)
However, despite not announcing the link officially, NATO entered the conflict on the side of the KLA, accusing Serbian security forces of atrocities and “ethnic cleansing” against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. The main objective of the campaign was to make Milosevic’s forces pull out of the province. The fact that there was violence on both sides of the confrontation was ignored both by allied governments and Western media – which stirred up public anger by focusing only on Serbs’ atrocities and being far less vocal regarding abuses by Albanians.
“All efforts to achieve a negotiated political solution to the Kosovo crisis having failed, no alternative is open but to take military action,” Solana said on March 23, 1999. “We must halt the violence and bring an end to the humanitarian catastrophe now unfolding in Kosovo.”
An incident involving the “mass killing” of Albanians in central Kosovo’s village of Racak – a KLA stronghold – became a major excuse and justification for NATO’s decision to start its operation. Serbs were blamed for the deaths of dozens of Albanian “civilians” on January 15, 1999. However, it was alleged that the accusations could have been false and the bodies actually belonged to KLA insurgents whose clothes had been changed.
A central role in labeling the events in Racak “a massacre” belonged to William Walker, who headed the OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission. He visited the site shortly after the incident and made his judgment.
“[Walker] arrived there having no powers to make conclusions regarding what had happened,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazenta paper in November last year.
Yugoslav authorities accused Walker of going beyond his mission and proclaimed him persona non grata, while Western leaders were infuriated over the Racak incident.
“And some time later the bombing started,” Lavrov recalled, adding that the situation in Racak became the “trigger point.” Moscow insisted that an investigation should be carried out. The EU commissioned a group of Finnish forensic experts to prepare a report on the incident. Later, the European Union handed it over to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Lavrov said. The full version of the document has never been made public, said the minister, who was Moscow’s permanent representative to the UN between 1994 and 2004.
“But parts of the report leaked and were quoted in the media saying that [the victims] were not civilians and that all the bodies found in Racak were in disguise and that bullet holes on clothes and bodies did not match. There was also no one who was killed at short range,” Lavrov said. “Even though I’ve repeatedly raised this issue, the report itself still has not been shown.”
NATO halted its air campaign with the signing of the Military Technical Agreement in Kumanovo on June 9, 1999, with the Yugoslav government agreeing to withdraw its forces from Kosovo. On June 10, 1999, the UN Security Council adopted resolution 1244 to establish the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK).
In August 2013, Amnesty International accused the UNMIK of failing to properly investigate the abductions and murders of Kosovo Serbs in the aftermath of the 1998-1999 war.
“Years have passed and the fate of the majority of the missing on both sides of the conflict is still unresolved, with their families still waiting for justice,” the organization said.
Moscow’s former envoy to NATO (1997-2002), Viktor Zavarzin, believes the military alliance’s aggression was “a crime against humanity” and a “violation of international laws and norms.” The event that unfolded 15 years ago laid ground to a new era of the development of international relations – the era of “chaosization of international law and its arbitrary manipulation,” Zavarzin, an MP for the United Russia party said at the State Duma plenary session on Friday.
France’s National Front party dealt a major blow to the ruling Socialists Sunday after several of its candidates took prime position in the first round of local elections.
According to preliminary results from the interior ministry, the UMP and allies took 47 percent of the vote nationwide while the Socialist party and allies took 38 percent, and the FN five percent — far higher than its 0.9 percent result in the first round of 2008 municipal polls.
Applauding what she said was “an exceptional vintage for the FN”, Marine Le Pen — head of the anti-immigration, anti-EU party — said the polls marked the “end of the bipolarisation of the political scene”.
Although the FN had been expected to do well, the first round results were far better than expected.
FN candidates came ahead in several key towns and cities that will put them in pole position in the second round on March 30.
In the former coal-mining town of Henin-Beaumont in northern France, Steve Briois went a step further and achieved 50.3 percent, an absolute majority which made him the outright winner and mayor.
Under municipal election rules in France, any candidate who gets more than 50 percent is declared the winner and there is no need for a second round.
The FN hopes to claim the mayorship of 10 to 15 mid-sized town after the second round, and if it achieves that, it will have beaten its previous record in 1997 when it had four mayors.
The Socialists immediately responded to the surge of the FN by acknowledging that some voters had registered their discontent with current government policies.
“Some voters expressed their concerns, and even their doubts, by abstaining or through their vote,” Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said.
Turnout was dismally low at around 38 percent — a record for French municipal elections.
Ayrault called on voters to rally in the second round to block the “advance of the FN”, in a mirror of 2002 presidential elections when then FN leader Jean-Marie Le Pen reached the second round, prompting the Socialist Party to urge support for centre-right candidate Jacques Chirac.
“Where the National Front is in a situation where it could win the second round, all democratic and Republican forces have the responsibility to create the conditions to stop it from doing so,” he said.
The leader of the UMP party meanwhile called on those who had voted for the FN to “carry over their vote” onto UMP candidates in the second round.
Jean-Francois Cope predicted a “big victory” for his party in the second round, in a sign that corruption scandals that have affected the UMP as well as former president Nicolas Sarkozy had little impact.
In the French capital, the UMP was encouraged by an unexpected lead won by former Sarkozy minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, who is competing against Anne Hidalgo, the daughter of Spanish immigrants, in a fierce battle that will see Paris get its first ever female mayor.
Hidalgo had largely been tipped as the favourite, but the results instead gave Kosciusko-Morizet a handy advantage going into the second round.
The mayorship of the French capital is the most high profile of municipal elections that will produce over 36,000 new mayors for villages, towns and cities across France.
And while very few of these will be from the FN, the Sunday results are a remarkable turnaround for a party that, at the time of the last municipals, was mired in financial crisis and internal bickering.
Le Pen took over the FN leadership in 2011 and set about broadening the appeal of a party regarded as taboo by many voters in light of her father’s repeated convictions for Holocaust denial and inciting racial hatred.
As well as trying to “detoxify” the FN’s image, she has attempted to make it less of a single-issue party by campaigning on unemployment, costs of living and crime.
Past FN attempts at running local councils have often failed as a result of the eccentric personalities involved, but Le Pen has been eager to show that the party is capable of prudent governance.
“We want to become apparent as a big local political force,” Le Pen said Sunday.
“We map the world as it is – not as people would like it to be,” National Geographic’s map-making authority says, as the educational entertainment giant prepares to mark Crimea as part of Russia after the parliament officially ratifies the measure.
Juan Jose Valdes, NatGeo’s geographer, chief editor and research director for the map-making division, emerged from a meeting with the magazine’s editorial, legal and cartographic authorities on Tuesday, where the decision was made to give the area a temporary special shading (like the Gaza Strip or the West Bank), until permanent coloring after the Russian parliament approves the treaty signed by President Putin and the Crimean authorities.
When the parliamentary vote takes place later in the week, “the document will be revised to indicate that the change has officially occurred and Crimea is officially part of Russia, then we will identify Crimea with the Russian boundary tint,” Valdes told the U.S. News.
“As you can only surmise, sometimes our maps are not received in a positive light by some individuals who want to see the world in a different light,” the director explained, which is not the case with other map makers. Rand McNally, another leader in atlas and map production, will not be making any changes to its maps.
The company spokesperson, Amy Krouse said “we take our direction from the State Department.”
Google has continued to show Crimea as part of Ukraine.
A woman with her face painted in the colours of the Russian national flag waits for the announcement of preliminary results of today’s referendum on Lenin Square in the Crimean capital of Simferopol March 16, 2014
The referendum in Crimea was fully consistent with international law and UN Charter, Russian President Vladimir Putin told Barack Obama, after the overwhelming majority of Crimeans expressed their willingness to join Russia.
The citizens of the peninsula have been given an opportunity to freely express their will and exercise their right to self-determination, the Russian president said in a phone conversation with his US counterpart, according to Kremlin’s press service.
With a record-breaking turnout of over 80 percent, according to preliminary results, over 95 percent of the Crimean population said ‘yes’ to the reunion of the republic with Russia. International observers have not reported any violations or anything resembling any kind of pressure during the vote.
However, Obama said the Unites States and the “international community” will “never recognize” the results of the referendum “administered under threats of violence and intimidation,” according to White House spokesman.
Obama “emphasized that Russia’s actions were in violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity” and that the US in coordination with its European partners is “prepared to impose additional costs on Russia,” the White House added.
Despite the existing differences in the assessment of the situation in Ukraine, the leaders of Russia and US have agreed that they must jointly seek to help stabilize the situation in the country, the Kremlin said.
“Putin drew attention to the inability and unwillingness of the current Kiev authorities to curb rampant ultra-nationalist and radical groups, destabilizing and terrorizing civilians, including Russian-speaking population, and our fellow citizens,” Kremlin statement reads.
In this context, the possibility of sending an OSCE monitoring mission to Ukraine was discussed, the press office reported. The Russian President believes such a mission should be extended to all Ukrainian regions. – RT.COM
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s popularity has soared after the historic referendum in Crimea.
Putin spoke to Barack Obama on the phone, after the overwhelming majority of Crimeans expressed their willingness to join Russia.
As Putin spoke about the referendum, he emphasised “the precedent set by Kosovo, among other things.”
The referendum was fully in line with international standards, its results should be recognised both in Ukraine and western countries, Austrian member of the European Parliament Johann Stadler said at the final press-conference of international observers on Sunday.
With a record-breaking turnout of over 80 percent, according to preliminary results, over 95 percent of the Crimean population said ‘yes’ to the reunion of the republic with Russia. International observers have not reported any violations or anything resembling any kind of pressure during the vote.
However, Obama said the Unites States and the “international community” will “never recognize” the results of the referendum “administered under threats of violence and intimidation,” according to White House spokesman.
Obama “emphasized that Russia’s actions were in violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity” and that the US in coordination with its European partners is “prepared to impose additional costs on Russia,” the White House added.
The Republic of Crimea has addressed the UN seeking recognition as a sovereign state and called on Russia to integrate it into the Russian Federation. 96.77 percent of the Crimean population voted ‘for’ the integration in a referendum in the final outcome.
“The Republic of Crimea intends to build its relations with other states on the basis of equality, peace, mutual neighborly cooperation, and other generally agreed principles of political, economic and cultural cooperation between states.”
On March 30 Crimea will switch to the Moscow Standard Time under a resolution passed by the Crimean parliament at an extraordinary session on Monday a day after the residents overwhelmingly voted to join Russia.
“To establish across the Republic of Crimea the time standard in accordance with the third time zone with the time change at 2 pm on March 30, 2014, by moving the clock two hours forward,” the resolution says.
Fears grow in Britain of a “constitutional crisis” which would put the election in doubt, as legal expert warns that Scottish independence could bring down the next government
The 2015 general election will be thrown into turmoil if Scotland votes for independence in September’s referendum, according to government legal advice.
An election is scheduled to be held on May 7 next year but by then Scotland could already be preparing to separate from the rest of the United Kingdom.
The leading lawyer who wrote the Westminster government’s legal advice on Scottish independence is now warning that a “Yes” vote in the referendum would have major ramifications for the election, and could destabilise the next British government.
Cabinet ministers fear that if Alex Salmond’s independence campaign succeeds, the general election would be in grave doubt, plunging Britain into an unprecedented “constitutional crisis”.
In a memorandum for the House of Lords, Professor Alan Boyle, a specialist in international law at Edinburgh University, outlined two options for the election if Scotland chooses independence on September 18.
Voting begins Sunday on a referendum on whether Venice and its surrounding region should secede from the rest of Italy, in an attempt to restore its 1,000-year history as a sovereign republic.
La Serenissima — or the Most Serene Republic of Venice — was an independent trading power for a millennium before its last leader was deposed by Napoleon in 1797. The republic encompassed not just Venice but what is now the surrounding region of Veneto and it is there that the vote will take place from tomorrow until Friday.
Campaigners have been inspired by the example of Scotland, which will hold its referendum on independence in September, and Catalonia, where around half the population say they want to break away from Spain.
Activists say that the latest polling shows that 65% of voters in the Veneto region, which includes historic cities such as Treviso, Vicenza and Verona, are in favour of cutting ties with Rome.
For decades there has been deep-seated dissatisfaction in the rich northern regions of Italy with what is widely regarded as inefficient and venal rule from Rome, as well as resentment that hard-won tax revenues are sent south and often squandered.
About 3.8 million people in Veneto are eligible to vote. Campaigners want a future state to be known as Repubblica Veneta — the Republic of Veneto.
They acknowledge that the vote is not binding on the national government in Rome and could cause a big constitutional upheaval, but insist that if it passes, they will start taking steps to withhold taxes, in what would effectively be a unilateral declaration of independence.
“If there is a majority yes vote, we have scholars drawing up a declaration of independence and there are businesses in the region who say they will begin paying taxes to local authorities instead of to Rome,” Lodovico Pizzati, the spokesman for the independence movement, told The Daily Telegraph.
The deepening crisis in Ukraine involves not only issues of political sovereignty, European integration and Russian hegemony, but also language and its relationship to nationalism and ethnic identity. Immediately after the removal of President Viktor Yanukovych from power on Feb. 22, the Ukrainian Parliament repealed a controversial law passed in 2012 that allowed the use of “regional languages” – including Russian, Hungarian, Romanian and Tatar — in courts and certain government functions in areas of the country where such speakers constituted at least 10 percent of the population. (In 1991, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the newly independent state of Ukraine established Ukrainian as its sole official language.)
Interim President Oleksandr Turchynov has since vetoed that repeal, but the episode has alarmed many of Ukraine’s Russian speakers and others. “Just as the law itself was meant to validate the continued use of Russian in Ukraine for a wide range of activities, the move to cancel that law was perceived as taking away rights enjoyed by the Russian-speaking population, and potentially a sign that there might be growing discrimination against them,” explained Olga Oliker, a security and defense analyst at the RAND Corp.
Indeed, after the 2012 law was passed, 13 of Ukraine’s 27 regions, mostly in the industrial eastern parts of the country, quickly adopted Russian as a second official language. (But even then, the passage of the law triggered demonstrations in the streets and even fistfights in Parliament.) Dr. Vitaly Chernetsky, associate professor in the department of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Kansas, commented that the 2012 language law was poorly written and roundly criticized by many experts at the time. “Additionally, no budgetary allocations were made at the time, so passing this law was, in effect, a purely symbolic measure intended to divert the attention of the Ukrainian electorate from corruption and economic problems,” Chernetsky said in an interview.
According to the CIA/World Factbook, the Russian language is spoken by about one-fourth (24 percent) of the Ukrainian population, while about one-sixth (17.3 percent) of the Ukrainian population are ethnic Russians. RT, a Russian television network, claims that 40 percent of Ukrainians speak Russian, (presumably including non-Russians). Russian speakers are concentrated in the southern and eastern parts of Ukraine – while in the southern autonomous region of Crimea (where the Russians have had a naval base on the Black Sea for more than 200 years), an estimated 60 percent of the population are ethnic Russians.
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The Ukraine Parliament reportedly will consider yet another language law in the coming weeks or months – it is unclear if it will again allow a multi-language framework for the country’s social and political life.
Svitlana Melnyk, a lecturer in Slavic languages and literatures at Indiana University-Bloomington, argued that the establishment of monolingualism formed a key part of solidifying Ukraine’s national identity. “For post-Soviet independent countries and Ukraine in particular, the state language has symbolic meaning and a great symbolic value in the process of nation-building,” she said. “This is a national symbol along with the flag and anthem. The language issue is highly politicized in Ukraine, and its future management heavily depends on the evolving political situation.”
Melnyk added that she thinks that Ukrainian should be “the only state language” in the country. “At the same time, the [new language] law should consider the current socio-linguistic situation and protect the languages of national and ethnic minorities in the country,” she said.
But the temporary repeal of the 2012 law sparked outrage from Ukraine to Moscow and even in the European Union. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev condemned the law’s abolition. “We do not understand what is going on there. There is a real threat to our [Russian] interests and to the lives and health of our citizens,” he said at a press conference, adding that the new interim government in Kiev lacks legitimacy. Similarly, Konstantin Dolgov, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s commissioner for human rights, characterized the law’s repeal as an “attack on the Russian language in Ukraine” and a “brutal violation of ethnic minority rights.”
Outside of Russia, the European Parliament even passed a resolution calling on the new Ukraine regime to respect the rights (and languages) of its minority population. “The Parliament of Ukraine has made what I believe to be a mistake… canceling a law on regional languages,” Poland’s Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski told CNN. “The new Ukrainian government should signal very eloquently to the ethnic minorities in Ukraine that they are welcome in Ukraine; that they are going to be part of the new Ukraine. And also Ukraine is a member of the Council of Europe, [with] its laws on protecting minorities.”
Separately, in response to the gathering storm in Ukraine, some nationalist lawmakers in Moscow, led by the far-right Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, have called for the fast-tracking of Russian citizenship to ethnic Russians in Ukraine. LPDR MP Ilya Drozdov has already tabled a bill that would grant Russian citizenship to Ukrainian-Russians within six months of proving their ethnicity. “The adoption of this amendment would allow [us] to lawfully use the migration potential of Ukrainian citizens of Russian ethnicity who desire to get Russian citizenship,” Drozdov explained. RT reported that more than 2 million residents of the former Soviet republics have received fast-tracked Russian citizenship since the fall of the Soviet Union – even including people not of ethnic Russian origin, like the South Ossetians of Georgia, who speak an Iranian-related language.
Meanwhile Ukrainian nationalists, particularly members of the ultra-right Svoboda (Freedom) party led by Oleg Tyahnibok, have even threatened to ban the Russian language completely and even strip the Ukrainian citizenship of the nation’s Russian speakers. Jean Asselborn, the foreign minister of Luxembourg, in a meeting with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in Moscow, expressed their grave concerns about another Svoboda-proposed bill that would essentially ban all Russian language media in Ukraine (which Svoboda has defended by citing that Russian reports of the turmoil in Ukraine have been tarred with bias). That bill would prohibit from Ukraine any media from nations that have not ratified the European Convention on Transfrontier Television — Russia has signed the convention, but has not ratified it yet.
“Russia is not a party to the convention, but it does not prevent us from broadcasting all across Europe. No EU member makes any problems for our broadcasts. If such a decision is taken in Ukraine, it would be a serious violation of the freedom of speech,” Lavrov said at a media conference.
With respect to the prevalence of Russian language, Chernetsky also noted if one looks at an average Ukrainian newsstand, one will find that about 90 percent of the publications are in Russian, even in the areas where the majority of the population speaks Ukrainian. “The Russian language also dominates the radio,” he said. “The only segment of the media where the Ukrainian language predominates is the national-level television channels.”
Oliker noted that while Ukraine has some strident far-right groups, including Svoboda and Pravyi Sektor (Right Sector), there are also more measured voices that recognize that Ukraine is a multi-ethnic country and which have absolutely no interest in denying anyone their citizenship on ethnic grounds. “Emotions are of course running very high right now, but I think most Ukrainian leaders, including the leadership of Svoboda, know they stand to lose far more than they stand to gain by taking action against the ethnic Russian minority,” she noted. “That said, the situation bears watching, because people are very angry and frightened, because one cannot ignore the ethnic undertones to the anger or the fear, and because elements of Svoboda, and certainly Pravyi Sektor, do hold ultra-nationalist views.”
Russian and Ukrainian are closely related Slavic tongues, but they are also distinct languages with separate ethnic and national identities. The Christian Science Monitor reports that Russian-language activists in Ukraine have long wanted to make Russian a second official state language, citing such scenarios in multi-lingual countries like Canada and India. “There is this pervasive suggestion that if you speak Russian, you’re not a loyal or true Ukrainian. This makes Russian-speakers feel like second-class citizens,” Ruslan Bortnik, vice chairman of Russian-Speaking Ukraine, an advocacy group, told the Monitor.
Of course, Ukrainian nationalists fear the further encroachment of Russian into its national fabric. “If Russian were an official language, the main fear is that it would be a wide-open door for Russian influence in Ukraine,” said Oleksiy Kolomiyets, president of the Center for European and Transatlantic Studies in Kiev. – International Business Times
The defense ministries of Ukraine and Russia have agreed on a truce in Crimea until March 21, Ukraine’s acting defense minister said on Sunday.
“An agreement has been reached with (Russia’s) Black Sea Fleet and the Russian Defense Ministry on a truce in Crimea until March 21,” Ihor Tenyukh told journalists on the sidelines of a cabinet meeting.
“No measures will be taken against our military facilities in Crimea during that time. Our military sites are therefore proceeding with a replenishment of reserves.” – Reuters
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It can best be described as killing your friends once they become a burden.
