When we look at everything happening in Ukraine today, we need to understand that as per international law, it is entirely illegal. Equally though we need to understand that every illegality perpetrated here has a legal precedent (or rather an illegal precedent) that the West has set — be it wanton aggression, supporting terrorists, blatantly violating or exceeding the UN charter, and pretending that some countries’ security concerns outweigh other countries.
This sordid tale starts in the former Yugoslavia: specifically Kosovo. Since the break up of Yugoslavia, rising ethnic tensions had led to outright civil war. While the worst of these — the war in Bosnia — had ended by 1995, the Islamic radicalisation and criminalisation inherent in a war economy needed to spread its wings and find new hunting grounds. This is not unlike say the 1980s’ Afghan jihadists needing to find new grounds and forming al Qaeda and sparking the Kashmir insurgency. In Yugoslavia, this negative energy turned to Kosovo. At that point, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) already had it out with Serbian strongman Slobodan Milošević whom they largely blamed for supporting the war crimes carried out by Bosnian Serbs. The method this time however was insidious.
It all started with a terrorist organisation called the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) under a ‘gentleman’ called Hashim Thaçi. The KLA was slowly but surely propped up by the Western media in a David versus Goliath narrative not dissimilar to the Zelensky versus Putin one playing out today. The direct support for the KLA was mostly routed through Albania, but needless to say that somewhere between the arms and the PR support being provided, a clear Western hand existed. The KLA much like Zelensky (using his own civilians as human shields) loved using their own people as bait.
From the start, their entire tactic was to provoke major Serbian reprisals against Kosovar Muslims. To this end, they would attack Serbian state security and civilians and started a campaign of murder, torture, rape and extortion. The aim was always to create what Mao Tse Tung called “contradictions of purpose” — that is to say, to turn the state against the people; people who were as terrorised by the KLA as the Serbian state was. Obviously, the plan succeeded. In due course after building momentum by killing Serbian villagers, the KLA started upping the ante — the first of which was the attack on the town of Orahovac. Here, 85 Serbs were abducted and 40 of them murdered. Naturally the Serbian state reacted with ferocity and as is common in countries with weak rule of law, it went on a rampage. The escalatory cycle was now in full swing.
Unsurprisingly, NATO decided that it would intervene. Curiously, the doctrine involved for this attack was called “humanitarian intervention” under which one did not need UN sanction to attack a country or meet any of the legal criteria that had existed prior — such as self-defence or pre-emption. Mind you it didn’t even meet any normal legal standard of who bore initial guilt and the state’s capacity to react. The moral and legal arbiter would be NATO. And so, NATO decided to start bombing Serbia, without UN authorisation.
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Just five years ago, the Rwandan Genocide had happened with exactly zero intervention or regret from the international community. Even when the sheer scale of the genocide became evident, no country took action — not because of any logjam at the UN Security Council or a veto, but because Rwanda simply wasn’t high enough on the priority list, being strategically irrelevant and economically irrelevant to the global supply chains. However, the rationale used for bypassing the UN in Kosovo was: because the UN had failed to act then, its permission should not be sought now. Once the aerial bombing of Serbia started in 1999, the Serbs doubled down, expelling large number of Kosovo Muslims thereby offering retrospective justification for the NATO bombing campaign.
Now while the principle (not law) of humanitarian intervention does allow an “intervention” violating sovereignty, it does not allow for a permanent violation of territorial integrity — which is to say partition. Indeed despite the horrors of the Bosnian War, the same NATO had insisted that Bosnia would remain one unit and that Croatians and Serbians in Bosnia could not secede from the whole. Yet just a few years later in Kosovo, this was turned on its head where Kosovo was ultimately declared an independent state. This was justified as “being impractical for two hostile communities to remain together as one state”. The man chosen to head this new state de facto was Hashim Thaçi — the same man responsible for all the murders, rape and arson before the conflict began. In short, the West supported an insurgency, created a violent backlash and then invaded and separated a state, creating a new state under the leadership of an international terrorist.
Now extrapolate this to Ukraine. The West stages a January 6, 2021 style “people’s movement”. Unlike January 6, this “maidan” movement in 2014 succeeds. It results in the burning alive of over 40 Russians in Odessa, where to date none of the perpetrators have been prosecuted. Then Russia citing humanitarian grounds invades and sets up Kosovo style republics while annexing a part for itself. Do you see a difference here? But it didn’t stop. The new Ukrainian government decides to absorb vicious sadistic neo-Nazis with a history of killing Russians, Jews and gypsies into the state apparatus and continues a war against its own minorities, resulting in over 14,000 deaths over the last eight years. Again, begin to see the similarities?
Needless to say, what we’re seeing is a whole new brand of racism — where Western Europe can do things thanks to white privilege, but nobody else can. Clearly you can take Nazis out of Europe, but you can’t take Nazism out of the Europeans. Long live Western white supremacy!
The writer is a senior fellow at the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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