THE European Court of Human Rights has found against Ukraine in a case brought by relatives of trade unionists burned to death in the Odessa massacre of May 2 2014.
Though its judgment attributes violence to protesters both for and against the then recent Maidan coup in Kiev, it makes clear that firefighters were instructed not to respond to emergency calls from people trapped in the city’s House of Trade Unions when it was set ablaze, and castigates Ukraine’s failure to investigate or hold anyone accountable for the 42 deaths.
The Odessa massacre — taking place on the anniversary of the Nazi outlawing of trade unions, and celebrated by Ukraine’s fascist Right Sector, a key player in the Maidan coup, as “yet another bright page in our fatherland’s history” — underlines ugly realities about the US and EU-backed overthrow of Ukraine’s then government, often presented as a straightforwardly democratic uprising.
Britain’s trade unions then as now were divided on how to interpret events in Ukraine, but an emergency resolution passed at that year’s TUC cited the risk that the violent divisions in the country had the “potential to destabilise the whole region” and that a “conflict of [Balkan war] proportions could unfold in the European continent.”
It recognised the threat to trade union rights, the resurgence of fascism, and called for an “immediate, permanent ceasefire in Ukraine and a peaceful, negotiated settlement” to the civil war erupting in the Donbass, while vowing “opposition to the use of British forces in the Ukrainian conflict.”
Eleven years on, similar clarity is needed.
It is no justification of Russia’s illegal war to note that Ukraine is no beacon of democracy but bans and persecutes opposition media and parties (including the Communist Party of Ukraine, which in the last elections it was permitted to contest, in 2012, won over 13 per cent of the vote) and that its rehabilitation of Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera and the Galician division of the Waffen-SS is a dangerous component of the Europe-wide advance of the far right.
And it is an active obstacle to ending that war to ignore the causes of the civil war in Ukraine that preceded it, and the role of Western powers in igniting that through the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government.
In the febrile pro-war atmosphere being drummed up in Parliament and by Establishment media, it is important once again that our labour movement commits to support for a peaceful, negotiated settlement, opposes any moves that might prolong or widen the war, and rejects any deployment of British troops.
The Odessa massacre is also a reminder that Western governments are not fussy about the democratic credentials of the forces we back to advance our interests abroad.
This is worth remembering as our media cheer on the new regime in Syria, led by jihadist Ahmad al-Sharaa of the once al-Qaida-affiliated terrorist army Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a coalition of groups including the notorious child-beheading Nour al-Din al-Zinki. (Like post-Maidan Ukraine, it has lost no time in banning both of Syria’s communist parties).
Over 1,000 Syrians of the Alawite religious minority, including hundreds of civilians, were massacred earlier this month by the new regime. The EU’s response was to condemn “recent attacks, reportedly by pro-Assad elements, on interim government forces in the coastal areas of Syria” and, as an afterthought, “all violence against civilians.”
Were HTS aligned with Russia or Iran rather than the West, we can imagine the reaction to its announcement this week that no elections will be held for five years, or that the basis of Syrian law is to be “Islamic jurisprudence.”
But HTS is conveniently silent on the ongoing military presence of both Turkey and the US in its country, and on Israel’s aggressive territorial expansion in the south. So there’s nothing to see here.
