UKRAINE U-TURN
As usual, it turns out the situation will be, “Hurry up and wait”, regarding the corpses of passengers and crew of Malaysian Airlines MH17.
Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has shone center-stage in her role with Media and representatives of other nations. Like a duck taking to water, she took on the mantle handed her by the International Community – that of lambasting Russia and declaring, “We will bring our people home… right away!”
Then of course, reality began to set in and the false timeframe began to slip, along with the allegations of Russian guilt. It was still possible, in the early days, to maintain a face of bravado addressing the EU and reading her prepared statement. All the correct words and delivered with the appropriate firmness and finely spaced pauses.
Away from the fine buildings and closer to the battle ground in Ukraine, the tawdry nature of the political game being played in Europe has become plainer. It will not, after all, be simply a case of collecting the dead Australians and heading home girt with the laurels of success.
Probably a year will pass before anybody can begin the process of removing dead bodies from Europe. The processes of DNA identification, plus verification and identification of each PART of each body, will take time. Some bodies were dismembered in the air and some were torn in the crash. To blithely assume it was a matter of collecting a few dozen dead bodies and returning to Australia was always naïve.
On top of the complex practicalities of identification, the logistics of operating in a war zone compound the problems. Access to a war zone can be guaranteed but nobody can guarantee a safe exit.
From the very beginning, Western Media adopted the assumption that Separatists on the ground were at once tampering with ‘evidence’, including bodies, and had no legal right to be in the small area of the crash site. This was wrong. Separatist forces in Eastern Ukraine are citizens of Ukraine and they had to fight to stay in the area to protect the crash zone which extends for fifty kilometers or so and which they have no intention of handing to invaders from what they consider an illegitimate government in Kiev. It matters also that they consider they have officially and legally seceded from Ukraine and seek to preserve their own national identity.
Into this morass of conflicting interest (war is conflict), Julia Bishop expected to waltz with ease and international approval but now she admits, “It’s more complicated than that.”
She and her international protection force and recovery team cannot even get to the site, in light of the ‘conflict’ which was at first naively ignored.
The forces at play in Eastern Europe did not come into power overnight. These ethnic and nationalistic differences have evolved literally over thousands of years and within recent decades have also become the interests of vast economic powers with multi-national aims and intentions.
The instant attempt to simply sheet home the airborne disaster as an ‘act of the Russians’ was always a planned scenario. The fact the planning became obvious, expressed within hours in many quarters as a ‘False Flag’ action, even caused the USA to publicly back down from such accusations.
Nevertheless, the disingenuous allegations continue that ‘Russian weapons’ are being used. What is ignored is the patently obvious fact, Ukrainian forces use Russian weapons, so such allegations are purely vexatious and intentionally hypocritical.
Only now, in the second week, do we begin to see rational responses on the ground… meaning international forces remain safely in a town sixty kilometers from the battle ground and await permission, under some sort of truce flag, to enter the area. Once the majority of the corpses/body parts had been removed, neither Kiev nor Donetsk felt there was cause to surrender the ground.
The probability of creating an international conflict of far greater proportions, if armed troops from either the Netherlands or Australia (or anywhere else) were to engage either side, has ensured discretion rather than valour has prevailed.
So for all the mad dash to assert Russia was a villain and to scoop up the bodies of loved ones, we now see a more steady and realistic pause taking place, both on the ground and within international politics.
There has been a U-Turn.
Corpses will be reunited with their identities, over time, and with the majority of their painstakingly identified body parts, to be repatriated to their several homelands in due course.
Blame, rather than justice, will gradually become a shroud of darkness associated with the obvious perpetrators – even if the downing of the plane does turn out to have been a tragic accident. We are far from that point. To this day, the media breathlessly announce the ‘Black Box’ reveals the plane was downed by, “an explosion”, “shrapnel” and “a missile”, as though any one of their simplistic statements is more than words.
The truth will congeal around the perpetrators like drying blood. It will possibly turn out that the real perpetrators were far away, in Washington, The Hague, Kiev or any of the financial hubs of the corporate multinationals who think they ARE the world.
One World Order? Of course, whatever it is!
Greed? Undoubtedly.
Lust for power and dominion? Political corruption mixed with ‘Grace and Favour’ under-the- counter payments of money and interests? We know all this without being told.
What is more interesting is that, despite this business of one, two or three or more aircraft being shot down or simply disappearing, the War goes on.
At first, the War ebbs and flows. Allegations and U-Turns appear to swirl amidst the lies and the blood of innocents.
When death becomes universal and blood flows like a flood, it will be interesting to see if all 298 corpses from MH17 ever return to their proper homes.
Against this backdrop and timescale, public opinion and the posturing of Julia Bishop are just elements of the current U-Turn in Ukraine.
Guran