Translated material
Circles on the water
We, the then residents of the Soviet Union, practically had no information about it, although our own state was one of the indirectly scrap participants in this massacre. Whatever the official motives of this and some subsequent wars on the African continent, their real reason was tribal discord. Nigeria, in the form in which it formed after decolonization, was an arbitrary political education, the composition and boundaries of which were determined not so much by the historical community and evolution of the peoples living in it, but by the boundaries of colonial empires accidentally laid at one time.
The trouble is that this is how the borders of almost all African states that gained independence were determined, and the Biafra precedent was extremely dangerous for the entire postcolonial consensus. The revision of these borders would be the reason for the endless war of everyone against all with the aim of separating and reuniting on a tribal basis. Therefore, the consensus found the support of not only former colonialists, but also the African governments themselves - it is generally strictly observed since then even in the absence of formal international agreements.
Africa, however, is only one of the possible examples, although unpleasant visual. The map of modern Europe in the form in which it developed as a result of the collapse of the two empires and two world wars, is not much different from African. When the principle of national self-determination was proclaimed state-forming, few could really understand what to consider the nation, and as a result of this half-life, the hereditary mini-imperias like Czechoslovakia were formed with its three or four peoples, Yugoslavia, inevitably doomed to decay, or Iraq and Palestine, already beyond European limits. The post -war ethnic purges, the most massive in history, the displacement of Poland to the west and the occupation by the Soviet Union of states and territories to the west of their borders should be added here.
Europe is much closer to the world center than Africa, at least so until recently, and therefore, in order to avoid ethnic explosions and mutual claims, they decided to fix the current situation by law - this was the meaning of the 1975 Helsinki agreements, which the Soviet Union also signed, closing their eyes to not too pleasant points about human rights and reality of families. The meaning was that even if you are indignant at the surface of the water in your shady of the backwater, throwing pebbles into it, diverging circles can lead to similar thoughts of observers at the most remote ends.
The obligation not to abandon Kameshkov took over 35 states. Of course, they could not have foreseen that in the very near future they would be expected to decay on another empire. It is difficult to judge how much the Helsinki precedent influenced the leadership of the post -Soviet states, which gained arbitrary borders, often across the Globe, often across the tribes and peoples, but in general, if you close their eyes to relatively short episodes, tiraspol, Abkhazia or the Uzbek massacre in Kyrgyzstan, etiquette was observed and the massive front of the territories did not take the territories.
However, in March of this year, the whole painstakingly built international structure was brought down, and the point here is not just in the annexation of Putin's part of the Ukrainian territory. The annexation has become something much more than it seems to its Kremlin authors. She blew up the Helsinki consensus. And for sure, even many of those who did not condemn aggression or simply said nothing, made important amendments to their long -term political plans. It is easy to guess that some of these amendments are not in favor of Russia.
The reaction of the West, and not just the West, to Crimean events must be understood and predicted precisely in the Helsinki context. Russia's attempts to justify its actions with a fictitious referendum by diplomats, discarding centuries -old conventions, they openly call a lie, but an attempt to refer to the Kosovo precedent looks even more clumsy. The late NATO intervention in the conflict was motivated by ethnic cleaning that began in the region, but no sovereignty became the reason for the annexation of Kosovo Albania: regardless of the mutual sympathy of the population of both territories, all participants rejected this version of the development, understanding which bank with scorpions would open. All the precedents of the Crimean Anschlus are strictly pre-war, and probably someone, looking at the diverging circles, begins to collect stones a little.
Alexey Tsvetkov-New York Political Commentator, Poet and Publicist
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