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What The US Representative to the UN
Should Know About Annexed Crimea
By Arina TSUKANOVA
February 09/10,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "SCF
" -
The speech by the new US permanent
representative to the UN Security Council, Nikki Haley,
at a Security Council meeting on 3 February backed up
the idea that the foreign policies of two American
administrations – the previous one and the current one –
will be continued. Haley said exactly the same as
Samantha Power before her: «Our Crimea-related sanctions
will remain in place until Russia returns control of the
peninsula to Ukraine».
The White House supported Haley’s
statement on the need for Crimea to be returned to
Ukraine, and the White House Press Secretary, Sean
Spicer, stated during a briefing that: «With respect to
the sanctions, I think Ambassador Haley made it very
clear of our concern with Russia’s occupation of Crimea.
I think she spoke very forcefully and clearly on that».
It is interesting that Mrs Haley was
speaking about the territory of Crimea rather than the
people. I wonder how this American imagines the «return»
of the Crimean Peninsula to Ukraine – with the people or
without them? It’s a pity that this question has
remained unanswered.
Do the Crimean people regard themselves
as Ukrainian? And does Nikki Haley know the answer to
this most important question? It is unlikely that the US
ambassador to the UN wants to move the people out of
Crimea so that she can give the peninsula back to
Ukraine. Especially as she would have to move not only
the living, but also the dead, since the ‘Ukrainian’
history of Crimea is very short, around a quarter of a
century. It is surprising that the citizen of a country
whose constitution begins with the words «We the people
of the United States...» is doing everything to avoid a
conversation at the level of «We the people of
Crimea...» But everything really does look different
from that position.
From the point of view of the people who
live on the Crimean Peninsula, Ukraine annexed Crimea in
1991, grossly violating the rules of international law.
Crimea became part of independent Ukraine illegally, and
repeated attempts by the Crimean people to redress this
injustice met with opposition from Kiev.
In order to see this, Nikki Haley just
needs to be made aware of a few facts.
In 1990, the Parliament of the Ukrainian
SSR adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty, which
hid behind the words «Expressing the will of the people
of Ukraine...» and spoke of a new state being
established within the existing boundaries of the
Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic based on the
Ukrainian nation’s right to self-determination. But did
the Ukrainian nation have the right to
self-determination in Crimea if the number of Ukrainians
on the peninsula made up only 25.8 percent of the
population?
The answer is obvious – no, it did not.
This was the first step in the annexation of Crimea by
the Ukrainian state, which, at that point, was the
Ukrainian SSR separate from the Soviet Union.
On 20 January 1991, the first Crimean
referendum was held on the restoration of the Crimean
Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic as a subject of the
USSR and as a party to the Union Treaty. (Between 1921
and 1945, the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist
Republic was part of the RSFSR.) With a high turnout of
81.37 percent, 93.26 percent of the Crimean population
voted in favour of restoring autonomy. On 12 February
1991, the restoration of the Crimean ASSR was confirmed
by law: the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR accepted
the results of the referendum. The Crimean people were
clearly self-determining, and this self-determination
differed hugely from the self-determination of the
Ukrainian nation.
So what did the Ukrainian state do next?
On 24 August 1991, the Supreme Court of the Ukrainian
SSR, again on the basis of self-determination, declared
the independence of Ukraine, arbitrarily identifying the
Crimean ASSR as a territory of the newly established
state. By doing so, the founders of Ukraine ignored a
law requiring a separate referendum to be held in Crimea
on the Crimean ASSR’s status within Ukraine. This was
done deliberately, since Kiev knew perfectly well that
the people of Crimea would never vote in favour of
becoming part of Ukraine. At the same time, a huge scam
to manipulate history was being prepared: on 1 December
1991, a referendum was held illegally in the Crimean
ASSR that did not deal with the issue of Crimea’s
status, but retroactively confirmed the Ukrainian
Declaration of Independence in the autonomous republic.
Moreover, anyone who had ever stepped foot on the
peninsula was allowed to vote. This was to make it seem
as if the Crimean people supported Ukrainian
independence when, for the most part, they actually
boycotted the referendum. In this underhand way, Ukraine
took its second step towards the annexation of Crimea.
The Crimean ASSR did not agree with the
Ukrainian con artists, however. From the start of 1992,
the number of protests began to increase – the Crimean
people were outraged at the deception and demanded
secession from Ukraine. Under pressure from the people,
the Supreme Soviet of Crimea adopted the Act of State
Independence of the Republic of Crimea, approved its own
constitution, and passed a resolution to hold a
referendum on 2 August 1992. It was another step towards
the self-determination that those Crimeans who felt no
connection to the Ukrainian nation were perfectly
lawfully and legitimately pushing for. The Constitution
of Crimea began with the words: «We the people, who make
up the multi-ethnic nation of Crimea and are united by
centuries-old ties of a common historical fate, are free
and equal in dignity and rights...»
By this time, however, Kiev had already
gotten a taste for it. No one was willing to let go of
the idea of Ukraine annexing Crimea. The referendum was
postponed to a later date (it was held in 1994 in the
form of a public opinion poll) and the Constitution of
Crimea, under pressure from Kiev, was rewritten dozens
of times until the peninsula was tied to Ukraine for
good. The first presidential elections took place in
Crimea in 1994, but by 1995, both the position of
president and the Constitution of Crimea had been
abolished. In late 1998, the Ukrainian authorities
brought the legislation of the Autonomous Republic of
Ukraine completely in line with the legislation of
Ukraine. This was the penultimate step in the annexation
of Crimea, the final step being to deprive Crimea of its
autonomous status by establishing the Crimean Oblast as
part of Ukraine.
Over the next decade, Kiev did not dare
do this, since any attempt to raise the issue of
abolishing Crimean autonomy led to large-scale protests
and demands to restore the 1992 Constitution and the
statehood of the Republic of Crimea. Creeping
Ukrainization was also unsuccessful – moulding Crimea to
be more like Ukraine did not work even in light of the
2001 census, which showed that the Russian population on
the peninsula had fallen by 512,000. The disappearance
of Russian Crimeans cannot be explained by a natural
decline in the population, by migration processes or by
a shift in identification. The figures indicate
something else: Ukraine had simply expunged half a
million Russians from the annexed territory in order to
build a ‘Ukrainian Crimea’. In 2012, the Svoboda Party,
made up of radical Ukrainian nationalists, included the
abolition of Crimean autonomy as part of its party
policy.
The February (2014) uprising in Kiev was
not supported by Crimea, but attempts by Crimeans to
oppose it led to tragedy: on the night of 20 and 21
February, buses taking protesting Crimeans home from a
chaotic Kiev were stopped by armed nationalists in the
small city of Korsun-Shevchenkivskyi. The Crimeans were
beaten, tortured, forced to sing the Ukrainian national
anthem under threat of death, and made to pick up broken
glass from the buses’ windows, which had been smashed
with sticks, with their bare hands.
In a referendum on 16 March 2014, the
Crimean people once again confirmed their historical
choice, just as the United States once did when they
broke away from the British Crown. In the US Declaration
of Independence, it says that the Creator endowed people
with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness. Just like Americans, Crimeans also
want to live, be free and be happy. That is precisely
why they spent decades trying to break away from the
Ukrainian trident, something they finally managed in
2014 when they returned to Russia.
It seems that Nikki Haley, like millions
of her fellow Americans, does not know the history of
the Crimean people’s struggle against its illegal
annexation by Ukraine, which began in 1990 and ended in
2014. Questioning the choice of the Crimean people in
2014 seems to be the reason why the US permanent
representative to the UN Security Council is keeping
quiet about the Ukrainian annexation of Crimea in the
1990s. After all, no one in the world could doubt the
results of the Crimean referendum held on 20 January
1991. If it is a case of the deliberate distortion of
facts, however, then the situation looks a lot worse.
Only an ignorant or a dishonest person
could deny the fact that there has never been and never
could be any kind of «self-determination of the
Ukrainian nation» in Crimea, owing to the fact that
Ukrainians living on the peninsula are very much in the
minority.
If you were to side with the Crimean
people, then the history of Crimea’s reunification with
Russia becomes simple and understandable. It is enough
to know that for each territory, whether that is the US
or Crimea, exactly the same words are key: «We the
people...» Because don’t you think that when she says
the word «Crimea», Nikki Haley is only talking about the
territory without the people?
The views
expressed in this article are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of
Information Clearing House. |
