IT IS GROSSLY unfair for the families of the 298 people who died in MH17 that the incident which took the lives of their loved ones is likely to be seen as a trigger for a new cold war, instead of the awful tragedy that it is.
In a world that reacts with millisecond speed to news fed unfiltered through social media networks, the immediate politicisation of the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 has loomed far above its human, and family, dimension. All this has happened because the flight on 17 July, from Amsterdam in the Netherlands to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, ended with sickening abruptness in the fields of eastern Ukraine, which is a war zone, as are the skies above.
Before the shock set in around the world — for the questions piled high over the disappearance of MH370 are still unanswered, more than four months on — the accusations about who were responsible for the heinous crime began to be prepared. That these accusations, at the earliest stages of a crash such as this, and in a region that is being wrenched apart by war, took on a West-versus-East cast is objectionable, but that is the nature of bloc geopolitics today.
That is why, within scant hours of the news being reported that a passenger airliner, a Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777, had crashed presumably because of being shot down, the blame began to be pinned onto Russia and the forces resisting the regime in Kiev who are fighting in the east of Ukraine. Sadly and in a most destructive manner, this is the line that was begun and maintained by the ‘West’ — by which is now commonly meant the US and its allies in western Europe, principally Britain, and an assortment of non-European allies of the USA in the OECD countries.
In this grim equation, the ‘East’ is now Russia and those whom the American and European mainstream media call ‘rebels’ in eastern Ukraine. As a non-partisan perusal of reportage from the region can confirm, those ‘rebels’ are residents fighting for their lives against a regime in Kiev whose military forces are bombarding central areas of Donetsk and Lugansk cities, which have declared themselves independent. Only a week before the shooting down of MH17 these resident ‘rebels’ had announced they feared a humanitarian crisis because of the ferocity of the assault by the Kiev forces. It is these people, fighting for their lives, who have spared their time and meagre resources to help secure the crash site of the downed airliner and to retrieve the bodies of the victims — in the middle of a war zone — who are vilified by the US and its allies, and directly by American President Barack Obama as being “an insult to the international community”. Yet one member of the ‘international community’ (a term that issues regularly from American leaders) praised the local authorities for having made arrangements to retrieve the bodies and to hand over the ‘black box’ recorders from wreckage of MH17 — Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak.
Early in this macabre opera of one-way blame surrounding MH17, Russian President Vladimir Putin had urged all sides to maintain objectivity until more was known about the circumstance and causes. The advice was ignored by the forces that have been arrayed against Russia, particularly since the uprisings in Kiev in February and the Crimea referendum in March, and which surrounded MH17 with a propaganda firestorm and scarce evidence.
For history not to treat the MH17 tragedy as a marker of the new cold war, objectivity must return quickly.