Golan Heights, Kosovo and Crimea: A Case Study in Hypocrisy and Double Standards
The Golan Heights form part of the sovereign territory of the state of Syria. It, along with the West Bank of Palestine (then part of Jordan) and the Gaza strip were seized by Israel at the conclusion of the Six Day War between Israel, Egypt, Syria and Jordan in June 1967 [...]
The recent announcement by United States President Donald Trump that the US will recognise Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights draws attention yet again to the double standards applied by NATO and its satraps including Australia to the issues of territorial integrity, the right to self-determination, and international law. Three cases illustrate the duplicity and double standards of the Western nations. They may be reviewed chronologically.
A picture taken on July 4, 2018 from the Israeli-annexed Syrian Golan Heights shows displaced Syrians from the province of Daraa staging a protest (top L) calling for international protection, in the Syrian the village of al-Rafid, near the border fence with Israel. / AFP PHOTO / JALAA MAREY
The Golan Heights form part of the sovereign territory of the state of Syria. It, along with the West Bank of Palestine (then part of Jordan) and the Gaza strip were seized by Israel at the conclusion of the Six Day War between Israel, Egypt, Syria and Jordan in June 1967. Israel has remained in occupation of the West Bank and the Golan Heights ever since. It maintains a blockade on Gaza to the immense suffering of Gaza’s inhabitants.
It is well-established international law (Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949) that states may not continue to occupy territory seized as a result of war. On 22ndof November 1967 the United Nations Security Council in resolution 242 unanimously called on Israel to withdraw its forces from occupied territory. This was ignored by Israel, just as it has violated 32 United Nations resolutions since 1968, easily the single biggest offender (Turkey is second with 24 violations over the same time period).
In 1981 Israel passed the Golan Heights Law in which it purported to annex the Syrian Golan Heights. United Nations Security Council resolution 497 of 17th of December 1981 declared that purported annexation “null and void and without legal effect.”
That Israel continues to ignore its obligations under international law is not surprising. That the United States, other NATO countries, and Australia not only do not impose any sanctions on Israel for its continued violations, it does not even permit the discussion of such a possibility. Even to raise the issue invites immediate allegations of anti-Semitism and other absurdities from the immensely powerful Jewish lobby in most western states.
Trump’s announcement follows a similar declaration last year to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. This is also not only a violation of international law, it is contrary to resolutions the United States itself has supported in the past (as with the Golan Heights).
Kosovo’s case is totally different but it raises a number of relevant points. Kosovo is ethnically and linguistically Albanian, although it formed part of the former Yugoslavia. There were strong elements within Kosovo that wanted independence from Yugoslavia.
That independence movement was supported by the United States. Between March and June 1999 the United States bombed Serbia to encourage the Serbs to withdraw their military forces from Kosovo. The bombing was without Security Council approval, was not within the provisions of the United Nations Charter, and was accordingly a gross violation of international law.
At the cessation of the bombing, on 10 June 1999, United Nations Security Council resolution 1244 gave Kosovo autonomy within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. On the 17th February 2008 Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Yugoslavia. There was no referendum, but it is fair to say that the declaration was supported by the majority of Kosovans, especially those of Albanian ethnicity who comprised 88% of Kosovo’s population.
On 8 October 2008 the United Nations General Assembly asked the International Court of Justice for an advisory opinion on the Kosovo declaration of Independence. Their decision was announced on 22nd July 2010. The court noted the lengthy history of unilateral declarations of independence since the 17th century, with most of them opposed by the parent state.
The court concluded that “international law contained no prohibition of declarations of independence” (paragraph 79) and that “the declaration of 17th February 2008 did not violate general international law” (paragraph 84).
The United States had a particular interest in Kosovo, including in particular being able to establish a substantial military base there (Camp Bond Steel). That base functions, inter alia, as a major transit point for Afghan heroin under the control of United States and Allied forces in Afghanistan.
No sanctions were applied to the United States for its illegal bombing of Syria, nor on Kosovo for its unilateral declaration of independence. The majority of the world’s countries now recognise Kosovo as a separate independent state.
Crimea was factually different again, but also contains several relevant points. Crimea had been part of the Russian Empire since 1783. On 18 February 1954 the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR issued a decree transferring Crimea to Ukraine. There was no referendum of the Crimean people and had there been, the overwhelming likelihood is that the transfer would have been rejected.
The transfer seems to have been the brainchild of then Soviet leader Khrushchev, himself a Ukrainian. The absence of democratic procedures is reinforced by the fact that the transfer was itself a violation of Soviet law.
In the following decades there was an uneasy relationship between the Crimeans and the Ukrainian government. Crimea enjoyed the status of being an “autonomous republic”. That uneasiness came to a head in February 2014 when the duly elected and internationally recognised government of Ukraine was overthrown in an American organized and financed coup d’état.
The new Ukrainian government was anti-Russian and frankly fascist in its orientation. Neither fact was acceptable to the Crimeans who, like the Albanians in Kosovo were overwhelmingly of one language, culture, ethnicity and identification with all things Russian.
A referendum was quickly organized (unlike Kosovo) and there was a voter turnout of 83.1%, of whom 95.5% voted in favour of reunification with Russia. The Russian Duma in turn voted to accept Crimea back into the Russian Federation.
The western media and politicians consistently use the term “annexation” to describe the reincorporation of Crimea into the Russian Federation. The OED defines annexation as synonymous with “seizure, occupation, invasion, conquest, takeover, appropriation and expropriation.” None of these terms accurately describes the sequence of events in Crimea.
There is no difference in international law between what Kosovo did with the approval of the International Court of Justice and what the Crimeans did. The latter was arguably much more democratic as it followed an overwhelming referendum result in support of departure from Ukraine and rejoining with Russia.
The consequences however, have been very different. Russia has been subject to endless vilification. The Russian state and many political and business leaders have been subjected to sanctions. One has only to ask: would this have happened if Crimea had voted to leave the Russian Federation and join Ukraine? The overwhelming probability is that Crimea would have been welcomed with open arms and its people applauded for making the ‘right’ choice.
Crimea is strategically significant, which is why the British fought Russians there in the Crimean war (1853-1856), and why a prime geopolitical objective of the US interference in Ukraine was to deprive the Russians of the naval base at Sevastopol.
The history of these three episodes (Golan, Kosovo and Crimea) exemplifies the double standards and hypocrisy that characterizes western geopolitics. Trump’s latest statements on the Golan Heights only reinforce the point.
Originally published on 2019-03-28
About the author: James O’Neill, an Australian-based Barrister at Law and geopolitical analyst, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.
What could cause Russia to invade IsraelAt the time, Israel’s Prime Minister had flown to Washington, and was making a desperate bid to get Obama’s support for Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.Only a few weeks earlier a discovery had been made that would serve to increase tensions on the question of sovereignty over the Golan – huge oil deposits were found on the Golan Heights, and verified by an Israeli company.Yet, weeks later, Benjamin Netanyahu returned to Israel having failed to secure Obamas support.It wasnt long before the United Nations – including Russia – condemned Israels “occupation” of the ...
Future war “may see attacks via computer viruses, worms, logic bombs, and trojan horses rather than bullets, bombs, and missiles” [Steven Metz, Armed Conflict in the 21st Century: The Information Revolution and Post-Modern Warfare, Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, 2000, xiii].First partThe facilities of the Internet in politicsThe Internet or the WWW (World Wide Web) became massively widespread around the globe since the late 1980s or more precisely since 1989 – in the same year when the Berlin Wall collapsed and, therefore, enabled the Cold War 1.0 to enter the final stage of its end. That is why both of these ...
RT: Kosovo wants to establish an army and has received several Humvee armoured vehicles from the USA. Although there was official NATO restraint, how much is the establishment of a Kosovo Army a fixed development?Marcus Papadopoulos: Kosovo is, effectively, a NATO protectorate today – and has been ever since Belgrade lost control of this Serbian province in 1999. It follows, therefore, that the illegal entity which is the Republic of Kosovo will begin the process of creating its own armed forces so that, in time, Kosovo will gain entry into NATO.RT: The EU has rejected the introduction of Kosovo sanctions ...
A study by a Toronto-based consulting and research company has revealed that over the past fifty years mainstream reporting about Israel has been distorted to portray the Jewish state in positive terms while ignoring the plight of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation. The media study, based on a computer analysis of 50 years of data, found that major U.S. newspapers have provided consistently skewed, pro-Israel reporting on Israel-Palestine. The slanting in news coverage included subtle manipulations like using word associations favorable to Israel and derogatory to Palestinians as well as the persistent publication of stories praising Israel while also avoiding reporting ...
Another NATO Intervention?Less than a dozen years after NATO bombed Yugoslavia into pieces, detaching the province of Kosovo from Serbia, there are signs that the military alliance is gearing up for another victorious little “humanitarian war”, this time against Libya. The differences are, of course, enormous. But let’s look at some of the disturbing similarities.A demonized leaderAs “the new Hitler”, the man you love to hate and need to destroy, Slobodan Milosevic was a neophyte in 1999 compared to Muammar Qaddafi today. The media had less than a decade to turn Milosevic into a monster, whereas with Qaddafi, they’ve been ...
Russian President Vladimir Putin put it succinctly when he recently warned that prospects for peace in Ukraine were negligible as long as the current authorities in Kiev remain in power. Worse, given a new rash of provocations by the Kiev regime, the entire region is being threatened with conflict, and even all-out war.It seems clear – and criminally reprehensible – that the Kiev regime and its President Petro Poroshenko are intent on dragging the United States and the NATO military alliance into a war with Russia. The incendiary conduct of Ukrainian politicians and their military is that of a regime ...
“Russia suspected of election scheme. U.S. probes plan to sow voter distrust.”That’s the Washington Post page-one lead headline of September 6. Think about it. The election that Americans are suffering through, cringing in embarrassment, making them think of moving abroad, renouncing their citizenship; an election causing the Founding Fathers to throw up as they turn in their graves … this is because the Russian Devils are sowing voter distrust! Who knew?But of course, that’s the way Commies are – Oh wait, I forgot, they’re no longer Commies. So what are they? Ah yes, they still have that awful old hangup so worthy ...
Several years ago two very distinguished American scholars wrote a book, The Israel Lobby.The book made a very understated case that the Israel Lobby has far more power over the US government and media than is good for America or Israel, as it silences constructive critics who are Israel’s friends. The two scholars were demonized by the Israel Lobby as advocating the return of the Holocaust.The Israel Lobby presented itself as just a poor little weak thing unable to stand up to all the Nazis assailing Israel. Meanwhile the US Congress was unanimously passing outrageous resolutions handed to it by ...
It passed more than the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War in 1914−1918. Proportionally, in the war, Serbia suffered mostly among all countries involved in the conflict as it lost ¼ of its population followed by 50% of industrial destruction. The first war crimes or even the genocide occurred on the territory of Serbia but on other hand, the first allied victory on the battlefield against the Central Powers happened as well as in Serbia – the 1914 Battle of Cer in the Machva District with the administrative center of Shabac. Before and during the Great War, ...
America is coming to the rescue of Al Qaeda under a humanitarian mandate. The unspoken agenda is to undermine the Liberation of Aleppo. The pretext and justification for these actions are based on America’s “responsibility to protect” (R2P) the “moderates” in Aleppo from Syrian and Russian attacks and bombing raids.On October 3, the US State Department announced the suspension of bilateral relations with Russia pertaining to Syria (see document below), in response to which, France’s foreign Minister Jean Marc Ayrault was called upon to intermediate at the diplomatic level. Pointing his finger at Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Jean Marc Ayrault casually accused Moscow ...
On March 24th, 1999, NATO launched its 78-day round the clock aerial assault on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia without the approval of the United Nations Security Council. Over a thousand NATO warplanes delivered over 2,000 airstrikes in nearly 40,000 sorties, dropping over 20,000 bombs over the former Yugoslavia, killing thousands of civilian men, women, and children, as well as upwards of a thousand Yugoslav soldiers and police.[1] [2] [3] NATO employed weapons considered criminal by international law such as depleted uranium and cluster bombs.[4] [5] [6] [7]The popular narrative is that is that the Western powers dropped these bombs ...
At the age of 15 on a riverbank he was shot eight times just for being Serbian. He survived and a few days later during the religious holiday of Transfiguration he was out of his coma. But until now he has not received an answer to his question: who shot the children bathing in the river near the Kosovo village of Gorazdevac on August 13, 2003? In his interview to the Voice of Russia Bogdan Bukumiric tells a wonderful story of his rescue.“It is not so scary to die as to be buried alive” – this is the inscription on ...
The history behind Palestine and Israel is a history of Jewish European settler-colonialism — i.e., Zionism. And since racism is a symptom and a tool of settler-colonialism, Zionism is also viewed as anti-Semitism, and as ethno-supremacy or Jewish supremacy, Arabophobia and Islamophobia.The triangulation of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and Arabophobia in the history of Palestine and Israel is part of the settler-colonial movement of Zionism and is not a “new history” in the sense of the term as introduced by Israeli historian Benny Morris in 1980 to humanize, in Israeli academic discourse, the victims of Zionism. It simply reflects modern terminology and ...
The book of evidence about ethnic cleansing and policy of genocide committed by the neo-Nazi Ustashi government in Croatia against its own citizens of the Serb nationality in August 1995. That was a third genocide against the Serbs committed by the Croats in the 20th century: 1. during the WWI; 2. during the WWII; 3. in the 1990s. Today, Croatia is almost totally ethnically cleanced from all non-Croats like Kosovo and Albania from all non-Albanians. During the WWII, around 700.000 Serbs were brutally killed by the Croats and Bosnian Muslims on the territory of the Independent State of Croatia.Read our ...
Albin Kurti is on the verge of becoming the next Prime Minister of Kosovo after he and opposition chairman Isa Mustafa confirmed last week that the two rival political parties had made progress to create a coalition government. Mustafa said that Kurti can rightfully become the next Prime Minister if he can convince the three remaining parliamentarians, representing the Bosniak, Turkish and Roma minorities to enter a coalition – and it appears they will.What does the accession of Albin Kurti mean for the future of Kosovo?Kurti does not recognize the flag and anthem of Kosovo, as well as the Kosovar ...
The superhighway to disaster is already being paved.From Donald Trump’s first days in office, news of the damage to America’s international stature has come hard and fast. As if guided by some malign design, the new president seemed to identify the key pillars that have supported U.S. global power for the past 70 years and set out to topple each of them in turn. By degrading NATO, alienating Asian allies, cancelling trade treaties, and slashing critical scientific research, the Trump White House is already in the process of demolishing the delicately balanced architecture that has sustained Washington’s world leadership since ...
In a remarkable book, 1939: The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II, the Canadian historian Michael Jabara Carley describes how, at the end of the 1930s, the Soviet Union repeatedly tried, but finally failed, to conclude a pact of mutual security, in other words a defensive alliance, with Britain and France. This proposed arrangement was intended to counter Nazi Germany, which, under Hitler’s dictatorial leadership, had been behaving more and more aggressively, and it was likely to involve some other countries, including Poland and Czechoslovakia, that had reason to fear German ambitions. The protagonist of this ...
Israel will soon bar all access to a Palestinian village whose farmers have continued a tradition stretching back thousands of years of tending stone terraces to grow crops in the fertile uplands outside Jerusalem.These farmers are among the latest victims of Israeli efforts to put in place the final pieces of a Greater Jewish Jerusalem that will require “ethnically cleansing” tens of thousands of Palestinians from a city their families have lived and worked in for generations, human rights groups have warned.The villagers of Walaja, many of them holding Israeli papers as “residents” of Jerusalem, were warned in November that they ...
Up to June 1967, a border separated Jews living in Israel and Palestinians residing in the West Bank and Gaza. The Six Day War, which occurred exactly fifty years ago, erased that line. Israel has been occupying these territories ever since. This has been the source of an endless conflict between Jews and Arabs. Who started that war? Having won the war, Israel set out to give an answer to that question which would suit its needs.To cement its hold over the new territories Israel had sought to mold the story of the Six Day. The attempt to frame the ...
The world is lectured frequently by the United States of America — the One Indispensable Nation — about how to behave, on the grounds that, as President Obama declared, «from London and Prague, to Tokyo and Seoul, to Rio and Jakarta... there is a new confidence in our leadership».He didn’t mention Amman, Baghdad, Beijing, Beirut, Caracas or the capitals of so many other countries in which the majority of citizens, according to the Pew Research Centre and other pollsters such as Marketwatch, regard the United States as an aggressive and malign manipulator of world affairs.Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton went further than President Obama in glorifying ...
The magazine is covering the research gaps uncovered by global Western hoax mainstream media platforms and academic teaching & research institutions.
This is an alternative information & academic research digest platform with the purpose to offer an alternative “another side of the truth”.
The magazine is independent, private, and free of any influence by any institution, organization, government, or pressure group. URL: www.global-politics.eu
