http://en.rian. ru/analysis/ 20081001/ 117364733. html
Russian Information Agency Novosti
October 1, 2008
From Munich to Kosovo
Russian Information Agency Novosti
October 1, 2008
From Munich to Kosovo
John Laughland
The 70th anniversary of the Munich agreement, reached
on 30th September 1938, opens what will doubtless now
be many years of formal reminiscence about the Second
World War.
As the events of the 1930s and 1940s recede in time,
indeed, the shadows they cast over the present seem to
grow ever longer. Contemporary politics is now guided
by only a single (and negative) moral lodestar: the
black hole of Nazism.
The memory of Munich is therefore very important.
The agreement between Britain, France and Fascist
Italy to allow Nazi Germany to annex the Sudetenland
(the Western, German-inhabited parts of
Czechoslovakia) was the fruit of that policy known as
appeasement by which London and Paris tried to mollify
Hitler. The failure of this policy became
spectacularly obvious when Hitler occupied all of the
Czech lands in March 1939 and then attacked Poland on
1st September 1939.
As a result, Munich stands as a symbol for shameful
capitulation towards aggression.
Faced with the threat of the use of force by Hitler,
the Western powers agreed to destroy the very state
they had themselves created at Versailles only twenty
years previously. Czechoslovakia' s immediate
neighbours behaved no better: Poland, which later
succeeded in presenting itself as the supreme victim
of World War II, annexed the territory around Teschen,
while Hungary occupied parts of Southern and Eastern
Slovakia.
Munich is therefore frequently invoked, especially by
American neo-conservatives, in justification of
contemporary wars which, they say, are also responses
to aggression. Whether it is with respect to the
Yugoslavia of Slobodan Milosevic in 1999, the Iraq of
Saddam Hussein in 2003, or almost any country or
situation in the world, the mantra is that the
mistakes of 1938 must never be repeated.
How strange, therefore, that in the 70th anniversary
year of Munich, the Western powers have indeed
precisely repeated it.
In February 2008, in the face of the threat of the use
of force by Albanian separatists in Serbia, the United
States and the European Union recognised the
independence of Kosovo.
They had in fact strongly encouraged the original
proclamation of independence, and indeed the use of
force itself to the extent that they attacked
Yugoslavia in 1999 in support of the Albanian cause.
They thereby unilaterally destroyed the territorial
integrity of Serbia, just as the integrity of
Czechoslovakia was destroyed 70 years ago.
The EU then immediately dispatched a 2,000 strong team
of administrators to run the province, which in any
case is already home to a massive United States
military base housing thousands of GIs.
To that extent, the "independence" of Kosovo resembles
the bogus "independence" of Slovakia under the puppet
regime of Monsignor Tiso, which Hitler encouraged Tiso
to proclaim in March 1939 and which he used as a
pretext for the simultaneous German occupation of the
Czech lands.
Both recognitions destroyed the governments of the
countries affected.
In 1938, Munich led to the immediate collapse of the
patriotic government of President Edvard Benes; in
2008, the recognition of Kosovo immediately destroyed
the government of Vojislav Kostunica, the very man the
West hailed as a great democrat in 2000 when he
toppled Sloboan Milosevic from power.
In Prague in 1938, a collaborationist government took
power under Emil Hacha, who promised to try to protect
Czechoslovakia' s position in the New European Order
which was then emerging. (Many of his ministers were
convicted as war criminals in 1946.)
In 2008, the new Belgrade government under the
leadership of the Democratic Party President, Boris
Tadic, has similarly confirmed that Serbia's
"principal strategic goal" is to become a member of
the European Union - the same organisation which now
illegally administers Kosovo. (The EU administration
is illegal because United Nations Security Council
1244, passed in the aftermath of the NATO attack on
Yugoslavia, reaffirmed that Kosovo is part of Serbia
and that it is administered by the UN; its existence
emphasises that the so-called "independence" of Kosovo
is, in reality, a kind of annexation.)
The parallel even extends to the last-ditch attempts
made respectively by Prague and Belgrade to hold on to
their territories.
President Benes negotiated with Konrad Henlein, the
Sudeten German leader, and promised both substantial
autonomy for the German-inhabited parts of the country
and a cabinet post for Henlein himself.
The government of Vojislav Kostunica was prepared to
give so much autonomy to Kosovo that the province
would have been freer in Serbia than it now is as a
US-EU protectorate.
In both 1938 and 2008, more importantly, the domestic
negotiations then under way were deliberately wrecked
by outside intervention.
Hitler's occupation of the Czech lands in March 1939,
on the basis that the "artificial state" of
Czechoslovakia had collapsed and that Germany needed
to preserve peace and stability, then invoked exactly
the same logic as the Western interventions in the
former Yugoslavia today.
It is obvious that the EU and the US, unlike Nazi
Germany, do not secretly harbour any plans for
wholesale genocide.
The evil they have perpetrated is therefore not in the
same league as Hitler's.
But it is evil nonetheless, in particular because it
represents a unilateral abrogation, backed by military
force, of international laws (general principles of
law as well as UN Security Council resolutions) to
which these powers have themselves signed up.
It is here that the similarity with Munich is
strongest. As for the consequences of the Kosovo
recognition, it appears, also like Munich, to have
started a dangerous ball rolling in the Caucasus. It
must be our fervent hope that the parallels stop now.
John Laughland, a British historian and journalist, is
director of studies at the Institute of Democracy and
Cooperation in Paris.