Martyr or killer? Corsican nationalist's death inflames island

People waved Corsican flags and held candles as the hearse carrying Colonna's coffin arrived ahead of his burial Friday 

Pascal POCHARD-CASABIANCA AFP


Issued on: 25/03/2022 

Ajaccio (France) (AFP) – A jailed Corsican nationalist whose death in prison has turned him into a martyr for some is to be buried on Friday amid unease in Paris about fierce public support for the convicted killer.

Yvan Colonna, a former goat herder on the French Mediterranean island, was announced dead on Monday after being strangled and attacked in prison on March 2.

The 61-year-old was serving a life sentence after his conviction of assassinating a senior French official in 1998, but he is seen as a hero by some for his role in the violent struggle for Corsican independence.

"We want to show to the French state that there is a Corsican people," local musician and pro-independence activist Jean Mattei, 72, told AFP on Wednesday night during a vigil for Colonna attended by thousands.

"When you touch one of us, we're all there, whatever our divisions," he said.

Colonna will be buried Friday in his family fiefdom of Cargese on the rugged western coast of what is known as the Island of Beauty due to its mountains and pristine coastline.

News of the attack against him by an Islamic extremist sparked several nights of rioting in early March and led the government to make a surprise offer of talks about increased autonomy for the island.
Tributes

An estimated 4,000 people lined the streets on Wednesday evening after his body arrived by plane at the island's capital of Ajaccio, many burning flares and flying the black-and-white Corsica flag.

Marches, candle-lit vigils and a decision to lower flags on the regional council building and at Ajaccio airport this week underlined public affection for Colonna while causing deep unease on the French mainland.

French President Emmanuel Macron said the decision to lower flags was "an error and inappropriate" in an interview on Wednesday night.

Colonna was tried and convicted three times for murdering top French official Claude Erignac by shooting him at point-blank range in the head in 1998 as he headed to a theatre performance with his wife.

Although he maintained his innocence, Colonna went on the run before being arrested four years later when police tracked him down to a remote mountainous area in the south of the island.

"The death in the way it happened, in prison, for Yvan Colonna was an offence," Socialist Party leader Olivier Faure told RTL radio on Thursday.

"But to make him into a hero, to give the impression that he is a model for the young generations, is a scandal," he said.

The killing of Colonna and the subsequent riots have given a boost to the Corsican cause, however, with Macron's government agreeing to talks about greater political freedoms for the island.

The leader of Corsica's pro-autonomy regional council, Gilles Simeoni, welcomed the proposals as "important words that open up prospects, but they ought now to be extended and firmed up."

burs-adp/js/yad

Corsican nationalist Colonna dies after attack in jail: France

A symbol of Corsica’s tensions with mainland France dies weeks after falling into a coma following an attack in prison.

Colonna was serving a life sentence at a prison in the southern French city of Arles [French Interior Ministry handout via Reuters]

Published On 22 Mar 202222 Mar 2022

Yvan Colonna, a jailed Corsican nationalist who became a symbol of the Mediterranean island’s tensions with mainland France, has died after falling into a coma following an attack by a fellow inmate, according to the French government.

Corsica has a history of separatist violence and the government is set to keep a close eye on any signs of it, just weeks before France’s presidential election.

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Violent protests rocked the island after Colonna was strangled by another prisoner in early March.

“The dramatic circumstances in which he was killed are clearly very shocking,” French government spokesman Gabriel Attal said in an interview with Europe 1 radio on Tuesday. “It’s necessary now to call for calm and for dialogue.”

Mourners peacefully gathered in two Corsican towns to pay respects to Colonna on Monday evening, local media reported.

Demonstrators hold a banner as they take part in a protest on March 13 [File: Pascal Pochard-Casabianca/AFP]

Colonna was serving a life sentence at a prison in the southern French city of Arles for the 1998 murder of Claude Erignac, who as prefect of Corsica embodied the power of the French state on the island.

Corsican protesters clashed with police after the attack on Colonna, prompting an emergency visit by Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin who said Paris could discuss autonomy for the island.

Roger Antech, editor-in-chief of newspaper Corse Matin, told FranceInfo radio that he felt the situation would calm down out of respect for Colonna’s family until his burial, but that there was “no guarantee as to what happens afterwards”.

French prosecutors launched a “terrorism” investigation after the attack on Colonna.

“All light must be shed on the sequence of events that led to this unacceptable situation,” Attal said.

TOY SOLDIERS & CONSCRIPTS
Ukraine war: why are so many Russian generals being killed?

THE CONVERSATION
Published: March 22, 2022

Yet another Russian general, Lieutenant-General Andrei Mordvichev, is reported to have been killed by Ukrainian forces in a conflict that is less than a month old. Mordvichev’s death was announced on Ukraine social media on March 20 2022, but has yet to be confirmed by the Kremlin. His death, if confirmed, will bring the number of Russian generals killed by the Ukrainian armed forces since the war began to five.

The role of an army general is to command and supervise strategy rather than conduct tactical actions on the ground. As a result, casualties at this rank have tended to be low. Comparing this figure of five reported dead in less than a month with the total number of US generals killed between 1965 and 1975 in Vietnam – just 12 – you have to ask why so many Russian generals are dying.

It is very likely that the targeting of Russian senior ground commanders forms part of a wider Ukrainian strategy to disrupt their enemies’ command-and-control network. The Ukrainian forces are aware of the leadership approach that has been adopted by the Russian armed forces since 2001, much of which is based on international analysis conducted by the US and Nato agencies. Its rigid hierarchical system, overseen by an autocratic leader in Vladimir Putin, condemns junior ranks to a chain of perpetual fear, with little allocated for independent thinking or decision-making.

Putin manages the military in much the same way as he does the wider Russian state, choosing loyalty to him above professional competence. This is no more clearly illustrated than the choice of Sergei Shoigu as Russian defence minister in 2012. Lacking any military experience or understanding, Shoigu was chosen as he posed little political threat to Putin or established military tradition. He has been criticised by many for failing to introduce major reforms after the Georgian campaign in 2008, which highlighted key failings in the Russian military in carrying out combat operations.

Corruption in the Russian military

Corruption is endemic within all aspects of Russian life – and this includes the military. A recent report, published as part of the London-based International Government Defence Integrity Index, identified that the Russian military had a corruption risk of high “owing to extremely limited external oversight of the policies, budgets, activities and acquisitions of defence institutions”. The report also highlighted a lack of transparency on procurement and the issuing of defence contracts, with a rating of only 36 out of 100 in this category. Loyalty to Putin may have landed senior leaders a place in the inner circle, but this has been at the expense of the personnel they serve.

The public procurement sector often carries with it opportunities for corrupt practices, and this is no different in the Russian state. A report issued by the Risk and Compliance Portal (2021), which examines corrupt practices within states, claims that: “Bribes, kickbacks and other irregular payments are often exchanged to obtain public contracts. Companies report favouritism in decisions of government officials, and public funds are frequently diverted due to corruption.”

The report also states that military contracts were more likely to receive approval based not on the quality or standard of the bid, but rather on the company’s personal relationships with state officials and loyalty to the Kremlin.

Corruption in Russia’s armed forces may have damaged its effectiveness as a fighting unit. 

EPA/Yuri Kochetov

Military reforms over the past decade have failed to enforce a clear agenda of development and instead have allowed many of their military units to become low grade and poorly trained. A recent US Defence intelligence assessment suggested that Russian forces had sold much of the best equipment during the early months of their deployment to the Ukraine border in 2021, due to poor pay and conditions.

On average, Russian professional soldiers of junior ranks earn US$480 (£360) a month, whereas their equivalents in the Ukrainian army are receiving three times that figure. The division between pay, working conditions and morale could play a big role in determining the outcome of this conflict.

Sitting targets

It is true that senior commanders have always been exposed to becoming targets on the battlefield, with the Red Army using this to devastating effect in the ruins of Stalingrad in 1942, in which Soviet snipers targeted both junior and senior ranks. However, what differs between this conflict and those fought in the past is the proximity to the front line in which Russian generals appear to be operating.

The lack of confidence that they have in their lines of communication and the standards of ground commanders – the result of chronic levels of corruption – is providing clear opportunities for the Ukrainian military to strike at the few competent military leaders.

At Stalingrad, the Wehrmacht officer commanding, General Friedrich Paulus, was at least 15 miles away from the city during the battle. This ensured that he and his staff maintained a wider strategic view, placing confidence in his junior ranks rather than exposing himself or his command team to tactical-level decision-making.

Ukraine has several well-equipped combat units who would be capable of carrying out specialist missions, so it would seem that any opportunity might be taken to target the leadership through assassination, designed to disrupt the lines of communication, cause confusion, and slow the Russian advance further.

It is also hugely symbolic and provides a clear example to the Russian rank and file that their enemies can target senior leadership with ease, demonstrating a failure of the system to protect their senior staff. It is a clear symbol of a weak and incompetent communication system that is forcing generals to move from strategic to tactical decision making.

This causes mistrust in the effectiveness of chains of command, with doubt spreading much faster than conviction. Meanwhile, the slower the advance becomes, the more time the Ukrainian command has to prepare their centres of population for the advancing enemy forces.

Author

Jonathan Jackson
Senior Teaching Fellow in Professional Policing and Security 

School of Social Sciences, Birmingham City University

Ukraine’s music reveals the past and points to the country’s future

Maria Sonevytsky, an ethnomusicology researcher, discusses how Ukraine’s rich musical traditions are bound to sovereignty and national identity

BY MARIAM KIPAROIDZE
22 MARCH, 2022
Q&A

One of the core beliefs of Russian leadership about Ukraine is that the country’s claims on nationhood are baseless. That “Ukraine is a muddle not a state,” as the Kremlin’s former chief ideologist, Vladislav Surkov, has said. These claims rely on historical exaggerations, gross mythmaking, dangerous distortions, false pronouncements, and outright fictions.

Maria Sonevytsky’s work has something to say about that. She has been studying Ukrainian national identity and Ukraine’s historical music for years. A professor of anthropology and music at Bard College, she is the author of Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine. In a conversation edited for length and clarity, she spoke to me about how Ukraine’s musical inheritance can provide context and insight into Ukrainian history and national identity.

Tell me about your work in Ukrainian music and how it helps shed light on the current situation.

I decided that I wanted to divide my research between Crimea and western Ukraine.

And what I started observing was that many people had very complex feelings about whether they wanted Ukraine to go in the direction of the European Union or Russia. Everyone I spent time with was not in favor of going toward Russia, but they were also critical of the European Union. They didn’t have simple ideas that Europe was some sort of utopia. I saw this expressed constantly through music.

My project started because Ruslana, a Ukrainian pop star, won the Eurovision Song Contest in 2004. It was a really big deal for some people. They believed, “Uh-huh! Finally, we can show that Ukraine is part of Europe.” For others, it was very embarrassing. They said, “Eurovision is kitsch, and this is not how we want our Ukraine to be defined.”

It became a very fascinating glimpse into just how complex it is to think about how people want to position themselves. So music became a lens through which I could view how culture was, in some ways, imagining a future for Ukraine.

Why is this important?

I think that’s so important, especially when we’re talking about traditional music. I’m usually writing about some sort of hybrid music that uses a combination of traditional gestures with popular music forms. But even when we’re talking about just traditional music, these are all also forward-facing. They’re expressing a wish for the future — even if just a wish for the survival of a past.

Right now, what we’re seeing is not only a denial that Ukraine has a past, but a rejection on the part of the Russians that there could be a Ukrainian future. And these musicians are saying, “No, we have a past and we are projecting it also into the future.”

It’s not a simple history. It’s a very complicated history. Ukraine has had a very complicated relationship to its project of statehood, as do many other countries around the world, including Russia. But Ukrainian history exists and we can actually hear it if we listen to the history of Ukrainian music.

Your book discusses how music got dragged into Russia’s propaganda on Ukrainian nationalists and Nazis. Could you tell me more about that?

There’s one chapter in the book about the Maidan revolution, the band called The Dakh Daughters, and their performance of a song, that they did not want to claim had politics, but they performed it during the revolution and sure enough, the Russian internet immediately started calling them neo-Nazis, neo-fascists.




This is about how Ukrainians are not allowed the possibility of existing as anything but nationalists, that Russian propaganda does not let them have any agency outside of nationalism. And the Dakh Daughters are a clear example of a group that actually wanted so much not to be pigeonholed as Ukrainian musicians. They wanted to be just musicians, they didn’t want to have to serve the state. But they did want to show their support. They ended up performing this quite apolitical song and immediately were called neo-fascists.

If you know the Russian playbook, this is a very old strategy, it goes back to the Russian Empire and it was prevalent in the Soviet Union as well.

What has surprised you the most in your study of how Ukrainian musicians think about Ukraine’s history?

I’m writing a book on the late-Soviet Ukrainian rock scene and specifically in Kyiv. And I’m writing about the first Ukrainian punk rock band to sing in Ukrainian, Vopli Vidopliassova.

They are all Russian-speaking, and as one of the members told me, they all grew up in the “Russkiy Mir” [Russian world]. They started singing in Ukrainian, and they claimed that at the time, it really wasn’t a political statement. They just thought it sounded cool. And they were making fun, in some ways, of the stereotypes of Ukrainians as these kind of hopeless hillbillies.

Most of the band members have now switched to speaking only in Ukrainian for different reasons. In one interview, [a band member] came to understand himself as a formerly colonized subject in a way that he did not understand himself to be in the 1980s. In the 1980s, he really just thought of himself as a punk rocker in Kyiv and wasn’t really that concerned about Ukrainian identity. But in the 1990s, when he started learning about the history of Ukrainian poets who had been repressed and reading the books that had been censored, he started understanding that some of this internalized feeling of inferiority had been part of a colonial campaign.

This has been really poignant for me, to hear these people as they learn and understand the degree to which Ukraine has been targeted by deliberate campaigns that say they have no history of their own, that they have no culture of their own.

I’ve always asked myself, is it fair to think about Ukrainians as colonized people? There’s no question they were in the Russian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Yes, these were colonized peoples, but they were divided between empires. The Soviet Union is a much more complicated case. It wasn’t exactly an empire. And of course, Ukrainians were central in leading it at times.

What songs have you been thinking about as you watch the war in Ukraine?

One of the songs I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is the song “1944” by Jamala, a singer with Crimean Tatar heritage and who has crossed the border with her children, but whose husband has remained behind to defend their home.

When she wrote and performed it in 2016, it was really a plea to understand the plight of Crimean Tatars after the forced occupation of Crimea. And now it’s become a plea to understand the plight of the whole of Ukraine.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Taras Kompanichenko, who has been a key figure in the revival of 17th-to-19th century repertoires. He is now serving in the army and playing music to boost morale for Ukrainian soldiers.

And I’m thinking about very ordinary musicians, non-celebrities, who are playing music on the streets of Odesa or on the streets of Kyiv in defiance of this unjust war. I think these ordinary acts of defiance, these people playing music on the streets as they’re surrounded by barricades and sandbags, have been incredibly moving to watch.



Mariam Kiparoidze is a reporter/producer at Coda Story.

Get in touch via mariam@codastory.com@mariamkiparoize

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AS DUMB AS THEIR BASE

‘Prank’ video with British Defence Secretary emerges after Kremlin blamed for hoaxes

IN PEACEFUL TIMES ITS CALLED BEING PUNKED

TUE, 22 MAR, 2022 - 10:01

SAM BLEWETT AND DAVID HUGHES, PA POLITICAL STAFF

Ministers are braced for more videos to emerge after a “prank” call with British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace surfaced in the wake of Britain blaming Vladimir Putin’s Russia for attempted hoaxes.

Downing Street accused the Kremlin of being behind the efforts to secure sensitive or embarrassing information in duplicitous calls ahead of the first footage being published on Monday evening.

Officials were understood to be lobbying YouTube to remove the video of Mr Wallace, who thought he was talking to Ukrainian prime minister Denys Shmyhal on a video call.

British Home Secretary Priti Patel has also acknowledged having spoken to imposters, while an unsuccessful attempt targeted Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries.

An “official teaser” of the call with Mr Wallace appeared online claiming it was a “video-prank” with “Vovan and Lexus”, a pair previously attributed to a hoax aimed at Prince Harry.

Mr Wallace is shown speaking from Poland as the caller says Ukraine wants to progress a “nuclear programme” to protect itself from Moscow, a claim Russian state media has baselessly claimed in the past.

As the call was published, Mr Wallace suggested the invasion of Ukraine “must be going so badly for the Kremlin” if it was resorting to “video fakes”.

A Ministry of Defence source said the video was “garbage”, adding: “It’s a doctored clip.

“What you don’t hear is the Defence Secretary also saying that the UK can’t have anything to do with alleged Ukrainian nuclear ambitions, because the UK is committed to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.”

Mr Wallace did not appear to say anything particularly embarrassing or sensitive in the video, but it did tout a “full interview” within “a few days”.

Lexus and Vovan have previously targeted Elton John, a vocal opponent of Russia’s “gay propaganda” laws, critics of the Kremlin and world leaders including Canada’s Justin Trudeau.

Critics have accused the pair, real names Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexei Stolyarov, of having links to Russian security services, something they deny.

Mr Wallace said at the time of the incident last week he believed Russia was to blame and Downing Street has now publicly pointed the finger at the Kremlin.

The British Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “The Russian state was responsible for the hoax telephone calls made to UK ministers last week.

“This is standard practice for Russian information operations and disinformation is a tactic straight from the Kremlin playbook to try to distract from their illegal activities in Ukraine and the human rights abuses being committed there.

“We are seeing a string of distraction stories and outright lies from the Kremlin, reflecting Putin’s desperation as he seeks to hide the scale of the conflict and Russia’s failings on the battlefield.”

(PA Graphics)

Senior Government sources feared the Russians may attempt to doctor footage obtained in the calls in an attempt to embarrass the UK.

Mr Wallace publicly acknowledged he had been targeted shortly after his call on Thursday in an attempt to get ahead of any attempt by Moscow to circulate footage from it.

He also launched a cross-Whitehall investigation to understand how he ended up on the video call.

Ukraine coverage shows gender roles are changing on the battlefield and in the newsroom

Mykola Tys / EPA-EFE

THE CONVERSATION
Published: March 22, 2022 

News coverage of Ukraine’s war with Russia has been illustrated by images of men, young and old, taking up arms and fighting for their country. The political leaders involved are men who represent very different versions of masculinity.

Meanwhile, from an ad hoc TV studio outside Kyiv, Ukrainian news anchor Marichka Padalko drew attention to the nuances of gender roles during wartime. Interviewed by video link at Oslo’s House of Press, Padalko relayed a discussion she recently had with her husband about who should take care of their three children.

“I must defend the country,” her husband told her. Over a 20-year career as a reporter and anchor, Padalko has built solid audience trust. She felt she couldn’t abandon her people at a crucial time in history. “So do I,” she responded.

In the face of Russian disinformation campaigns, Padalko believes ensuring her fellow citizens get accurate accounts of the conflict is a task equally as important as fighting the Russian militarily. Eventually, her husband travelled with their three children to the western border of the country to bring them to safety.

“I do not have the luxury of seeing my children, but I know they are safe,” Padalko said before bravely declaring: “We will continue to broadcast until the very last minute.”
Gender and war

Besides the powerful testimony of being torn between motherhood and journalism in wartime, Padalko’s comments are a reminder of how gender-segregated wars often take shape.

“The connection between war and gender is arguably the most consistent gender issue across cultures,” renowned political scholar Joshua Goldstein wrote more than 20 years ago. He argued that this is a result of traits being equated with masculinity being constantly portrayed as aggressive and more appealing in situations of war.

In contrast, women are often portrayed as guided by pacifism and concern for others – typically feminine attributes. At a first glance, reports from the war in Ukraine seem to reinforce these gender stereotypes: the endless flow of women and children leaving their country, while men between the ages of 18 and 60 stay behind to fight. On closer inspection, much of the news coverage from the war in Ukraine shows the changing gender roles in war.

A recent New York Times podcast brilliantly addresses the insecurities and fears of Ukrainian men. Listeners are introduced to Eugene, who is ready to fight but cannot come to terms with the fact that the enemy, Russian soldiers, are his neighbours. Another young man desperately tries to cross the border to Poland, without success. He expresses his deep fear of holding a gun and carrying out violent actions and finds it terribly discriminatory that men are not allowed to leave: “I’m an illustrator. I’m trying to draw motivational posters. And just because, I’m sorry, I have a penis, I cannot leave.”

Television reports have featured crying men, devastated by how their lives changed in the blink of an eye, shattered by the sight of their mothers, wives and children fleeing the country. Their stories add nuance to the binary designations that are usually found in war reportage: fight v flee, brave v fearful, active v passive, men v women.

The Ukraine war coverage helps us see that there is not necessarily a difference between fleeing to save your children or fighting the enemy with weapons or words. All are actions of war.

Emotion in the media

In the newsroom, television reporters (not least male reporters) seem to show more emotion in the coverage of this war than what was traditionally seen in war reporting. This is perhaps a testament to the relatively recent emotional turn in journalism. The attention to emotion in journalism represents a shift that has opened up new spaces for more emotional and personalised forms of expression in public discussion.

Not to be outdone, the inspiring work by female reporters covering this conflict hasn’t gone unnoticed.

While not a journalist herself, Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, has also joined the information battle to defend her country. As a screenwriter, she wrote for the comedy group that brought Volodymyr Zelensky into the limelight. Now, she uses her communication skills to dictate the pace of the ongoing information war.

Zelenska’s battlefield includes social media, where she shares images by professional photojournalists and adds poignant captions. In one post, Zelenska included pictures of women in military uniform in the trenches, women as part of a rescue crew with helmet and headlights and women caretakers of newborn babies in a provisional bomb shelter. She wrote: “Our new opposition has a female face to it.” Posts like this support new war narratives that don’t differentiate between fighting and caring as actions of war.



Gender both shapes and is shaped by media content. These personal stories contribute to the overall narrative of the war and feed into a larger story of power and information exchange. The more complex and human media portrayals of gender may also affect the world’s understanding and empathy of Ukrainians’ peril on the battlefield and as refugees, and eventually influence the mood for change in international security policies.

Authors

Kristin Skare Orgeret
Professor of Journalism and Media Studies, Oslo Metropolitan University

Bruce Mutsvairo
Associate Professor in Media Studies, Utrecht University
Disclosure statement
Bruce Mutsvairo receives funding from Norwegian Research Council

Israel lobby group ADL rehabilitates Hitler’s accomplices in Ukraine

Ali Abunimah 

The Electronic Intifada

17 March 2022

A priest delivers a speech during a torchlight procession honoring Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera in the Ukrainian capital Kiev on 1 January 2022. Bandera’s nationalist movement directly assisted German occupation forces in perpetrating the Holocaust during World War II. 

Pavlo BagmutUkrinform

Israel and its lobby depend on support from the United States.

So when Washington goes to war, the lobby will often lend its propaganda services to the cause.

The Anti-Defamation League, one of Israel’s top US lobby groups, is doing so now by rehabilitating Ukrainian collaborators who helped Hitler exterminate Jews and Poles.

This Holocaust revisionism is motivated by the need to whitewash the present-day, far-right Ukrainian nationalists and neo-Nazis who are supported by the United States.

The reason the US, NATO and the European Union say they are sending weapons and mercenaries to Ukraine is to help a fellow democracy defend its independence and sovereignty against an illegal invasion by an expansionist, megalomaniacal madman.

It is therefore very awkward from a Western perspective that the Ukrainian regime is underpinned by hard-right fascists and neo-Nazis.

Acknowledging this fact, Western war propagandists undoubtedly fear, would legitimize President Vladimir Putin’s claim that the Russian invasion – which has been overwhelmingly condemned by the UN General Assembly – is justified by a need to “de-Nazify” and demilitarize Ukraine.

The dilemma is summed up in an NBC News headline from earlier this month: “Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real, even if Putin’s ‘denazification’ claim isn’t.”

But most Western media will no longer even go as far as NBC News in acknowledging this reality.

The current war can be traced directly to the 2014 coup in Ukraine, during which the US and its allies supported far-right and neo-Nazi elements.

The goal was to install a US-friendly regime that would bring Ukraine into NATO, the anti-Russia military alliance. Moscow has long seen NATO expansion as an existential threat.

Key actors in the US-supported coup were neo-Nazi groups like Right Sector, the Azov Battalion and C14.

They are part of a broader Ukrainian nationalist movement that venerates Stepan Bandera, the leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which collaborated with Hitler during World War II.

During the war, members of the OUN loyal to Bandera formed the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, commonly known by its Ukrainian initials, UPA.

“Tactical” alliance with Hitler

On 4 March, the Anti-Defamation League published an article by Andrew Srulevitch, its director of European affairs, to minimize the Nazi problem in Ukraine.

The article was also promoted in a 15 March email newsletter from ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt on how “anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and other misinformation are spreading in the wake of the invasion.”

In order to downplay the present-day cult of Bandera and support for Nazism in Ukraine, the ADL finds it necessary to rewrite some history – in effect Holocaust revisionism.

Srulevitch’s article takes the form of a Q&A with David Fishman, a professor of Jewish History at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Fishman is also a member of the academic committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“We’ve seen torchlit marches in the middle of [Kiev] with the red and black flags of UPA … and pictures of Stepan Bandera, who allied with the Nazis during WWII,” Srulevitch asks. “Isn’t that evidence of Nazism in Ukraine?”

“For Ukrainian nationalists, UPA and Bandera are symbols of the Ukrainian fight for Ukrainian independence. The UPA allied with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union for tactical – not ideological – reasons,” Fishman responds.

“For Jews, however, not only is allying with the Nazis unforgivable under any circumstance, but historians have documented that Ukrainian nationalists participated together with Germans in the murder of many thousands of Jews in Ukraine,” Fishman adds.

Fishman’s excuse that Bandera and other Nazi collaborators are “symbols” of the “fight for Ukrainian independence” mirrors the claims from American white supremacists that their display of the Confederate battle flag is merely to honor their “heritage” and not to celebrate a regime that went to war to protect its “right” to enslave people from Africa.

“There are neo-Nazis in Ukraine, just as there are in the US, and in Russia for that matter,” Fishman asserts. “But they are a very marginal group with no political influence and who don’t attack Jews or Jewish institutions in Ukraine.”

In other words, there’s nothing to see here, the ADL wants us to believe.

But Israel lobby groups were concerned over the rise of the Ukrainian far-right before the Russian invasion.

“Holocaust perpetrators are the last people on Earth who deserve to be glorified, regardless of their nationalist credentials,” Efraim Zuroff, a regional director with the Simon Wiesenthal Center, another pro-Israel lobby group, correctly stated in 2015.

“This phenomenon, currently so common in post-Communist Eastern Europe, and especially in Ukraine and the Baltics, clearly shows that these countries don’t fully comprehend the obligations of true democracy,” Zuroff added.

This condemnation came after Ukrainian nationalists held a New Year’s Eve torchlight procession in Kiev to honor Bandera.

But today, just like the ADL, the Simon Wiesenthal Center is, for political expediency, denying the support for Nazism in Ukraine.

And also like the ADL, it is citing the fact that Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish as evidence that neo-Nazism is not a concern.

However, this is no more convincing than arguing that the 2008 election of Barack Obama as president means that racism and white supremacy have been eliminated from the United States.

Indeed, according to the ADL, the dissemination of “white supremacist propaganda” in the US surged in 2020 – four years after America’s first Black president left office.
Falsifying history

This rationalization, minimization and “both-sidesing” of Nazism and Holocaust crimes ought to be shocking in itself.

But the ADL’s claim that the Banderite alliance with Hitler was merely “tactical” – as if that would in any way mitigate their crimes – is also false.

“Although Bandera and his followers would later try to paint the alliance with the Third Reich as no more than ‘tactical,’ an attempt to pit one totalitarian state against another, it was in fact deep-rooted and ideological,” journalist and author Daniel Lazare writes in a 2015 Jacobin review of historian Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe’s book Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist.

“Bandera envisioned the Ukraine as a classic one-party state with himself in the role of führer, or providnyk, and expected that a new Ukraine would take its place under the Nazi umbrella.”

Bandera was however detained by the Nazis because he was pushing for Ukrainian independence – something Hitler was not ready to grant. But the alliance between the OUN and the Germans persisted.

“Rather than disbanding the OUN, the Nazis had meanwhile revamped it as a German-run police force,” Lazare writes.

“The OUN had played a leading role in the anti-Jewish pogroms that broke out in Lviv and dozens of other Ukrainian cities on the heels of the German invasion, and now they served the Nazis by patrolling the ghettoes and assisting in deportations, raids and shootings.”

In 1943, Banderite members of the OUN formed their own militia, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA.

The UPA began the ethnic cleansing and extermination of Poles from territories they saw as belonging to Ukraine.

Citing historians, Lazare writes that “the UPA killed close to 100,000 Poles between 1943 and 1945 and that Orthodox priests blessed the axes, pitchforks, scythes, sickles, knives and sticks that the peasants it mobilized used to finish them off.”

At the same time, the UPA’s attacks on Jews “continued at such a ferocious level that Jews actually sought the protection of the Germans,” Lazare writes.

“The Banderite bands and the local nationalists raided every night, decimating the Jews,” a survivor cited by Rossoliński-Liebe testified in 1948. “Jews sheltered in the camps where Germans were stationed, fearing an attack by Banderites. Some German soldiers were brought to protect the camps and thereby also the Jews.”
Bandera resurrected

This horrifying history has a direct bearing on events today.

After World War II and with the start of the Cold War, the US and its allies embraced the Banderites, many of whom went into exile in the West, especially in Canada.
Since 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine became independent, and even more so in the last few years, the cult of Bandera has re-emerged with a vengeance.

Far from being marginal, it is fully supported by Ukrainian state institutions.

In what NBC News calls an “ominous development,” Ukraine “has in recent years erected a glut of statues honoring Ukrainian nationalists whose legacies are tainted by their indisputable record as Nazi proxies.”

Such monuments can be found all over western Ukraine from Lviv to Ternopil to Ivano-Frankivsk and many small towns in between.

In 2016, the city council in Kiev voted overwhelmingly to rename the Ukrainian capital’s Moscow Avenue in honor of Bandera.

Eduard Dolinsky, the director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, has for years documented how Bandera is regularly celebrated with statues, banners and ceremonies:The Ukrainian ambassador in Germany, Andrij Melnyk, even bragged in 2015 that he “laid down flowers on the tomb of our hero Stepan Bandera” during a visit to Munich.

Potential for horrifying blowback

With the US and Europe arming and supporting the government in Kiev, all this must be buried along with the ample evidence of support for Nazism and fascism in present-day Ukraine.

Acknowledging this reality is not the same as claiming that 40 million Ukrainians are Nazis or that the country deserves to be attacked.

Nonetheless it is crucial for people in the US, EU and NATO countries to know that their governments are colluding with, as well as reportedly arming and training far-right and Nazi elements that are definitely not “marginal.”

On top of the moral revulsion that allying with Nazis – any Nazis – should provoke, it is a strategy that is bound to produce horrifying blowback, even if an escalating conflict in Ukraine does not lead to nuclear war.

In 2019 – before it became politically necessary to whitewash them – the ADL itself warned that an “extremist group called the Azov Battalion has ties to neo-Nazis and white supremacists” and issued a report on how the Ukrainian militia was trying to “connect with like-minded extremists from the US.”

American and European far-right extremists are flocking to Ukraine to join their neo-Nazi brothers in arms.

When these battle-hardened race warriors return home, it will be Muslims, Jews and anyone else they consider not to be truly “European” or “American” who will likely pay the price.

It may seem surprising that an Israel lobby group claiming to fight bigotry against Jews and others would help to whitewash Nazis. But the alliance between Zionism, anti-Semitism and fascism goes back a century.

The ADL may also be taking a leaf from Benjamin Netanyahu’s shameless historical distortions and fabrications. In 2015, when he was still Israel’s prime minister, Netanyahu attempted to exonerate Hitler and blame the Holocaust instead on Palestinians.

Nor is it surprising that the ADL, which spied for apartheid South Africa in the 1980s, would tacitly join forces with neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

Nonetheless it is still hard to fathom the cynicism it takes even for an Israel lobby group to brand almost any support for Palestinian rights as “anti-Semitic” while it helps rehabilitate Hitler’s Holocaust accomplices.

Ali Abunimah is executive director of The Electronic Intifada.

Today, the Azov Battalion, fully integrated into Ukraine’s National Guard, 

is reportedly already receiving weapons supplied by Western countries.

How Glasgow university smeared its own journal as anti-Semitic


David Miller 

The Electronic Intifada 

22 March 2022

Glasgow university censored a paper examining the pro-Israel lobby. 

(WikiMedia Commons)

A Scottish university refused to properly assess pro-Israel complaints about a peer-reviewed article in one of its journals.

Instead of sending the complaints to the author of the paper for further peer review, the university asked a staff member “close to the [subject] area” to give an informal view.

University documents released under freedom of information rules show it was agreed that the paper – which discussed the Israel lobby in Britain – should also be sent for external review, but this seems not to have been done.

But even this was only agreed after the university had already decided on its response – to endorse the baseless smears of the complainants.

The university is still refusing to reveal who complained about the paper. But extremist anti-Palestinian blogger David Collier has been public about his involvement.

The original article by Jane Jackman – published by eSharp, a University of Glasgow journal, in 2017 – examined the propaganda activities of the Israel lobby in the UK.

After complaints by pro-Israel activists in 2020, the university last year appended a statement to the article alleging it contained problematic features, including the idea that it promotes “an unfounded anti-Semitic theory regarding the state of Israel.”

After a high profile open letter to the university signed by 500 prominent academics including the linguist and political analyst Noam Chomsky, the university removed the reference to anti-Semitism.

But it refused to remove the baseless claim that the paper had used a “biased selection of sources,” claiming that the article promoted “‘what some would regard as an unfounded theory.” This wording obviously still implies that the article is anti-Semitic.
Violation of ethics

Britain’s Committee on Publication Ethics has produced a set of guidelines on how academic journals should respond to complaints about published articles.

The committee advises that when complaints are received, journals should “invite the original authors of the critiqued article to write a reply” and that “the critique and response may be peer reviewed.”

Although eSharp is not a member of that committee, the guidance is widely accepted by academic journals.

As The Electronic Intifada reported last year, Jane Jackman was not invited to respond. In fact, the first she heard about it was via an anti-Palestinian newspaper, The Jewish Chronicle, which reported on the university’s apology for publishing her article.

The Committee on Publication Ethics also advises that critiques of published papers “should have evidence or data to support the claims” they contain.

This requirement was not met by Glasgow university. None of the documents released in response to our freedom of information request give any evidence for the claims of anti-Semitism or bias.

What was, however, discussed repeatedly by senior university staff as a reason for the censorship of Jackman’s paper was the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s bogus defintion of anti-Semitism.

Although widely criticized by scholars and lawyers, and rejected by most UK universities, the definition has been pushed by Israel and its lobby around the world. It conflates criticism of Israel and its racist official ideology Zionism, on the one hand, with anti-Jewish hatred, on the other.
Expert opinions spurned

The journal eSharp is published by Glasgow university and is targeted at graduate students.

The journal states that it peer reviews articles, assigning “two reviewers to each paper, making sure that those reviewers have a degree of expertise in the subject matter dealt with in the article.”

But the emails disclosed by the university reveal that the university staff primarily responsible for the apology had no such expertise.

The Electronic Intifada has seen copies of the original anonymous peer review responses. The first stated that the article is a “relevant topic,” asks for “further analysis” and more “signposting.”

The second stated the article was “really engaging and informative” and that it provided “a fresh look into a widely debated phenomenon” and that the “overall argument was a very strong one.” Suggested improvements were made concerning minor grammatical errors, compliance with a style guide and issues with structure.

But it was made clear that “these are just small issues.”

There are no grounds to think that the peer review comments are inadequate and nothing in the Glasgow response has suggested that.

Given the existence of a peer review process, any challenges to the outcome of that process should also require a review of at least equal seriousness.

But the university subverted its own processes by sidelining the editorial team at the journal and putting the complaints in the hands of two academics with no relevant expertise.

Emails released by the university reveal that the lead role in the censorship effort was taken by Nick Fells, a professor of music, and by Bryony Randall, a professor of modernist literature

.
Nick Fells at work (left). Bryony Randall (right). The pair led censorship efforts at Glasgow university. 

(YouTube/Glasgow university)

Although the paper was published in 2017, the complaints only started in December 2020, after a blog post by the extreme Zionist David Collier.

As The Electronic Intifada reported, Collier urged his followers to contact the university. Although Collier has almost 74,000 Twitter followers, only 11 formal complaints were received, a university document shows.

Having agreed a line of approach with senior colleagues, Nick Fells proposed in early February 2021 that “it would be sensible to approach the current editorial team” in order to find out “what their response to the situation would be.”

But already the assumption had been made that the complaints would not be rejected.

At no point in the disclosed documents does anyone at the university consider the possibility of rejecting the complaints – despite the fact that they did not give any evidence showing anything in Jackman’s article was incorrect.

The “main questions” were stated as being: “should the paper be removed; or should it remain, but perhaps have some kind of editorial written, which itself might invite further contribution and debate.”

A meeting was duly convened with the editorial group, where it was decided “to leave the article in place, but to write an editorial in response.”

By early March, Fells had accessed “perspectives” on the article “provided by a colleague close to this area.” Fells pointedly does not name the colleague.

The decision to add an editorial note to the original paper was taken – according to the documents – in the absence of any other advice than that given by this informal internal adviser.

The advice was that the article “places itself in the midst of a familiar controversy, that pro-Zionist Jews in Britain are a means by which Israel exercises soft power to advance its cause.”

Rather than dispute this fact, the advice asserted that the article crossed “a fine line from criticism of a government to the restatement of anti-Semitic tropes.” But – again – the email did not explain where this “line” was or how the article had crossed it.

It claimed the paper was “problematic in its discursive strategies” and that aspects of it “would therefore be likely to cause offense.”

This advice is worth some scrutiny. There is no real controversy about whether “pro-Zionist Jews” engage in pro-Israel advocacy. They do, along with pro-Zionist non-Jews.

Do some co-ordinate or collaborate with the state of Israel? Indisputably yes.
Journal editors marginalized

The allegedly problematic “discursive strategies” and “biased” sourcing have still not been specified.

After meeting the editorial team of eSharp, Nick Fells wrote an email with a note summarizing a plan of action to be sent to senior management. The general editor of the journal in 2021 was Caleb Rogers.

The documents reveal that the editor had not seen the original complaints.

It would “be good if at all possible, if I could see some of the complaints in more detail,” one of the emails – apparently written by the editor – reveals.

Fells declined to share details of the complaints with the editor – a lack of transparency which was continued by the university’s freedom of information department when it later refused to release them or name the complainants.

The editor also stated: “I wonder if it might be good to consult with an expert in this field now.” This too was dismissed.

Both of these actions appear to be clear breaches of academic freedom and a subversion of any proper peer review process.

The documents state that the editorial was required to be sent “for final approval prior to publication” to five senior management figures. Overall, the process of dealing with the complaints was run by university management with what appear to be only courtesy meetings with the editorial team of the journal.
Atone for the damage

The Glasgow story is a cautionary tale for those who hope that public institutions will respond to politically motivated complaints of anti-Semitism by relying on evidence and following standard procedures.

Instead the University of Glasgow has capitulated to, facilitated and protected anonymous complainants operating to pursue the foreign policy objectives of a hostile foreign state.

Glasgow is on the back foot, having had to remove the term “anti-Semitism” from the supposed “editorial” it added to Jackman’s paper.

But there is a long way to go before it reverses course and atones for the damage it has caused, both to the reputation of Jane Jackman and to academic freedom at the university.

A fulsome apology to Jackman is the first step in a process which must see the university fully overhaul its complaints procedures.

David Miller is the co-editor of the book What is Islamophobia? Racism, Social Movements and the State.