Killing Kyoto Softly: Hard Choices and Hillary Clinton's Climate Change Alternate Reality

I suffered an attack of bulging eye/throbbing vein syndrome when reading presumptive presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s blithe account of a clever piece of business she pulled at the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009.

Courtesy of India’s First Post, an excerpt from Hard Choices:

At the international conference on climate change in Copenhagen in December 2009, US President Barack Obama forced himself into a room where the then Chinese premier Wen Jiabao was holding a secret meeting with the then Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and other leaders. Giving a blow by blow account of the incident, of which she was part as the then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton in her memoirs 'Hard Choices' writes that the purpose of China was to isolate the United States by bringing together countries like India, Brazil and South Africa on its side. But Obama's determination and presence of mind thwarted such a move, she writes.

"President Obama and I were looking for Premier Wen Jiabao in the middle of a large international conference on climate change in Copenhagen, Denmark," she recalls. "We knew that the only way to achieve a meaningful agreement on climate change was for leaders of the nations emitting the most greenhouse gases to sit down together and hammer out a compromise, especially the US and China," she said.

"But the Chinese were avoiding us." "Worse, we learned that Wen had called a 'secret' meeting with the Indians, Brazilians, and South Africans to stop, or at least dilute, the kind of agreement the United States was seeking. When we couldn't find any of the leaders of those countries, we knew something was amiss and sent out members of our team to canvass the conference center," she writes. "Eventually they discovered the meeting's location. After exchanging looks of 'Are you thinking what I'm thinking?' the President and I set off through the long hallways of the sprawling Nordic convention center, with a train of experts and advisors scrambling to keep up," she writes in her book. "Later we'd joke about this impromptu 'footcade', a motorcade without the motors, but at the time I was focused on the diplomatic challenge waiting at the end of our march.

So off we went, charging up a flight of stairs and encountering surprised Chinese officials, who tried to divert us by sending us in the opposite direction. We were undeterred," she says. When they arrived outside the meeting room, there was a jumble of arguing aides and nervous security agents, she says. Robert Gibbs, the White House Press Secretary, got tangled up with a Chinese guard, she adds. In the commotion the President slipped through the door and yelled, 'Mr. Premier!' really loudly, which got everyone's attention. "The Chinese guards put their arms up against the door again, but I ducked under and made it through," Clinton writes recounting the incident. "In a makeshift conference room whose glass walls had been covered by drapes for privacy against prying eyes, we found Wen wedged around a long table with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and South African President Jacob Zuma. Jaws dropped when they saw us. 'Are you ready?' said President Obama, flashing a big grin," Clinton claims.

"Now the real negotiations could begin. It was a moment that was at least a year in the making," she adds.

Horsepucky as far as the “we broke up China’s cabal and got the real negotiations going” thing. 

 

I wrote a detailed backgrounder on Copenhagen soon after the debacle.  Here are some choice excerpts concerning the United States’ failure to “thwart”, indeed its inadvertent success in creating, the “BASIC” bloc (Brazil, South Africa with initials inverted for maximum acronym effect, India, and China) of affronted developing regional powers:

[T]he United States assiduously ignored the embarrassing fact of ostensible ally India’s move into the BASIC camp—and skated over the issue of how Washington’s conference planning found it lined up against both New Delhi and Beijing instead of playing one off against the other.


When one considers that the essence of U.S. diplomacy in Asia involves pushing China and India into opposition, forcing these two rivals into an alliance is a remarkable if dubious achievement.


India, for its part, was frank about its identity of interests with China, at least on the issue of climate change India has come out quite well in Copenhagen: Ramesh (Lead):

[Environment Minister] Ramesh said: “A notable feature of this conference is the manner in which the BASIC group of countries (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) coordinated their position.

“BASIC ministers met virtually on an hourly basis right through the conference; India and China worked very very closely together.”

…

 “India, South Africa, Brazil, China and other developing countries were entirely successful in ensuring there was no violation of the BAP [Bali Action Plan] (of 2007),” Ramesh said.

“Despite relentless attempts made by developed countries, the conference succeeded in continuing negotiations under the Kyoto Protocol for the post-2012 period”, when the current period of the protocol runs out.

Endquote. 

 

The original piece, long and filled with circumstantial detail, is still up at Japan Focus.

In Hard Choices, Clinton also misrepresents the key US gambit at Copenhagen: the $100 billion per year mitigation initiative:

The United States was prepared to lead a collective effort by developed countries to mobilize $100 billion annually by 2020 from a combination of public and private sources to help the poorest and most vulnerable nations mitigate the damage from climate change if we could also reach broad agreement on limiting emissions.

Actually, the quid pro quo was not “broad agreement on limiting emissions”; the promise of aid was linked to the PRC’s acceptance of  emission caps and “transparency”.  It was, as Admiral Akbar would say, “A trap!”  As John Lee approvingly put it in Foreign Policy at the time, it was “a clever trap”.

Having just announced that the United States would establish and contribute to a $100 billion international fund by 2020 to help poor countries cope with the challenge of climate change, Clinton added a nonnegotiable proviso: All other major nations would first be required to commit their emissions reduction to a binding agreement and submit these reductions to "transparent verification." … The onus was now on Beijing to agree to standards of "transparent verification." If it did not, poorer countries standing to benefit from the fund would blame China for breaking the deal. Clinton's proposal had cunningly undermined Beijing's leadership over the developing bloc of countries.

It was a trap that worked—for a while.  The solidarity of the G-77+China bloc--which had historically maintained a united front insisting that the developed nations shoulder most of the greenhouse gas burden in the spirit of the Kyoto Treaty--was shattered. 

Actually, it had been shattered pre-Copenhagen as the United States had cultivated the emergence of a pro-Western faction within the G77, led by Tuvalu, to confront the PRC at the conference on the issue of obstructing US-sponsored mitigation aid.  But the benefits were short-lived as the big powers alienated the G77 in toto by excluding it from the closed door negotiations over the final accord, it became obvious that the US lacked the political will to commit to binding agreement on emissions despite the desperate efforts and importunities of the at-risk nations, and that a “collective effort by developed countries to mobilize $100 billion annually by 2020 from a combination of public and private sources” i.e. after President Obama had left office, looked like a piece of public relations vaporware.

Another piece of dubious reportage from Hard Choices is Clinton’s rather counterintuitive explanation that outrage within the Chinese delegation was triggered by fear of the mad US negotiation skillz, rather than anger that the US team had forced its way into a private meeting between Wen and three other world leaders as if it was schooling misbehaving adolescents at a sleepover:

In one surprising display, one of the other members of the Chinese delegation …started loudly scolding the far more senior Premier.  He was quite agitated by the prospect that a deal might be at hand.

WaPo provided the context at the time:

China’s top climate change negotiator exploded in rage at U.S. pressure after Obama walked in on the Chinese while they were holding talks with the Indians, South Africans and Brazilians. After Obama asked whether the Chinese could commit to listing their climate targets in an international registry, Xie Zhenhua launched into a tirade, pointing his finger at the U.S. president… Wen instructed his Chinese interpreter not to translate Xie's fiery remarks. When Xie erupted again, Wen, who was chairing the meeting, ignored him. After Wen handed Obama a draft text of an agreement that included verification language Obama couldn't abide by, the two men led a lengthy debate that ended in a working compromise, sources said.

The “working compromise” was an agreement text that kicked the transparency can down the road to a future “conference of the parties”.  I imagine Xie was continuing to vent his spleen at the US delegation for its disrespect for the PRC, and felt little need to disrupt a “deal” that was little more than face-saving nonsense.

Apparently the fact that the US stunt—which, I note, Clinton is careful not to take responsibility for--caused Xie Zhenhua to berate President Obama, not Wen Jiabao, is one of those awkward items of narrative that demanded some creative bending and stretching.

Beyond placing the lumpy gristle of Copenhagen failure into the political memoir Cuisinart in order to output creamy Clintonian achievement, the book says very little about the objective that has been driving international climate change policy under President Obama: the desire to “kill Kyoto” i.e. collapse the current treaty and its messy framework of unbalanced obligations, big-and-small consensus, and rhetoric of moral claims on the developed world, with something more U.S.-friendly.

What really happened at Copenhagen was that President Obama had been unable to get national cap-and-trade legislation passed in the US.  Having never ratified Kyoto (with its binding emissions caps) and with no meaningful prospect of national legislation, the United States was unable to put any pressure on the People’s Republic of China to implement national caps and assist the world in moving beyond the Kyoto Protocol (which bound only the Annex 1 “advanced economies”) to a new regime in which all of the largest emitters (including China, India, Brazil, & South Africa) accepted binding caps.

In 2010, Al Gore told a conference in Montreal that the PRC passed a message to President Obama before Copenhagen that it was ready to work with the United States to come up with a binding successor to Kyoto… if the US Congress could pass similar legislation.

Not to be.

Instead, President Obama and Secretary Clinton apparently came to Copenhagen with the idea that, absent meaningful US advances either on ratifying Kyoto or creating a new regime, the US would settle for half a loaf: incrementally weakening the Kyoto Protocol at Copenhagen so that it could be allowed to expire and the new regime, nonbinding and with the US and other major powers calling the shots (embodied in the “Denmark draft”) would emerge from its ashes.

In tactical terms, this meant attacking the PRC instead of working with it, by dangling the promise of mitigation money linked to transparency concessions to break the united front of China and the G-77 bloc of small countries.

The PRC—apparently because this would make tapping the international carbon offset market subject to the adversarial attention of the United States and its allies, thereby putting at risk a major economic prop for greenhouse gas reduction—declined to yield to the public US demands for "transparency".  (I might add that the PRC is a clever and not entirely scrupulous player in the offset game; however, its resistance to US demands seemed to have more to do with the apparent inability of the US to deliver a binding emissions commitment in return for transparency concessions.)

In PR terms it meant that the virtually foreordained failure of the conference would be laid at China’s feet, something that the PRC was not quite prepared for, and which probably accounted for Xie’s furious but untranslated set-to with President Obama.

Unfortunately for the United States, the $100 billion gambit and shouldering its way into the PRC/Brazil/India/South Africa confab did not isolate China; instead, the BASIC alliance stepped forward to share the political heat and finesse the creation of a pro forma accord that put the West and Japan on the hook for the $30 billion in immediate aid but accomplished nothing else on the key issues of binding emissions targets or transparency.

India’s Jairam Ramesh described the fallout from the U.S. tactics as follows:

"During the last day of the summit (18 December) when the talks had reached an impasse, it was the intention of European Nations and the US to announce the breakdown and hold the four Basic nations (India, China, Brazil and South Africa) accountable for its failure," Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said addressing the Aspen Institute of India recently.

Speaking about the talks on the concluding day of the Summit, he said the US President (Barack Obama) kept on saying to the head of state of Bangladesh and Maldives that "you are not going to get money (for climate steps) unless these four guys (BASIC nations) sign the Accord."

He (Obama) made it categorically clear that any money flow to the developing countries will be linked to the Accord provided the four countries of BASIC group come on board, Ramesh said.
"Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina did ask me whether India will deny her country this money. This was the line taken by UK and Australia as well.

"Against this background, none of the heads of the four states wanted to be responsible for the breakdown of the talks. China was particularly wary being world's largest green house gas emitter," Ramesh recalled.

This "was the moral line taken at the summit and against this background the Accord was noted," he added.

The Accord that resulted from Secretary Clinton’s fancy footwork and “clevertrapping” was, by design, a nonbinding collection of loopholes negotiated behind closed doors by the big developed and developing powers in order to save their face as climate change heroes.

The BASIC countries insisted that it be stripped of anything that would allow it to be construed as a (nonbinding) successor to the (binding) Kyoto Protocol.   The Accord was not adopted by the conference attendees, who in general detested it; and it was only “noted” by means of some procedural legerdemain as it was jammed through the general session of the Conference, to the intense resentment of the G77.  By the end, even Tuvalu, the leader of the pro-West bloc, had turned on the United States and condemned the Accord and the $30 billion in promised “Fast Start” mitigation aid as “thirty pieces of silver” that betrayed the interests of the small developing nations.

The lack of any real achievement at Copenhagen was the signal for a general pile-on intended to put the onus on the PRC and not the US for the failure at Copenhagen, led by the Anglo-American bloc abetted by prestige media, especially in Great Britain.  Kevin Rudd memorably accused the PRC of administering a “ratf*cking” at Copenhagen.

 

Nevertheless, the BASIC countries, led by the PRC and India, have maintained a united front on climate change—and the preservation of Kyoto—to this day.

Subsequent to Copenhagen, in its campaign to supersede the Kyoto treaty with the “Copenhagen Accord”, the Obama administration appeared to be channeling the unsavory spirit of the Bush neo-cons.  For the United States, negotiator Todd Stern (apparently a favorite of Clinton’s; in Hard Choices she singles him out as a “passionate and dogged diplomat” whom she put in charge of climate diplomacy) assumed the role of climate-change goon-in-chief, charged with the task of killing Kyoto—and belittling both the Kyoto Treaty and the smaller at-risk nations that presumed to invoke the treaty to assert moral and financial claims on the developed world.

Post-Copenhagen the U.S. engaged in an intensive global armtwisting campaign to compel smaller at-risk nations to endorse the Copenhagen process as a successor to Kyoto (in 2010, as a part of the kill-Kyoto PR campaign, Todd Stern displayed a “little chart” that pointed out surviving Kyoto binding signatories only accounted for 28% of global emissions, as opposed to the more inclusive [but unbinding] Copenhagen Accord’s 80%)—and keep the pressure on China for “transparency”, instead of hassling the United States to commit to an emissions cap.  

Wikileaks also revealed a sleazy campaign to browbeat dozens of smaller at-risk countries into “signing on” to the Copenhagen accord and and discuss tangible financial inducements, in return for their support.

Todd Stern went distinctly undiplomatic in his effort to neutralize the unfavorable effect of the Wikileak.

In an article entitled US envoy rejects suggestion that America bribed countries to sign up to the Copenhagen Accord, the Guardian reported:

Stern added: "We can eliminate any cause or accusation of bribery by eliminating any money."

This case of affairs is bitterly ironic, since the “Copenhagen” model would require the at-risk developing countries to sacrifice their independent voices (through abandonment of the unanimous consensus system) and the moral and legal claims on developed countries that they enjoyed under Kyoto.  The concrete business of climate change policy would shift to the “Major Economies Forum” and climate change financial assistance would be doled out by the donor countries according to their own priorities instead of collected and distributed by the UN in a spirit of equity.

As the Kyoto regime hollowed out, the United States also gave every appearance of slow-walking the negotiations with the PRC on “transparency”, the issue that the U.S. claimed was the vital precondition to the successful reform of the Kyoto  regime—and the release of billions of aid.

Post-Copenhagen, the US and China have held continual meetings on MRV and it appears that there isn't too much practical difference between the two sides.

The Guardian reported a WikiLeaks cable with this exchange between the EU's top climate change official and the lead US negotiator:

[Connie] Hedegaard asks why the US did not agree with China and India on what she saw as acceptable measures to police future emissions cuts. "The question is whether they will honour that language," the cable quotes [Jonathan] Pershing as saying.

Given the lack of US domestic progress on climate change legislation, at the 2010 Cancun conference the “blame China” dog showed signs of not hunting anymore, as the New York Times reported:

Yet while the United States is casting China as the linchpin of the negotiations, there is anger aplenty at America inside the Moon Palace resort where talks are being held. Many say the United States is demanding compromise from others while bringing nothing to the negotiating table itself.

"I'm actually more concerned about the US's transparency," said Jennifer Morgan, who heads the World Resources Institute's climate and energy program.

One leading US analyst said every time countries make progress on an issue, the United States reminds countries that it might all mean nothing unless China agrees to transparency rules.

"The US is the problem here," the analyst said. "Everybody is so pissed off. Here we are with nothing back home, and acting like bullies."

On December 8, 2012, at yet another conference in Doha, in another exercise in “kicking the can down the road as far as we can before the asphalt melts in the heat”, the Kyoto regime was extended to 2020 and everybody agreed to negotiate a replacement regime in 2015--at the cost of the withdrawal of staunch US allies Japan and Canada, and (because of its dislike of tougher offset standards) Russia.  

Signatories still accepting binding targets are basically the EU plus Australia.  Now advocates of the Copenhagen Accord can claim that Kyoto, governing only 15% of world greenhouse gases post-Doha, is not significantly better than Copenhagen (zero % binding). At the same time, the US and EU refused to make inconvenient commitments for climate change aid to at risk nations beyond the $30 billion in immediate aid they promised at Copenhagen. 

And, in another indications of the problems inherent in the US strategy, America, not China, was putting in time in the climate change doghouse, at least with Friends of the Earth:

 “Doha was a disaster zone where poor developing countries were forced to capitulate to the interests of wealthy countries, effectively condemning their own citizens to the climate crisis. The blame for the disaster in Doha can be laid squarely at the foot of countries like the USA who have blocked and bullied those who are serious about tackling climate change. 

A few observations on Hard Choices:

Clinton’s strategy of advancing US policies (or obscuring their failures) by sticking it to the unpopular and autocratic Chinese regime—through a surprise attack with careful advance planning in an advantageous multilateral forum--was fully formed in December 2009 at Copenhagen, long before the “freedom of navigation” contretemps at ASEAN’s Hanoi meeting in mid-2010.  

By laying down her rather skewed version of what went down at Copenhagen, Clinton is signaling that she wants her readout of the Copenhagen outcome—Kyoto superseded, all caps to be renegotiated on a nonbinding basis with transparency on offsets a prerequisite-- to be regarded as the anchor for further negotiations.  As a practical matter, that means that major, costly joint global action on climate change looks pretty unlikely.

Message to Xie Zhenhua: Suck. On. This.

Deciding to treat China as an enemy is a clever tactic and good politics, but I think it’s a strategic blunder whose cost Americans will pay in matters great and small for decades.

And on the subject of climate change, going adversarial with China and Kyoto might turn out to be an existential blunder that will help decide the fate of the whole planet.

So that’s where we are, Ms. Clinton. 

Ukrainian Fascism Article Up At CounterPunch Weekend Edition

CounterPunch is very kindly featuring an article I wrote for them titled "The Durability of Ukrainian Fascism".

First, a correction.  In the piece, I give credence to allegations that the Nachtigall Battalion (Ukrainian nationalists, largely Banderites, organized into a military unit under the direction of German military intelligence) participated in the first Lviv pogrom.  These allegations are apparently false and the result of a Soviet forgery and disinformation campaign.

In the piece, I take issue with the desire of some supporters of the Kyiv regime to downplay the role of fascism and fascist parties such as Pravy Sektor a.k.a. Right Sector and Svoboda in the current political mix.  Fascism, I conclude, is not just part of Europe's past; it's part of its present...and future.

Fascism is particularly strong in the Baltic republics (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia), and in Ukraine.  Post-Soviet governments in these frontline states have, in a rather gingerly fashion, rehabilitated native fascists who fought with the Nazis against Stalin as rallying points for anti-Russian nationalism.

Rehabilitating fascists has also required poormouthing the Holocaust and its unique moral significance, primarily because World War II fascists and nationalists abetted the German occupation and liquidation of Jews, provided manpower for the "Final Solution" and enthusiastically and savagely participated in local pogroms that the arriving Germans permitted during the brief "honeymoon" period of the occupation.

Traditional strains of local anti-Semitism were amplified by the identification of Jews, rightly or wrongly, with Soviet occupation and administration.  When the German armies first entered the Baltic and eastern European states and liberated them from Soviet rule, elements of the local population enthusiastically engaged in horrific pogroms against Jews, especially in Lithuania and in Ukraine. In July 1941, using the massacre of thousands of prisoners in Lviv's prisons by the retreating Soviets as an excuse, residents of Lviv humiliated and murdered Jews in the city, with a death toll of over 3000.   German film crews recorded the episode in order to educate the homeland as to the desperate and savage struggle with "Judeo-Bolshevism".  Some footage was incorporated into newsreels and can be found on the Internet.  The raw footage ended up as evidence at the Nuremberg Trials.


A careful and persuasive study by John-Paul Himka concludes that the July pogrom was facilitated and executed primarily by the local militia of Stepan Bandera's OUN-B faction.

In Origins of the Final Solution, Christopher Browning Jurgen Matthaus describe the second, Fall 1941, Lviv pogrom executed as part of the ghettoization effort:

...ghettoization was combined with decimation.    Access to the ghetto was limited to passage under two railway bridges, where German and Ukrainian policemen seized valuables from the incoming Jews and conducted a selection...Many thousands of Jews were killed in the so-called bridge of death Aktion...women were for the first time the primary victims.




After the inaugural frenzy, the Germans reserved for themselves the responsibility and grim honor of engaging in the actual execution of Jews; but Baltic and eastern European auxiliaries were always there, to dig the graves, bury the dead, control the victims, and police the camps. In Lviv, by the end of the war the Jewish population had dwindled from the 1939 high of 200,000 to around 300.

Exalting fascists, therefore, involves downplaying the moral claims of the Holocaust.  This involves giving suffering at the hands of the Soviets at least equal stature with the program of annihilation local fascists helped visit on the Jewish population of Eastern Europe.

In Ukraine, this means elevating the Holodomor, the massive loss of life in Ukraine inflicted by Stalin as part of his program of collectivization, suppression of local resistance, and the ensuing famine.  The direct death toll was bad enough, somewhere on the order of 3 million; through various statistical jiggery-pokery, Ukrainian nationalist historians have tried to boost this figure to ten million dead, thereby eclipsing the canonical Holocaust figure of six million for all of Europe.


And, to the outrage of Jewish groups, the Baltic states' lobbying arm was able to prevail upon the US Congress this week to do this:

Legislation designating August 23 as a “Black Ribbon Day” commemorating the victims of both Soviet communist and Nazi terror passed yesterday in the U.S. House of Representatives. It is a culmination of an ongoing two-year effort by the Joint Baltic American National Committee, Inc. (JBANC) seeking passage of this legislation.

Congressman John Shimkus of Illinois, the co-chairman of the House Baltic Caucus, sponsored the legislation and effectively shepherded its passage in the House. The legislation, part of a National Defense Authorization Act (H.R. 4435), will now be taken up by the Senate. A conference committee of both houses will work out differences...
 

In Hungary the rightist/nationalist government is currently in the midst of a wrangle with liberal-democratic, Jewish, and pro-EU groups concerning its insistence on erecting a statue commemorating the suffering of Hungarians at the hands of Hitler, depicting an eagle (Germany) attacking the Archangel Gabriel (Hungary).

Just as Austria smoothed over the rough edges of its collaboration with the Nazis by portraying itself as "Hitler's first victim", it would seem that Hungary--which saw a belated occupation by the Nazis in 1944 to forestall their ally's efforts to negotiate a separate peace as the German war effort collapsed--is trying to repackage itself as "Hitler's last victim."

The real Hungarian victims of Nazi Germany, were of course, the Jews of Hungary, none of whom are particularly identified with the Archangel Gabriel--the symbol of the divine sovereignty of the Roman-Catholic Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Hannah Arendt relates that Eichmann was able to achieve the unimaginable task of transporting 450,000 Hungarian Jews to the overworked death chambers of Auschwitz in two months only because of the assistance of the local Hungarian bureaucrats: "Everything went "like a dream" as [Eichmann] repeated every time he recalled this episode..." (Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Viking Press, pg. 125)


I argue that European fascism is not just bigotry, xenophobia, and nostalgia for the Russian-bashing practices of Nazi Germany; it's also a nationalist response to the perceived excesses and failures of transnationalized, globalized neo-liberalism.  But it's also determinedly and shamefully anti-Semitic.

A Massacre, Remembered

Updated June 5, 2014

This video is very, very hard to watch. But I think it should be watched, and remembered.

It's the immediate aftermath of the June 2 attack on the regional administrative building in Lugansk, eastern Ukraine, which was serving as the HQ for the anti-Kyiv apparatus in the town.



According to a post on Twitter, the woman in the red shirt, who is still alive at the beginning of the video, was Inna Kukuruza.

 A viewer on Liveleak made a translation of the audio:

woman: Phone is near..., please..., Somewhere near...
At dead body near her another phone ringing
man: It is probably not yours, not yours
woman: Guys help me
man: My sunshine tell me wh...
woman: Please call 050...
man: right now, right now, my
(** 050 is city ​​code, not emergency number)

Eight civilians, including Inna Kukuruza, pictured above, died in the attack.  Alec Luhn, who writes for the Guardian, went to the site and says the markings on the ground are consistent with a strafing run.

The Kyiv government had announced it was flying Su-25 fighters over Lugansk, and one was seen making a pass over the administrative building just before the attack.

The Kyiv government tried to explain away the massacre as a rebel friendly fire incident, with a separatist's surface to air missile accidentally homing in on the heat signature from an air conditioner on the building as he tried to take down the jet.

Bullshit, probably.  The CCTV video from across the park shows whatever ordnance was used first hitting the ground about 100 meters left of the building; then there's a trail of smoke through the trees to the front door.  CNN visited the scene with a "munitions expert" and concluded the pattern of shredded trees and the regular footprint of munitions impact points marching across the park to the building were consistent with an air attack.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe noted in its Ukraine update that the attack seemed to be the result of an air attack using an "unguided missile".  Subsequently and rather mysteriously, the OSCE website was attacked.  As of June 4, 24 hours later, the attack was still going on, perhaps giving Ukraine's diplomats a chance to face the press without having to address the OSCE report.

In fact, Ukraine's permanent representative to the UN, Yuriy Sergeyev, availed himself of this opportunity in responding to questioning by Matthew Lee of Inner City Press.

In response to allegations of an air attack in Lugansk, Surgeyev made the unsupported assertion that "even Russian experts" attributed the incident to a "misuse of grenade" by the separatists.  He subsequently stated that, although he had experienced difficulties accessing the OSCE website, the OSCE had "changed its story" and "corrected" to the "main version" of a friendly fire incident.

Not true, apparently.

As of June 5, the OSCE website is accessible again, and its report for Ukraine conditions on June 2 states:

Based on the SMM’s limited observation these strikes [i.e. on the Lugansk regional administration building] were the result of non-guided rockets shot from an aircraft.

Russia is quite keen on having the OSCE--a European multi-lateral conflict monitoring mechanism-- in east Ukraine so that it can provide internationally accepted reporting on Kyiv's Anti-Terrorist Operation in addition to RT's much derided but actually quite good and objective on the scene coverage.

On May 30, Russia allocated the not-inconsiderable sum of 600,000 Euros to support the OSCE's work in Ukraine (that's apparently four times the OSCE's annual budget).  So it is possible that the OSCE is now seen by the partisans of the Kyiv regime as in Moscow's pocket, hence the sustained attack to keep authoritative looking corroboration of the air attack from seeping into the world's consciousness.

The Su-25 is an air-to-ground attack fighter with a 30 mm cannon.  The cannon fires a variety of shells, according to the "Russian Ammunition Page" website, including a "ME" or "multi-element" round with 28 subprojectiles i.e. a cluster munition.

The cannon's rate of fire is 3000 rounds per minute.  It seems that half-a dozen rounds were fired at the Lugansk administrative center.

So one can speculate that the pilot decided to make a pass over the local HQ of the separatists, touch the trigger for a F*ck You burst...and fly on home.

An attack on unarmed civilians in a non-military area, possibly using cluster munitions, looks and quacks pretty much like a war crime, a crime that's been documented by some absolutely heart-rending footage that would seem tailor-made for cable TV in what looks to be the 21st century's first completely HD war.

But the only significant Western coverage of the incident I found was CNN, which did a pretty good job in the body of the report despite the inevitable genuflections to "he said/she said/fog o' war" obfuscation that attend reporting of an ally's misdeed.

In order to keep CNN in step with US priorities, perhaps, the headline misleadingly implies the massacre was part of a legitimate military operation against militants as witnessed by the slack-jawed local yokels:
  
Air attack on pro-Russian separatists in Luhansk kills 8, stuns residents

Yes, if by "stuns" you mean "tears apart with sophisticated high velocity ordnance".

A 2011 study by academics Daniel Rothbart and Karina Korostelina calculates that the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in conflicts since World War II is ten to one.

The disproportionate suffering of civilians is often ignored while the combatant's sacrifice is exalted.  As Rothbart puts it, there is no "memorial day" for civilians.


Lugansk is being immediately and comprehensively ignored by Western news outlets, presumably because the Kyiv's US and European allies are not interested in revealing the homicidal incompetence of the ATO Kyiv is conducting in eastern Ukraine with the full encouragement and support of the West-- and perhaps because evidence of repeated war crimes against civilians would provide justification either for Russian intervention or, at the very least, support for Russian demands that the ATO be halted and negotiations take place.

 In contrast to the wall to wall coverage of the Tiananmen massacre, it looks like the West will not remember the Lugansk massacre for twenty-five minutes, let alone twenty five years.

But I think they should both be remembered.

Endnote:

Disregard of the eastern Ukrainian story looks like it may become the norm for Western media outlets.  Alec Luhn, perhaps the most objective Western reporter, is out of Ukraine.  In a farewell post, he alluded to the difficulties he experienced with angry and suspicious locals in eastern Ukraine--and also his editors (he wrote for The Nation and The Guardian; it's unclear which outlet he's referring to here):

I knew they were right to a certain extent [to verbally abuse and threaten him], given Western media’s tendency to vilify Russia and, by extension, the pro-Russian protesters. The ubiquitous use of the word separatist, for instance, ignored the fact that the majority of protesters said they wanted to remain part of Ukraine. Meanwhile, although statements made by the Ukrainian president and interior minister usually diverged wildly from what I was seeing on the ground, my editors seemed to treat them like the word of God.

I tried to present a balanced view, but the headlines and redacted ledes of my articles sometimes seemed overly simplified and made me wonder if I wasn’t just as bad as some of the hacks working in the field, if I wasn’t just an unwitting foot soldier in the information war. One day, I snapped at the editors of a radio station I was freelancing for when they repeatedly asked me to talk about an announced military blockade of Slavyansk, which I knew was not actually in place. What did they want me to do, make it up?

With media focus shifting elsewhere, maybe it won't be necessary to cover up the next massacre; it might never get reported in the first place.

A Quiet Revolution in the South China Sea

Is the PRC Ditching the Nine Dash Line?

Without any ambiguity, the People’s Republic of China has announced that it considers itself and not the United States the boss in the South China Sea.  Its most assertive statement of this principle was to send the HYSY 981 rig, escorted by a flotilla of dozens of ships, into waters that Vietnam claims as its Exclusive Economic Zone for some exploratory drilling, right after president Obama made a trip to Asia (but, tellingly and perhaps unwisely, not to the PRC) to talk up the US pivot.

In keeping with the PRC pattern of avoiding overtly military operations—those that would justify the invocation of existing or new U.S. security alliances with PRC neighbors—the flotilla apparently included no PLAN vessels, and the objectives and disputes surrounding the rig have been characterized in economic/bilateral terms.

In its attempts to present itself as a responsible and competent steward of the South China Sea—and in order to bring Vietnam to heel and isolate the Philippines for the next, much more complex and risky round of “salami slicing”--the PRC might be prepared to make a major shift in its South China Sea maritime claims.

Alert readers (admittedly, China Matters has no other kind) will immediately grasp the significance of this passage from the May 31 People’s Daily:

The truth is, so far China and Vietnam have not reached consensus on delimiting their exclusive economic zones and continental shelves, but the waters in which the oil rig is operated are only 17 nautical miles (31.5 kilometers) from Zhongjian Island of China’s Xisha Islands while about 150 nautical miles from Vietnam’s coast. In other words, the drilling site is located only five nautical miles from the outer limit of China’s territorial sea and is undeniably within China’s exclusive economic zone, regardless of whichever principle is applied in future delimitation.

The People’s Republic of China is claiming the right for its HYSY 981 drilling rig to operate at its current location based upon an EEZ justification, not by its position within the notorious “cow tongue”, the area enclosed by the “nine-dash-line”.

Over the last year there have been several informal indications that the PRC is planning to move beyond the anachronistic “nine-dash-line” as the basis for its South China Sea claims, and haggle with its neighbors on the basis of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, with its maritime claims based on sovereignty, territorial waters, and Exclusive Economic Zones or EEZs.

That is big news for the South China Sea and, perhaps, bad news for the United States, which has relied on the patent absurdity of the nine-dash-line claim to justify its role as the sensible adult in the SCS.

For clarification, the general principle is that a coastal state like Vietnam is accorded an EEZ of at least 200 nautical miles or even more if the continental shelf justifies—provided there is no conflict with the EEZ of an island held by another state.

In the case of a conflicting island claim, the coastal claim does not gain automatic precedence; nor is there a standard formula for drawing an EEZ boundary between the two claims.  For instance, there is no principle that the boundary be drawn at the midline between the coastal baseline and the island baseline.  UNCLOS calls for the boundary to be drawn on the basis of “equity”, taking factors like the populations of the immediate EEZ claimants into account.  

Vietnam would clearly get the lion’s share of EEZ in the direction of the Paracels, but its position that its continental shelf claim entitles it to the spot where the HYSY 981 is drilling—and any complicating claims to a Paracels EEZ can be ignored-- is less defensible. 

The PRC position (reflected in the reference to “regardless of whichever principle is applied in further delineation”) is that the Paracels is going to get something, at least something more than five miles beyond Zhongjian Island’s territorial waters, and the HYSY 981 is covered.  

Since we’re talking about the South China Sea, the situation is even more complicated.

In 1996, the PRC drew a single baseline around all the Paracels, essentially treating them as a single archipelagic group; Zhongjian Island, a.k.a. Triton Island is the basis for the southwestern corner of the claim.  The Chinese position is that the archipelagic grouping as a whole (or, per the PRC formulation, “territorial sea”) is, leaving aside for a moment the issue of conflict with a neighboring EEZ, entitled to a 200 nautical mile EEZ beyond the baseline, hence the invocation of the rig’s propinquity to Zhongjian Island as defense of its legality.

This is not kosher by UNCLOS standards; only essentially archipelagic states (like Philippines but not continental states like the PRC and Vietnam) are supposed to enjoy this treatment.  Furthermore, the above-water real estate inside the claim is miniscule, and doesn’t even come close to the UNCLOS standard that the ratio of watery realm to land features should not exceed 9:1.  Therefore, if the archipelagic claim is thrown out, the best the PRC could do would be to claim a 12 nautical mile territorial waters around Zhongjian/Triton Island itself.  Since the island is uninhabited and incapable of sustaining economic life, it gets no EEZ and apparently leaves the HYSY 981 hanging.

However, to further muddy the waters, several coastal states have ignored these restrictions on archipelagic claims when defining baselines for island groups (for instance, Denmark on the Faroes and Ecuador on the Galapagos).

And, in bad news for Vietnam, the PRC has been able to create a simulacrum of human habitation and economic life on Woody Island in the Paracels.  Woody Island is the designated seat of the Sansha Prefecture of Hainan Province, with a small town maintained by a monthly supply boat, an airstrip, and the prospect of patriotic tourism, thereby creating a plausible claim for itself to a 200 nautical mile EEZ …which would also cover the current position of HYSY 981, 103 nautical miles away.

Previously, Vietnamese representatives, perhaps unwisely assuming that the PRC would never abandon the nine-dash-line, had publicly acknowledged there is a case for allowing Woody Island an EEZ.

Therefore, Vietnam appears to be in something of a bind here.

According to an authoritative looking if officially unofficial paper from August 2013 by Hong Thao Nguyen of the Law Faculty of Vietnam National University, Vietnam’s position on the Paracels is based on three principles: sovereignty over the Paracels, rejection of the nine-dash-line, and the assertion that the issue should be addressed multi-laterally instead of bilaterally.

As yet, the world largely follows the U.S. lead and does not take positions on island sovereignty, so point 1 is out.  If the PRC is switching to an EEZ basis for its claims, then point 2 is out.  And if points 1 and 2 are out, there is no strong basis for taking a bilateral spat to a multilateral forum.

And on technical ground, if the PRC shifts the terms of debate for HYSY 981 away from the nine-dash-line to UNCLOS and EEZ, Vietnam’s claims to the spot the rig now occupies do not appear to be a slam dunk.

Adoption of an EEZ dispute formulation would also appear to create a major political problem for Vietnam.

For Vietnam to negotiate an EEZ settlement with the PRC would involve Vietnam acknowledging PRC sovereignty over the Paracels and China’s as yet undefined yet genuine rights to some EEZ treatment.

This, I imagine, is an impossibly bitter pill for the Vietnamese government to swallow at the present time, given the intensity of anti-Chinese anger that roils Vietnam.

And if Vietnam can’t accept PRC sovereignty over the Paracels, the dispute can’t go to UNCLOS arbitration, it’s a sovereignty dispute, and all those carefully parsed arguments about EEZs and penetrating legal critiques of the nine-dash-line are completely irrelevant.

If this is the case, the PRC has rather carefully and maliciously hoisted Vietnam on a cleft stick.

Indeed, beyond asserting the right to drill holes in Vietnam’s continental shelf, Vietnamese acknowledgement of PRC sovereignty over the Paracels may be the key concession that China is trying to extract from its unhappy neighbor.

And maybe that’s the deal the PRC is offering Vietnam and, by extension, ASEAN: an agreement to play by UNCLOS rules if its sovereignty claims in the SCS are accepted.

Beyond categorical declarations of its absolute superiority of its continental shelf claims, Vietnam appears to be trying to find a way out of its dilemma through the politics of outrage: using heated rhetoric and provocative approaches to the PRC flotilla by various vessels in the hope that the PRC will do something so stupid and outrageous that the arcane and fraught issue of conflicting EEZ and sovereignty claims will be superseded by the easier-to-understand and cathartic issue of battling Chinese aggression.

For Americans, this situation would conjure up ironic memories of another provocation in Vietnamese waters, the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident that the U.S. hyped as an excuse to sidetrack informed debate and escalate its intervention in the Vietnam War.

Remarkably, even though the global China-bashing machine is on hair trigger, there seems to be little appetite as yet for indulging Vietnam.  Even when a Vietnamese fishing boat flipped and sank in a dustup with the HYSY 981 flotilla—an incident that would have supplied ample grist for the anti-China media mill regardless of the inevitably disputed facts of the encounter-- the international response was remarkably muted.

Whether this is owing to recognition of the fundamental ambiguity of the PRC-Vietnam dispute, the fact that ASEAN is thoroughly divided and cowed by the PRC, or because the US is distracted by its Ukraine adventure and is not ready to get a China crisis on at this particular moment remains to be seen.

Judging by President Obama’s security agenda speech at West Point (where he briefly cited the South China Sea issue but coupled it with a call for the Senate to ratify UNCLOS in order to give the US more standing in the disputes), America is not drawing any red lines in the South China Sea just yet.

As Secretary of Defense Hagel was communicating US resolve at the Shangri La forum, the New York Times treated the world to an astounding backgrounder on the Obama administration’s attitude toward Asia.

But even as Mr. Hagel and the United States have adopted a public posture that backs Japan — and, to a lesser extent, the Philippines, Vietnam and any other country that finds itself at odds with China — some administration officials have privately expressed frustration that the countries are all engaged in a game of chicken that could lead to war.

 “None of those countries are helping matters,” a senior administration official said…

Even if President Obama is suffering from lame duck fatigue and is disgusted with the hand that Hillary Clinton and her pivot dealt him in Asia, it seems counterintuitive that the United States will give a green light to the PRC in its South China Sea dispute with Vietnam.

If the U.S. isn’t ready to throw its weight around on behalf of its buddies, right, wrong, or nuance be damned, then the value of the U.S. deterrent and the pivot are significantly devalued.

Furthermore, Secretary of State John Kerry is the godfather of U.S.-Vietnamese rapprochement and I find it difficult to believe he—or his ally on the matter, John McCain--will let Vietnam take a whipping from China without some kind of riposte. 

The hope that the US cavalry will ride to the rescue, despite its current ambivalence, is probably one of the factors that is keeping Vietnam from sitting down with the PRC for the bilateral talks that Beijing is insisting upon.

But for the time being, the PRC seems to be cautiously enhancing its legal position—and relying on the expectation that the world will get tired of Vietnamese intransigence before it becomes sufficiently outraged by Chinese assertiveness—to gain further acceptance of its interests and rights in the South China Sea.