In discussing
the dispute over Crimea, yesterday we
introduced the first ground for a colourable claim: HISTORICAL ENTITLEMENT.
Before going into any negotiations about the sovereignty over Crimea, we have
to decide who has the right to claim. For more references about the colourable
claim see our previous post.
To demonstrate the importance of
factual evidence (the basis for the historical claim) and the way in which this
“same” evidence is interpreted differently, we are going to review today two
very different “perceptions” of these facts concerning the same TERRITORIAL
DISPUTE: Crimea. Both these “perceptions” come from academic “rigorous” analysis.
Same
facts but two different accounts
Account
ONE of the facts concerning Crimea
“The Crimean peninsula officially
became part of the Russian Empire in 1783 on the orders of the Catherine the
Great (1762-1796), when the Russian imperial army finally defeated dwindling
forces of the Crimean Khanate – a state that was nominally under control of the
Ottoman Empire. Since then, Crimea’s sea ports became the home of the Russian
Black Sea fleet and the peninsula was immediately regarded as the strategically
important outpost of Russian Navy. The peninsula was also the site of 1853
Crimean War in which the Russian Empire fought against Britain, France and the
Ottoman Empire. The author of the famous War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy,
also fought in the Crimean War and later published several accounts of his
experience in the battles. A world-renowned Russian novelist Anton Chekhov,
author of The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, also lived
and composed his brilliant books and plays in Crimea. Chekhov’s house became “a
magnet for other Russian writers of his day - Ivan Bunin, Maksim Gorky,
Alexander Kuprin - and for musicians such as Sergei Rachmaninov and the great
singer Fyodor Chaliapin.”5 Furthermore, Sevastopol, the chief port of the
Russian Black Sea Navy, entered into the Russian imagination as the legendary
“City of Heroes” after withstanding the German Nazi army’s relentless siege and
the city’s heroic defense by the Soviet soldiers during the World War II. In
short, the site of Russia’s Christian origins and identity, the land of Russian
military glories and tragedies, a hub of cultural rejuvenation - Crimea has a
special place in the Russian heart and enigmatic soul.
Crimea, or the Crimean Autonomous
Republic, became part of Ukraine in the second half of the twentieth century.
The jurisdiction and authority over the territory was transferred to the
Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954 at the initiative of Nikita
Khrushchev who was then serving as the First Secretary of the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union. At that time, it was an insignificant event as even a thought
of the Soviet Union’s eventual implosion was unthinkable. Khrushchev, who was
himself a Ukrainian, never explained his decision to attach the peninsula to
Ukraine’s territory; neither did the official memoranda of the communist Party.
Today, many theories exist of why Khrushchev considered it necessary to
transfer control over Crimea to Ukraine.”
Annexation of Crimea:
Link to the complete article“In actual fact, the Crimean peninsula, for most of its history, had nothing to do with Russia. Since antiquity, Crimea’s mountainous southeastern shores have been dominated by Tauri, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Venetian, and Genoese principalities, before they were conquered by the Ottoman Empire in 1475. The vast inland steppes of Crimea were ruled and populated by Scythians, Greeks, Goths, Huns, Bulgars, Khazars, Mongols, and Karaites, and eventually, from 1441, formed the heartland of the Crimean Tatar Khanate, a tributary of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans and the Tatars continued to rule over their respective parts of the peninsula until 1783.
Throughout
the premodern era, Crimea’s only substantial historical connection to either
Russia or Ukraine was the fact that the inland section of the peninsula was
controlled by the Kievan Rus’ –the precursor state of both modern Ukraine and
Russia – from the mid10th to the early 13th century. At the onset of Kievan
rule (which did not extend to the mountainous southeastern parts of the
peninsula that contained its most important settlements and ports and remained
under Byzantine control), the Crimean city of Chersonesos, now a part of
Sevastopol, was the site where the leader of the Rus’, Vladimir I. of Kiev,
converted to Christianity. This was a seminal event in the development of the
Eastern Orthodox churches (both in Russia and in Ukraine), since Vladimir then
oversaw the conversion of the entire Kievan Rus’ to the Orthodox faith.
Notwithstanding the symbolic importance of this event, which was duly invoked
by Vladimir Putin in his annexation speech on 18 March, the period of rule by
the Kievan Rus’ did not leave a deep cultural or political imprint on Crimea.
In the centuries following the demise of the Rus’ in the 1200s, the peninsula was
the site of sporadic Cossack raids, but it remained firmly in Tatar and Ottoman
hands.
Throughout
its history, Crimea has thus been a crucible of cultures. It was not until 1783
that it became Russian territory, following Catherine the Great’s victory over
the Ottomans and her conquest of the Tatar Khanate, and it remained Russian for
the next 170 years.
In
1954, the Soviet leadership transferred Crimea from the RSFSR to the Ukrainian
Soviet Socialist Republic (UkrSSR). In spite of frequent claims that the Soviet
leader Nikita Khrushchev, bypassing all legal norms, singlehandedly assigned
the peninsula to Ukraine, the transfer was in fact carried out legally and in
accordance with the 1936 Soviet Constitution (which, admittedly, was in essence
a legal fiction).[…]
For
the next six decades, Crimea was formally a part of Ukraine. Its ties to Kiev
always remained somewhat loose, but much the same can be said about its ties to
Russia throughout the preceding seventeen decades when it had been a part of
the Russian Empire and the RSFSR. Throughout most of these 170 years, while it
was politically controlled by Russia, Crimea had remained culturally distinct,
and its cultural connection with Russia was relatively tenuous. In spite of substantial
Russian colonisation efforts throughout the 19th century, around 1900 the
Tatars still formed the largest ethnic group on the peninsula. The demographic pre-eminence
of ethnic Russians in Crimea was only firmly solidified following the mass
deportation of the entire Crimean Tatar population, as well as the smaller
populations of ethnic Armenians, Bulgars, and Greeks, at Joseph Stalin’s behest
in 1944. This de facto ethnic cleansing of the peninsula’s native inhabitants led
to the death of between 20 and 50 percent of the Crimean Tatar community; the
remainder were only able to return to Crimea in the 1990s.
Crimea
has long occupied a special place in the Russian national consciousness, but
this should not obscure the fact that, while its historical and cultural
connection to Ukraine has been weak, its historical and cultural connection to
Russia has scarcely been any stronger. Even a cursory glance at its history
reveals that the recurrent proclamations of various Russian officials regarding
Crimea’s “primordial” historical and cultural importance for Russia range from
vast exaggeration to downright fantasy. Given that the Kremlin has invoked such
claims in the attempt to justify a grave violation of international law and
intrusion upon another sovereign state, it is important to spotlight how little
they correspond to historical reality.”
The Legitimacy of Russia’s Actions in
Ukraine
Link to the complete article Tomorrow, the second ground for a colourable claim: legal status.
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