Crimea: same facts but different accounts
In
discussing the dispute over Crimea, yesterday
we introduced the first ground for a colorable 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 colorable
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:
Account
TWO of the facts concerning Crimea
“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
NOTE:
This post is based on Jorge Emilio Núñez, “Territorial Disputes and State
Sovereignty: International Law and Politics,” London and New York: Routledge,
Taylor and Francis Group, 2020 (forthcoming)
Previous
published research monograph about territorial disputes and sovereignty by the
author, Jorge Emilio Núñez, “Sovereignty Conflicts and International Law and
Politics: A Distributive Justice Issue,” London and New York: Routledge, Taylor
and Francis Group, 2017.
NEXT
POST: Crimea and colorable claims based on law
Wednesday 26th February 2020
Dr Jorge Emilio Núñez
Twitter: @London1701
No comments:
Post a Comment