Paul Malone July 26, 2014
Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop respond to the MH17 tragedy.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott must have believed he’d found his nine/eleven moment when he fronted the media immediately after the Malaysian airliner tragedy.
Just a few words into his opening statement he said the aircraft was probably shot down by a pro-Russian-separatist controlled surface-to-air missile. To get the point across he added: “So, it was shot down over Russian-backed rebel territory by what appears to be a Russian-backed rebel missile.”
Having made up his mind about what had happened, he then called for a “full, impartial, international investigation”.
For the next two days the Cold War rhetoric continued, with Abbott saying that Russia should not be allowed to stand in the way of any investigation.
But after talking to President Vladimir Putin and being told that Russia would support an international investigation, Abbott’s language softened as he acknowledged that Putin had said all the right things and now what was needed was to have him be as good as his word.
It should not be forgotten that the Abbott government is in deep trouble, having brought down a disastrous budget that the public rightly regards as unfair.
In two party-preferred terms the government has dropped 7 percentage points in the polls since the election and would lose an election were it held today.
The government is not in quite as bad a position as the Howard government was two years before the 2001 election, but it’s getting close.
Howard was rescued from the depths of the polls by his anti-boat people policy and the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which enabled him to rally support around his pledge of solidarity with the United States. He went on to win a federal election a month after the attack.
Abbott too could do with a cause to rally the troops. So a confrontation where he could classify the combatants as goodies and baddies, as he did in Syria just six months ago, suited him down to the ground. This time he found little difficulty in identifying the evil-doers.
“I want to say to the Australian people that as far as I am concerned, when you have a situation where Russian backed rebels appear to have killed Australians using, it may well turn out to be, Russian-supplied heavy weaponry, Australia takes a very dim view indeed and we want the fullest possible investigation.”
He then added: “I mean this is not an accident, it is a crime. I stress it is not an accident, it is a crime and criminals should not be allowed to get away with what they have done.”
It was good political rhetoric. But it will do nothing to help get to the bottom of this tragedy.
Nor were we helped by Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s suggestion that the pro-Russian forces might use the bodies as hostages or pawns in the Ukrainian conflict.
In the event the bodies were handed over to the international authorities.
On what basis did she suggest this? In what way could holding the bodies be in Russian interests?
The key to the cause of this tragedy is not hidden in the bodies.
No one has publicly claimed responsibility for bringing this plane down. The one thing most people agree on is that it was not intentional. This was not a terrorist incident of the kind frequently carried out by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the 1960s.
Pro-Russian separatists would gain nothing from shooting down a passenger airliner.
The most likely explanation is that the separatists fired a missile at what they believed was a Ukrainian military aircraft.
It should not be forgotten that Ukrainian planes had been bombing pro-Russian towns for some time. In the week before the downing of MH17 the BBC reported that 11 people had died when the rebel-held town of Snizhne in the Donetsk region was bombed.
Villagers at the airliner crash site told reporters that when the pieces of the plane started falling from the sky they at first thought they were being bombed again.
From the wreckage the air crash investigators may be able identify the weapon that brought down the airliner. But it will be much harder to find the perpetrators. To do that we will need people to come forward and admit to what they have done. With the war still raging there seems little chance of that.
It would help if the international community, including the United States and Australia, took a more balanced approach to the conflict. The vast majority of people in the self-declared Donetsk People's Republic identify with Russia. This should surprise no one.
Russians have fought and died to hold this region for hundreds of years. In the Crimean War they confronted the Ottoman Turks, British and French forces. Eighty years later Germany and its Axis allies invaded.
Rather than egg on Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in his efforts to capture the pro-Russian regions, Western governments should be urging restraint.
Reports last week suggest a build-up of Ukrainian forces preparing an attack on the Russian separatist-held regions. The European Union, in particular, should recognise that its interests are best served by stopping any such move. The government in Kiev should be discouraged from waging a war against those it claims are its own people.
As it is, thousands of panicked pro-Russians have been flooding highways and trains and heading out of eastern Ukraine. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, since the start of 2014 about 110,000 Ukrainians have fled to Russia, while more than 700 others went to Poland, Belarus, Czech Republic and Romania.
Given the way the conflict has gone, there is no way peace can be achieved by having Ukrainian forces subjugate the Russian-speaking regions.
Were they to do so, that would be a recipe for terrorist action.
The only realistic long-term solution is to divide Ukraine along ethnic lines.
Did Abbott believe he had his twin-towers moment with airliner's shooting down?
