“If you want peace you have to understand why people fight. Because they feel threatened, because they feel they are being done an injustice. Everyone wants justice. I never met a soldier who was attacking. Only defending himself. And that is true for soldiers on both sides of the front. No one is attacking, only defending.”
Alice Martins, freelance photographer who has worked among fighters in Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan and Palestine speaking at the Kyiv conference on The War in Ukraine and the Politics of the Left, 6 September 2014
On Friday 5 September the three parties to the negotiations in Minsk over President Poroshenko’s peace plan adopted a protocol setting out twelve steps to peace in Eastern Ukraine. Let’s look at the content of this protocol and ask ourselves what are its chances of success.
There is no English version of the protocol yet, only the original Russian one, so I give here my summary of its twelve points.
The protocol is an agreement between three parties – representatives of the Ukrainian government (Second President Leonid Kuchma), the Russian government (Ambassador to Ukraine Mikhail Zurabov) and the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (Ambassador Heidi Tagliavini). But the document is signed by these parties’ representatives as well as by Alexander Zakharchenko and Igor Plotnytsky, respectively the prime ministers of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. They are identified by name only, not by title or affiliation, and nowhere in the protocol are their state-political formations even mentioned.
Thus while the protocol is explicitly aimed at ending a “two sided” conflict, it leaves unclear which, in addition to the state of Ukraine, is the other party to the conflict. This lack of clarity is a direct result of Russia’s insistence that it is not a party to the conflict, merely a facilitator of its resolution. It may also point to some “rocks below the waterline”, as they say here, which I will explore below.
The three parties to the protocol have agreed:
1. to ensure the implementation of an immediate two sided ceasefire;
2. to ensure the monitoring and verification by the OSCE of the ceasefire;
3. to undertake the decentralisation of government, including the adoption of a Law of Ukraine on local self government of separate districts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts holding a special status;
4. to ensure the continual monitoring of the Russian-Ukrainian border, its verification by the OSCE, and the establishment of a safety-security zone in the districts along both sides of the border;
5. to adopt a law prohibiting the persecution or legal prosecution of people for their participation in events that took place in separate districts of Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts;
6. to free all hostages and illegally detained people;
7. to continue an inclusive all-national dialogue;
8. to adopt measures to improve the humanitarian situation in the Donbas;
9. to hold early local elections in conformity with the Law of Ukraine on local self government of separate districts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts holding a special status;
10. to remove all illegal military formations, weapons, fighters and mercenaries from the territory of Ukraine;
11. to adopt a programme for the economic reconstruction and recovery of the Donbas;
12. to provide guarantees for the individual security of the participants in the negotiations.
What is the value of this protocol and what are its chances of success? We can try to answer that question by examining some of its objectives against the current situation on the ground, including the developments since the protocol was signed on 5 September.
The protocol is undoubtedly valued widely because expresses a desire held by an overwhelming majority of Ukrainian citizens to end this bloody conflict and to begin addressing its causes by peaceful means. It is also welcomed by millions of Russians, Poles and other neighbours of Ukraine, as well as by other peoples around the world who themselves are suffering war and imperialist aggression. People are hoping it will give peace a real chance.
The ceasefire, its monitoring and verification
Since the ceasefire was declared on 5 September there have been more than 150 instances of firing on Ukrainian forces, which in many cases forced them to return fire.Ukrainian television has shown Ukrainian soldiers demanding that OSCE monitors record and verify clearly visible tanks advancing on their positions, and OSCE monitors refusing to do so. The Ukrainian government claims its forces are holding fire where possible, but that those on the other side are taking advantage of this in order to advance on them, destroy their fortified positions and take new ground. People note the same thing happened to destroy the ceasefire in May.
Russian and DNR forces have continued to advance along a new front from Novoazovsk to Mariupol . President Poroshenko flew to Mariupol on 8 September to show solidarity with the city’s inhabitants. Separatist and Russian forces responded to news of his impending visit by increasing fire on Mariupol’s defensive outposts. There Poroshenko announced he would telephone President Putin from Mariupol itself to assure him that Ukrainian armed forces would resist Russian advances along the coast towards the Crimean peninsula.
Divisions growing in Kyiv
President Poroshenko is the leader with the most to win or lose from a successful or failed attempt to establish a ceasefire So he is prepared to give it more time to take hold and to maintain contact with President Putin. Premier Yatseniuk on the other hand has gone on television to say that martial law should be imposed across the whole country because Ukraine is at war and the ceasefire is not holding. He insists that Putin continues to deceive the parties to the protocol and cannot be trusted.
Laying down arms
The second critical step following the implementation of a ceasefire depends as much on what combatants expect will can happen next as what has already happened. How will foreign combatants and mercenaries get safe passage out of Ukraine? The recent disaster at Illovaisk will certainly make foreign fighters who want to leave nervous about their fate when they do. At the very end of August several Ukrainian battalions carrying many wounded were surrounded at Illovaisk by Russian elite troops and DNR forces. They were offered a corridor out of the “cauldron” after President Putin made a public request to the DNR and LNR forces to do so. However, they were then were repeatedly attacked at they took the designated corridor, leaving many of them dead. The Donbass battalion lost half its members. Foreign combatants – Russian army forces and mercenaries – will naturally be very nervous about being repaid in kind for Illovaisk. They will only agree to leave with their arms and along a corridor secured by the Russian army.
Those who stay
What about the separatist fighters, their government officials and civil administrators who are Ukrainian citizens and don’t want to leave? They make up a majority of DNR and LNR forces. Before laying down arms they will want assurances of an agreed meaning to the protocol’s clause 5 prohibiting persecution and prosecution for involvement in the separatist movement.
Up until now Ukrainian government leaders have insisted that all persons accused of murder, torture, kidnapping, of war crimes must be held to account under the law. How is one to interpret clause 5 now? That will be on the minds of LNR and DNR leaders, as well as of various still-unidentified gangs that have preyed on the civilian population in the chaos of war. Already there are accusations being leveled in Sloviansk by community activists against people who served in the local administration when Girkin-Strelkov’s forces held the town, and who continue to hold public office.
Those who want to go
If a ceasefire holds, combatants lay down arms, irregular formations are disbanded and foreign fighters leave, the transition from making decisions by force to peaceful, political means can begin. This transition – identified in the clauses on decentralisation, a special status for districts of the disputed oblasts, early election to local governments there under a new law on special status – raises a number of important questions and unknown quantities.
First, do the DNR and LNR leaders want the districts they hold to remain part of Ukraine or do they want to separate and join them to the Russian Federation? If the latter, there is no point in their participation in these stages of the protocol’s implementation. Zakharchenko declared immediately after the protocols were adopted that they did not mean the Donbas should remain part of Ukraine, but that its status should be designated as “preliminary” or be “deferred” until further talks, due to resume in a week’s time.
What does this mean? Some top DNR (and LNR?) leaders want to take “their” territories out of Ukraine altogether. If so, they are at odds with Putin who needs the Donbas to remain part of Ukraine and with an autonomy sufficiently broad that it can wreck any policy of the Kyiv government that Putin doesn’t like. Perhaps Zakharchenko and Plotnytsky see in the non-recognition of their governments in the Minsk agreement they nevertheless signed a warning: the beginning of their own end. Perhaps they have served their purpose and are about to become nobodies in the eyes both of Kyiv and Moscow.
Who do the DNR and LNR represent?
Those within the DNR and LNR who see their future in a new decentralised arrangement within Ukraine need to be included in the peace process. Kyiv has until now resisted any idea of the sort, but in the long run one can’t have peace without mutual recognition of opponents on the basis of a mimimum agreement: in this case to resolve differences in the context of one, united country.
However, what claim to lead “their” territories and inhabitants do middle and lower rank leaders have, those who seized and occupied local government positions, often driving out those who had been elected to them? Certainly not a democratic one. So they, like everyone else, will have to submit to a process of democratic renewal of public office to see who actually has the right to speak in the name of Donbas people.
In the meantime, who will monitor and verify these stages of the process? The organisations of civil society who enjoy the greatest trust and confidence of the local population will be the most effective: the trade unions, the student unions, the voluntary, educational and cultural organisations and the churches. Not the OSCE on its own, and not the the Kyiv government, at least not until it re-elects a Verkhovna Rada with parliamentary deputies from these very oblasts. And that will almost certainly not happen there at the end of October, if the elections happen at all across Ukraine.
Addressing the conflict now
People need to identify their grievances and the injustices they have suffered. This will require a process of building trust, solidarity and reconciliation among themselves so that positive solutions can be worked out. Swathes of the Donbas have been destroyed; hundreds of thousands of people are displaced; homes have been seized illegally, bought and sold; property stolen. People have been pressed into forced labour, women raped and forced into prostitution. An electoral process simply cannot deal with these injustices and losses. They will require an intensity of community participation in decisions and popular control over their implementation that no system of government by oligarchs, such as Ukraine has had for twenty hears, could ever accommodate. So if this peace process takes hold – and everyone here hopes it will despite all the difficult obstacles in its way – it could change a lot more than the Donbas for the better. Yesterday I heard one soldier say: “We are fighting for a chance to finally change this whole state”.
We all need to demand an end to this war now. Not in the abstract, but to address this demand specifically to all those who continue to fuel the war. The war is fuelled by lies as much as by weapons: that Russia is not involved, that the separatists in the east are all terrorists and mercenaries to name just two. If we don’t stop the war now many more people will die, and it will become all the harder for the survivors to live with the consequences and with each other.
Kyiv, 8 September 2014
Observer Ukraine 