At the prestigious Munich Security Conference, world leaders and policy experts from democracies and autocracies alike played with their facts and sometimes lied through their teeth. The only difference was some did it with more panache than others
The recently concluded Munich Security Conference was high on rhetoric and propaganda and sparse on verifiable facts. Actually, the sheer volume of lies that came out of the conference was astounding. This started with Russia’s absolute denial of involvement in the Ukrainian conflict, despite significant independent evidence available on www.bellingcat.com, a reputed web platform that allows citizen journalists to investigate current events using open source information such as videos, maps and pictures. Its founder, Eliot Higgins, caught the attention of Western investigating agencies with his weapons analysis on the Syrian civil war.
However, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation does not seem to take this website seriously. A high-ranking Nato official admitting in private that it had “zero concrete proof” of Russian involvement, owing to the Russian mastery of Maskirovka — a military doctrine of camouflage and deception. However, this did not prevent Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko from producing “Russian passports” that, he claimed, belonged to Russian military men and were “lost” in Ukraine.
It is unclear how one is supposed to reconcile the private admission of a Nato officer that the Western military organisation has “zero proof”, with the seeming clumsiness of Russia sending troops into Ukraine devoid of all identification expect their Russian passports (which would scream Russian involvement from the rooftops). Either way, the discrepancies were also ignored by the Press which was happy to parade President Poroshenko’s ‘lost Russian passports’ as conclusive proof.
Now, in spite of the lack of direct proof, it doesn’t exactly take a genius to figure out that Russia is actively destabilising Ukraine. When Russian Foreign Minister Sergei lavrov repeated Moscow’s official line of non-involvement in Ukraine, the crowd of ‘experts’, rather gracelessly, for a bunch of supposed policy professionals, laughed at him and booed and jeered him. One expert ever cluelessly tweeted that “lavrov’s speech was aggressive and graceless”, ignoring the fact that all the speeches through the morning had been equally “aggressive” and “graceless”.
Of course, Mr lavrov gave it back as good as he got it. It held the mirror up to Nato on the latter’s debacles in Kosovo, Iraq, Syria and libya, but it seemed that the West was in no mood for introspection. As a particularly astute Azeri observer put it, “It seems to me the purpose of this conference is to punish Russia, not to find a solution to Ukraine”. In the end, the Russians made it abundantly clear what they thought of the entire affair when the conference website was the target of a rather successful DNS attack by ‘unknown’ hackers.
The second set of lies came from Nato itself. The same senior Nato official insisted that “in an excellent interview Mr Mikhail Gorbachev had given a few weeks back, he stated clearly that no assurance was given to the USSR that Nato would not expand eastwards”. With a little bit of digging, it turned up that Mr Gorbachev had given two recent interviews — one to TIME and the other to Der Spiegel. In both interviews, the Soviet leader had denounced Nato’s eastward expansion and said that these were directly violative of promises given to him as well as of the Helsinki Accords — contrary to the claims of the Nato official. However, the latter went unchallenged on this score as he was interviewed a basement with no internet connectivity and, consequently, there was no way to verify his claims instantaneously.
The Estonian President, however, fared far worse. He was publicly humiliated for his lies. Mr Toomas Ilves insisted that the current Ukranian Government was “not extremist”. Yet the fact is that President Poroshenko has refused a federated Ukraine, guaranteeing minority rights. Instead, Mr Poroshenko has declared of national holidays commemorating notorious Ukrainian Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera.
Promptly, a correspondent from Kommersant, a Russian newspaper, pointed out a past retweet of the Estonian President highlighting an amateur website for Russian world domination set up by two Kazhak students. His comeback that retweets did not equal endorsement, was immediately pooh-poohed by critics who pointed out that he had prefaced the retweet by stating: “This should be taken very seriously”. At that point, the Estonian President had little credibility left and the panel’s conclusion saw him cut a lonely figure on stage. No one wanted to chat with him anymore.
Moral of the story: All Governments, democratic or authoritarian, lie; and and they lie outrageously. The key here is, if you want to lie, do so with elan, like the senior Nato official or President Poroshenko or Minister lavrov. Most certainly, do not lie in a manner that you can get called out, because if you get caught, you turn into an instant liability.
The second moral of the story is that women are much more balanced and credible when it comes to foreign policy. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her Defence Minister Ursula Von leyen, who voiced their rage at Russian perfidy, and yet acknowledged the need for a solution for Ukraine over punishment for Moscow, came across as nuanced and balanced. Together, they did more damage to Russia, than any of the walking-talking testosterone tubes at the conference.
Perhaps, the most sinister aspect of the conference though came from the human rights brigade, represented by Mr Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch. Mr Roth openly called for regime change and discussed leadership alternates in Syria. In India, when the Intelligence Bureau had designated certain human rights organisations as suspect last year, it was met with howls of laughter.
let’s be clear that there are some organisations that are genuinely concerned about human rights and others that act as agents of foreign Governments. The problem is that there are some organisations, like HRW, which blur the line between politics and human rights when they actively promote foreign agendas like regime change. They make such a distinction tougher and erode the credibility of human rights advocacy in countries like India.
Far from facilitating human rights, these organisations actively destroy any peaceful legal means one may have and end up in situations like Russia where all advocacy groups, legitimate or otherwise, have been designated foreign agents. Unfortunately, getting people like Mr Roth to prioritise human rights over self-publicity is a daunting task.
But those like him and his ilk should not come in the way of us acknowledging the excesses of our state and trying to rectify them. Our duty to our people must not be diluted simply because there are some who advocate these duties from the West and that some of them in the West may have an agenda.