KUALA LUMPUR: AFTER World War 2 ended, the Cold War decades were defined by the outlandish belligerence of the Soviet Union, Russia’s garishly previous incarnate, as an exasperating psyche all too familiar to democratically inclined right-thinking people of the world.
Now, that same pigheadedness characterising the Soviets is reprised with great zeal by the pro-Russian rebels entrenched around Malaysia Airlines flight MH17’s crash site, where they have installed intimidating sentries to suppress the multinational search-and-recovery teams from entering the deteriorating area.
During the Cold War epoch, the Soviet Union went toe-to-toe with the West, from ideology to technology to arms race, but it could at least boast of a formidable tight-knit commune answerable only to a dictator lording over a Kremlin politburo.
They did that during the Cuban missile crisis, they flexed their muscle in blasting the first man to space and they constructed satellite states globally in their claim as a superpower superior to the United States and Nato (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) nations.
However, today’s Soviet- drenched Russia is in the doldrums — dodgy administration ruled by a strongman reminiscent of the bad old days, a state overrun by an oligarchy enforced by thugs, a shrinking population, and overdependency on oil and gas undercut by new energy abroad.
Sure, Russia brandished a new sort of Cold War in its bald-faced attempt to retake Ukraine after its preferred leader was democratically dethroned, but the price in allowing belligerents to do your bidding is unpredictably vicious, the unlikely but unsurprising outcome being MH17.
Unwittingly, Vladimir Putin’s regime revels in the role of an unrepentant backyard bully, swaggering and dismissive of all pleas to be reasonable, but this is essentially a facade to mask what is readily a fundamentally weak totalitarian position.
After the homicidal downing of MH17, that stroppy characteristic belies a more sinister, underlying intent.
The Netherlands, leading multinational teams of search and recovery that include a strong Malaysian contingent, is an easy-going liberal nation who would, by now, transmute its rectitude, only if it means knuckling the heads of the equally belligerent pro-Russian separatists to put some sense and humanity into them.
Until now, the recovery team cannot enter the badly compromised crash site, although members of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe were permitted a restricted viewing — but only just, unless they risk being shot by a rebel on a drunken rage.
As far as forensics recovery goes, precious little remains grounded: the looting of cash, smartphones, tablets, laptops, jewellery and other valuables is almost complete, but more worrying, telling evidence of a jetliner incinerated by a surface-to-air missile is whittling away.
The 298 bodies, strewn distressingly over a 34-sq km swath, have somehow been searched and collected by a 380-strong Ukrainian State Emergency Service, with help from local volunteers but under the threatening glare of armed separatists.
The question is: was there proper a forensic process applied in recovering the 196 bodies so far? Is it possible to identify the rotting bodies other than DNA? Alarming reports state that the rebels have confiscated the bodies, only to be transferred to an unknown location.
The rebels’ single-minded mulishness reflects their intransigent Russian patron, but a level-headed person would ponder, how could anyone be this pigheaded?
Especially in a situation where compassion should be a natural instinct?
Probably because in the years of fighting for a dodgy cause, the rebels’ conscience has been subverted to the point that their mindset think — obstinately, but wrongly — that shooting what they thought was an encroaching enemy aircraft is ideologically justified, just as Israel can justify genocide in opposing the truism that Palestinians want back land purloined almost 70 years ago.
If Putin thinks he can be absolved, he cannot: it is his regime that nurtured the environment that empowered the rebels to execute, perhaps, the single deadliest act of terrorism since Sept 11, 2001.
Sure, the defence is that the rebels had neither intent nor motive to shoot down a passenger jetliner, but on this the world will be assured: if it is not murder, then it is manslaughter, where somebody must be accountable, tried and punished.
The world has clearly indicted Putin and the pro-Russian separatists for shooting down MH17 and, yet, certain maddeningly ghoulish critics continually harp that MH17 veered into a war zone to save a few bucks.
The same critics would probably criticise a woman raped and murdered that she must be blamed for her death purely for wearing seductive clothes and meandering into a rapists’ alley.
Correspondingly, MH17 was deliberately targeted and clinically shot down on the same route hundreds of other commercial aircraft followed, including Singapore Airlines, who but simply had the good fortune of missing the rebels’ lethal lottery.
This perpetrator’s nonsensical defence and critics who continue to froth on MH17’s wrong flight path must be viewed in tandem — contemptuously, as the terrorists who shot down MH17.