Spare a thought for the relatives of the 298 passengers and crew members who perished on that fateful Boeing 777 Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, which was downed over eastern Ukraine in July 2014 by a Russian Buk missile.
They have, hitherto, neither gotten any closure nor a whiff of justice.
Judging by the reaction of Russia and its rebel proxies in Ukraine last Wednesday to a report released by the Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team (JIT) of international prosecutors on the findings of who, how and from where the missile was fired, the relatives may never get closure or justice.
The JIT comprises prosecutors from the Netherlands, Australia, Belgium, Malaysia and Ukraine.
According to Wilbert Paulissen, the chief Dutch police investigator, “based on the criminal investigation, we have concluded that Flight MH17 was downed by a Buk missile of the series 9M83 that came from the territory of the Russian Federation”.
The JIT even narrowed the missile launch site down to a specific field near the village of Pervomaiskyi, which was then in Russian-backed rebel hands, and stressed that the missile had been taken from Russia to the village on the morning of July 17, when the plane was shot down, and the launcher was taken back to Russia the next day.
The initial reaction from Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was that Russia could not accept the findings as the final truth, and that no Russian weapons were taken to Ukraine.
The tragic and sordid state of affairs surrounding this particular segment of international aviation security — civilian passenger planes being shot down, regardless of whether it was done by accident or deliberately — beggars belief.
The nauseating reality is that the shooting down of passenger airlines has been a pastime of state actors over the last six decades.
Since 1954, a staggering 11 passenger planes (including MH17) have been downed by China, the Soviet Union, the United States, Israel and Ukraine, in addition to those by rebel groups in Georgia (Russian-backed rebels from the breakaway Abkhazia region), Rhodesia (freedom fighters from the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army, or Zipra, fighting for independence against the white-minority regime of Ian Smith) and Ukraine (Russian-backed rebels who downed MH17).
These incidents involved Cathay Pacific, Libyan Airlines, Air Rhodesia, Korean Airlines, Iran Air, Transair, Siberian Airlines and MAS.
The tragedy is that a total of 1,296 innocent people died in the downing of the 11 planes through no fault of their own.
The fact that all the above state or quasi-state actors acted without impunity has set the tone for others to follow, which is why the perpetrators of the shooting down of MH17 did it so casually and callously — because they knew that they could get away with it.
Whatever the morality of the political case, there can be no mitigation for the downing of a passenger plane.
The fact that in most cases, no or inadequate compensation was paid, while in others, belated acknowledgements of guilt had to be cajoled from the perpetrators, beckons for a specific and targeted international legal framework to deal with this issue, going forward.
This should include tough new international rules of engagement for passenger planes flying over conflict zones (simply put, all passenger planes should be banned from flying over no-fly zones), which would be effected through an early-warning system by the International Civil Aviation Authority; an unequivocal commitment by United Nations members not to shoot down any civilian passenger plane per se; a prompt acknowledgement and admission of guilt in the event of such an occurrence; full cooperation with the authorities of the domicile of the destroyed passenger plane; an unequivocal and timely public apology to the relatives of victims by the offending country or state-backed rebel group; and, a full, generous and timely compensation package to be paid by the perpetrating country or its proxy — all enshrined in international law, enforceable by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague.
But, when you have three superpowers among the perpetrators, then, policing any international framework becomes difficult, if not impossible.
Take, for instance, Iran Air Flight 655 bound for Dubai, which was shot down over the Persian Gulf by two missiles fired from the American cruiser, USS Vincennes, in July 1988, killing all 290 passengers and crew members on board.
Yes, Washington and Teheran were not on speaking terms in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, and the subsequent taking of American hostages at the US embassy.
But, to dismiss an act of mass personal tragedy like the shooting down of a passenger plane as a case of mistakenly identifying it as a F-14 fighter plane, based on a misunderstanding, is an abdication of moral responsibility unbefitting any self-respecting nation, let alone a liberal democracy.
American obfuscation forced Iran to go to the ICJ in 1996, effectively to sue the US government, which only reluctantly compensated the families of the victims much later.
Similarly, China and Ukraine initially denied shooting down Cathay Pacific Flight C-54 in July 1954 and Siberian Airlines Flight 1812 in October 2001, only to admit to the incidents later as errors by their fighter pilots.
Two other incidents highlight the sheer depravity of the justification of their actions.
In September 1983, Soviet fighter jets shot down Korean Airlines Flight 007 after it strayed into Soviet airspace because of faulty navigation, and the aircraft was summarily dispatched into oblivion on the spurious claim that it was on a spying mission.
In contrast, Israeli fighter jets shot down Libyan Arab Airlines Flight 114 in February 1973 after it strayed, once again, into Israeli-controlled airspace over the Sinai desert due to equipment failure.
One shudders to think what would have happened if the situations were reversed: the Soviet Union attacking South Korea, and Israel bombing Libya.
The hapless relatives of the victims of MH17 will have to come to terms with this background and precedents involving the shooting down of passenger planes.
Since the JIT has stressed that it does not know who fired the missile or gave the order for the firing, it would be nigh impossible to bring criminal proceedings against those responsible.
According to reports, the JIT is looking into a broad circle of suspects.
Whether finding and prosecuting the perpetrators and bringing them to justice — as Dutch and Malaysian Prime Ministers Mark Rutte and Datuk Seri Najib Razak want — will actually happen must remain a moot point.
The relatives seek justice and some explanation as to why the plane was shot down and their loved ones perished.
Short of a change of heart by the perpetrators and sanctions against Russia (which have proven ineffective in the case of Syria), the options are indeed limited.
The ICJ, by identifying the 100 people or so that it suspects of being involved in the downing of MH17, could put moral pressure on them and their families by naming and shaming them, with the hope that the sheer pressure of the fear of eventual exposure and prosecution would precipitate an admission, even if it is by only one of them.
Both Russia and Ukraine, in the past, have stood out as trigger-happy perpetrators of the downing of civilian aircraft.
The international community, led by the two arch-rival protagonists, the US and Russia, has shown that there is very little moral capital left in global politics.
Indeed the downing of MH17 is steeped in the politics of maintaining Russian regional hegemony, and the battle for influence in post-Soviet Eastern Europe between Washington and Moscow.
One just has to look at how they have handled the defining tragedy thus far of the 21st century: the brutal internecine civil war in Syria.
Appeasement, dressed as capitulation and indecisiveness, on the one hand, and base chauvinism and defiance at any cost on the other.
Mushtak Parker is an independent London-based economist and writer