Territorial Integrity versus the Right to Self Determination

Sandy Grant | Monday March 24, 2014 15:01

 

Perhaps the power and water situation has obliterated all other topics.  I haven’t yet understood why we needed this change but it is always exciting to have new coins in hand even if it takes time for old goats like myself to distinguish between one another. 

I think that I am okay on the P5 and P2 although it surprises me that the P5, the P2 and the P1 are now virtually the same size. The new 50 thebe, 25 thebe and 10 thebe are repeat but slightly enlarged versions of their predecessors as is the 5 thebe coin which has, however, done a shift from copper to silver. 

The stand out changes are the circular P2 and P1 coins which have replaced the old heptagonal brass/copper alloy coins. I was never able to distinguish one from the other so am now grateful for the change.

That said, the new P1 should have retained its previous size so that the monetary values would be more clearly differentiated by size.  Unfortunately the designers of the new coins had different considerations in mind so that the new P5, P2, P1 and 50 and 25 and 10 thebe coins are more or less of the same size, whilst there is a sudden lurch and the very small 5 thebe coin emerges, seemingly as an after thought, unsure if it should have followed the one and two thebe coins into oblivion. 

Overall, I think that we should welcome the new coins but with a degree of surprise that the change was felt to be necessary.  Presumably we should now await a new issue of bank notes – but in the hope that when this happens the limpid P10 note will be replaced by something more robust.

But now we are presumably involved in yet another international crisis and will inevitably be aligned with the majority in the Security Council, with the USA and the European Community.  But to try and get a better understanding of recent events I have been continuously switching TV news channels from Russia, to Sky, BBC, CNA, Aljazeera and Euro News and I am not much wiser about the obviously important historical background.

I have gathered that the Russian Empress Catherine the Great conquered the Crimea in 1783 and wiped out much of the indigenous population, an exercise which Stalin later repeated.

I know that the British and French fought a horrendously bloody war with Russia, not the Ukraine, over it, in the middle 19th century, for reasons that are obscure to me. If it was Russian then it would have remained Russian if Kruschev had not whimsically handed it over to the Ukraine when this was still part of the old USSR.  It followed therefore that the Crimea was automatically a part of the new Ukraine when this became independent as a result of the break up of the old USSR. 

With the rejection and popular overthrow of the pro Russian dictator, Viktor Yanukovych in Kiev and the push there for a new pro Western alignment, Russia may indeed have feared that its one and only warm water port was in major danger of coming under American/NATO control.

It then made its dramatic rapid, move to restore historical normalcy. Meanwhile in a recent lengthy Aljazeera interview Ukraine ex premier Yulia Tymoshenko repeatedly hammered home the point that having guaranteed the Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for its abandonment of its nuclear armoury, the USA and European Community had no option but to enforce its undertaking and restore the Crimea to the Ukraine. 

If this is true, and subsequently I have heard nothing to suggest that it is not, the major powers may now be caught standing on one leg.

The West does not claim that the majority in the Crimea are other than pro-Russian but nevertheless concludes that the only way of dealing with the new crisis is to impose economic sanctions which it knows can have no chance of altering the Crimean situation in the slightest.  What will the West do if pro-Russian eastern Ukraine eventually secedes, as now seems very likely? 

Africa needs to think very carefully about its own situation before taking up one or other side because it will be well aware of its own vulnerability when there is a conflict between territorial integrity and the right to self-determination? When is it right and when is it wrong to re-draw national boundaries which, in many cases, were arbitrarily drawn by the colonial powers? ? And who will make that decision?