Helen Saulnier 
By Peter Emerson
Mariupol is still one more town which humankind has 1st created… and then destroyed, flattened, like Guernica and Warsaw. And Russia now does to other people, what it much too has suffered, as in Leningrad and by its personal hand, in Grozny.
Mariupol is not a Russian phrase if it had been Russian or Slavic, it would be ‘Mariugrad’ or ‘Mariusky’. But the suffix ‘pol’, as in Sevastopol and Simferopol, is Greek, and it goes back again 2,000 years or so, when the Greeks were being on this Black Sea littoral, prolonged just before Russia was concocted. What’s a lot more, Russia is not a Slav country: the Federation incorporates Samis in Lapland, Maris and Tartars around the Urals, Chechens and Dagestanis in the Northern Caucasus, and above 50 distinctive ethnic groups in Siberia, like the Buryats around Lake Baikal and the Chukchis on the Pacific coastline. Meanwhile, other nations or locations like Slovakia, Slovenia and Slavonia (in Jap Croatia) are Slav, as is Poland, for illustration, and in the key, Ukraine.
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In 2004, I was an OSCE election observer in Kharkiv, an election fought in the closing round in between just two candidates – Yushchenko and Yanukovich – so every little thing was incredibly binary and divisive. Yushchenko was pro-EU, Yanukovich pro-Russia. The previous most popular the Ukrainian language, the latter Russian… but these two languages are incredibly similar. Western Ukraine is extra Catholic or Uniate, the japanese ‘half’ opts for the Orthodox Church, … but these two denominations are the two Christian. (And, as in Northern Ireland, tiny differences can all as well simply divide and antagonise.) Pointless to say, in the election, both of those candidates experienced their parties, and observers. Two of them were sitting up coming to every single other in the rely, and I questioned them, what was it like to contend from each individual other. “Oh currently, we are opponents, certainly но завтра будем друзьями – but tomorrow, we’ll be close friends once more.”
How unsafe it was, we may say if only in retrospect, to use such a divisive voting treatment.
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So what can we do, listed here in Eire, to help our fellow human beings in Ukraine? Inter alia, we must not be applying, thereby advertising and even justifying ‘false flags’, provocations, excuses for violence. I refer in certain to binary referendums.
In 1920, when Eire opted out of the United kingdom, Northern Ireland opted out of opting out and opted back in yet again, (albeit without the need of referendums). In like fashion, when Bosnia opted out of Yugoslavia, Republika Srpska tried to decide out of Bosnia. And when Georgia opted out of the USSR, South Ossetia experimented with to choose out of Georgia. Each the Balkans and the Caucasus were being inundated with referendums they however are.
A equivalent destiny befell Kiev: Ukraine opted out of USSR in 1991, and each and every ‘county’, oblast, voted for independence, which include Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk. But, in 2014, these three attempted to decide out of Ukraine. There yet again, referendum selections can certainly be reversed: it’s catered for in the Belfast Agreement, and it’s what some in Scotland now want to do. In fact, you will try to remember, Scotland also experienced a referendum in 2014, and it is sobering to remember that the word Shotlandiya, Scotland, was made use of by Russian separatists in Luhansk (I was there). In the meantime, like Northern Eire, a component of Donetsk referred to as Dobropillia and Krasnoarmiisk, experimented with to decide out of opting out and to choose again into Ukraine. In this very last referendum, 69%, i.e., some two million individuals voted to go again into Ukraine. Alas, as in the Balkans, so also in Ukraine, the powers that be – the West in the Balkans, Putin in the Donbas – recognise only those people referendums the benefits of which they approve.
It is all a little bit like all those famous Russian dolls, the matryoshki – ‘matryoshka nationalism’ the Russians referred to as it – or utilized to, just before . Inside of each individual doll, there’s a different minimal just one. Alongside with every single greater part, there is always yet another minority. But international law – the ideal of self-resolve – developed havoc in Yugoslavia, in which “all the wars… started off with a referendum,” (Oslobodjenje, 7.2.1999), and in Ukraine.
Every thing is connected. “Всё связано,” to estimate Vladimir Vernadsky, the founder of Ukraine’s Academy of Sciences. Binary referendums can be untrue flags. In Bosnia, Milorad Dodik in Republika Srpska is rattling his sabres and ballot containers, and so also in Ga was Anatoly Bibilov in South Ossetia, the President until he shed the the latest election. And now Zaporizhzhia desires a single as very well, voting and fighting about a nuclear power station! This is just so damned dangerous.
Accordingly, right here in Ireland (and Scotland), if only for the sake of peace in Ukraine and elsewhere, we should really not be hoping to take care of our individual constitutional thoughts with (‘false-flag’) binary referendums.
Alternatively, permit us apply pluralism: the world’s first multi-choice referendum was in New Zealand in 1894 the greatest in Guam, in 1982, experienced 6/seven alternatives. And in stark distinction to binary balloting, a multi-option ballot has in no way provoked a war.
Peter Emerson is the director of The de Borda Institute, a Northern Ireland-based NGO, which aims to encourage the use of inclusive voting processes on all contentious queries of social choice. He was an Irish Assist OSCE election observer in 6 elections in Ukraine, 2004-14 and a member of the EUMM in Georgia for South Ossetia, 2008-09.
