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British media vitriol and the Kursk tragedy

Premen Addy

THE British media are convulsed in one of their periodic fits of morality, brought about by a moral view which smells strongly of carbolic.

Every waking and sleeping hour has been devoted to the sunken Russian nuclear submarine Kursk. The loss of 118 lives, and the visible grief of the bereaved families have been grist to the mills of denunciation of the Russian President, Mr. Vladimir Putin , his government, and the Russian establishment at large. There has been growing disquiet as Mr. Putin set about restoring the government in his country to a serious exercise after a decade of Mr. Boris Yeltsin's mayhem, when it was reduced to a criminal ised circus.

The tragedy of the Kursk was the moment to get even, to disgorge pent up bile that Moscow should even contemplate a great power role for itself when the ethical thing to do is to accept with good grace Uncle Sam as world gendarme and law-giver; guide, ph ilosopher and friend to earthlings not swaddled in cloth bearing the sacred stars and stripes.

The Kursk is a nuclear submarine of 1995 vintage, not the rusting hulk that has become a symbol of familiar Western scorn on radio and television week after tedious week. Whatever the reasons behind its destruction in the icy waters of the Barents Sea, t he Kursk is the prototype of a formidable machine armed with intercontinental ballistic missiles. It clearly carries a message at a time when the US President, Mr. Bill Clinton, seems sold on a Star Wars defence shield for the US in violation of its pled ges enshrined in anti-ballistic missile treaties.

The Times has been leading the charge ever since Mr. Putin took over the reins in the Kremlin from the ailing and discredited Mr. Yeltsin with whom the West, despite occasional minor embarrassments, was hugely comfortable. He was, after all, a happy and willing accomplice in what was hoped would be Russia's terminal industrial and military decline; and when he brought in tanks to blast a recalcitrant parliament into submission, the West applauded, convinced that has show of strength was necessary if Rus sian nationalism was to be curtailed.

The former Russian president's drunkenness and increasing loss of bodily and mental vigour was good copy for popular amusement, while the more serious business of Nato's eastward expansion and the cornering of Central Asian oil and gas by the US could be pursued by stealth. Stealth diplomacy is an adjunct to stealth military technology. A broken-backed Russia carved into three separate entities is the stuff of which Zbigniew Brzezinski's dreams are made.

This Russian-baiting Pole, once Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, has boasted recently that the Americans were in Afghanistan some six months before the Soviets entered the country and that the move was designed to ensnare Moscow in a murderous t rap. It worked for America alright, but look what it did to Afghanistan. Afghanistan is a Taliban-infested wasteland, and neighbouring Pakistan is an incubator for Islamist terrorists, for gun-running and drug trafficking. Does it really matter how the l esser breeds work or die? Mr. Brzezinski is an influential voice within the American political-military-industrial complex.

To return to the Times, however. From bemoaning the excessive loss of Russian life in the titanic struggle at Stalingrad against Hitler's Nazi hordes to the real and imagined problems of tax-dodging Russian newspaper tycoons and much else besides, the pa per's Moscow-based Russophobe, Giles Whittell, can be trusted to sneer, leer, carp and snort at all things Russian. Perhaps he believes Stalingrad could have been a victory on the cheap. Who knows, he may one of these days bring up Russian human rights v iolations in that battle; this being the silly season anything is possible in defiance of reason and logic and plain common sense.

The Times and its peers censure the appalling state of the Russian navy and low morale in the country's armed forces generally, but the fault lies surely with Mr. Yeltsin's long years of misgovernment and neglect. The paper has been firing a succession o f editorial broadsides at the present Russian Government's determination to arrest the country's decline which, alas, includes its military decline, and put it back on the world map.

The Independent, in its leader, cooed softly that the Cold War being over, Russia must learn to treat the West as a friend. The media, with the Times leading the pack, bark incessantly that Mr. Putin is a cold fish who was once a KGB man. But, then, so i s Oleg Gordievsky, who is invariably wheeled out at such critical times by any one of a number of broadsheets -- this time it was the turn of the Sunday Telegraph -- but he apparently saved his soul by defecting to the West for the usual thirty pieces of silver and has since earned more than a pretty penny indulging in scripted vilification of his former masters.

Mr. Putin is cold and reserved. Mr. Yeltsin was warm, a clown and mostly drunk. Mr. Clinton of the ready and winning smile, of the practised soundbite and the made-to-measure horse laugh is also a serial adulturer and, possibly, liar as well. You can tak e your pick as you go along. The Russians knew, when they voted for Mr. Putin, that were not electing Groucho or Harpo Marx.

Certainly, the Russian authorities were tragically deficient in their handling of the Kursk tragedy. They are answerable to the Russian people who are determined to discover the true reasons that led to sinking of the submarine and the deaths of its crew . Russia will have to work out its own solution to its present crisis without the condescending advice of the British (and Western) media, whose hypocrisy, even for those hardened to it, has reached subliminal heights.

Denmark has lately complained to Washington about its secrecy over a US hydrogen bomb that has lain at the bottom of the sea near the coast of Greenland for over thirty years. There have been damaging accidents to American nuclear submarines leading to d eath and injury amid tight national security, hence it is only he that is without sin who can cast the first stone.

As for wilful deceit and falsehood, one need go no further than the Nato contrived crisis on Yugoslavia, and the subsequent bombing and destruction of the country, to appreciate how far the world has perfected such skills since their originator, Josef Go ebbels, passed from the scene. States have lied, and lied effectively, before, but Goebbels took the profession to a higher operational level.

The Rambouillet talks were designed as a deception to lure the Serbs to their doom; they had nothing to do with peace. Everything that followed was tainted. The whole exercise was a criminal hoax in which the British media played the role of ignoble acce ssory.

Iraq is another case of Anglo-American dissimulation. The country is being relentlessly bombed and blockaded for no cause that makes the slightest sense. The Times letter page carried these lines from one Jon Holbrook: ``There is no contest between the m ilitary machines of Iraq and the West. The danger to peace and stability to the region comes not from Saddam's imagination but from the imaginations of Western strategists who substitute present with future fiction''.

Another letter from Lieutenant-Commander Colin McMillan of the Royal Navy (retd) said apropos of the Kursk: ``It muse be clear, worldwide, that despite the end of the Cold War and the demise of Communism, a mad arms race is still taking place. If the wor ld does not now insist on the control of the military-industrial complexes of the `great powers', we shall surely all come to a terrible fate... The urgent need now is for a world disarmament conference under the aegis of the UN''.

The need may well be urgent, but the hope that such a conference will take place or achieve anything of note if it does, is likely to be stillborn.

Meanwhile, measure the significance of a Financial Times columnist's advice to India in the heady days of June 1992. Settle with Pakistan on Kashmir, whatever the price, cut the defence budget ``after the Russians have been paid for what they have suppli ed'', wrote Joe Rogaly, and get rid of Nehru's ``delusions of grandeur'' about an independent foreign policy, of which non-alignment was the symbol.

A year earlier, in the aftermath of Rajiv Gandhi's assassination, Mr. Rogaly had warned that Khalistan sounded like Kurdistan, and Kurdistan had become a no-go area for the Iraqi state; he demanded that India scrap its then special relations with the Sov iet Union as ``we now live in a one-superpower world, and any acquiescence in bloody attempts to repress secessionist movements will depend upon the US''.

Listen to the rasping voice of the Economist at about the same time: ``India risks fragmentation in ways that threaten its people but its neighbours too... (Unless the general election of June 1991) confirms India's unity, the central government will be tempted to use any means -- even martial law -- to keep the realm intact. And the less popular a central government feels at home the more it may be tempted to curry support by adventuring abroad... Anxious neighbours remember India's wars against Pakist an and China -- and more recently -- its trade sanctions on Nepal and its despatch of soldiers to Sri Lanka and the Maldives''.

The Economist is to the imperial wing of the Anglo-American establishment what Die Sturmer was to Germany's Third Reich in the 1930s. The Economist's anti-Indian venom should not be lightly dismissed. Indo-Western ministerial commerce in shared democrati c values has to be brought into just balance with Hegel's ``cunning of reason'': realpolitik in other words.

British media fury over the Kursk has a resonance that travels beyond the Barents Sea.

(The author, a visiting tutor in Modern History at Kellog College, is editor of the London-based India Weekly.)