Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 14 – Three US senators,
Marco Rubio, Bob Menendez and Rob Portman, have called for Washington to
promulgate a policy of “the non-recognition” of Moscow’s illegal annexation of
Ukraine’s Crimea and to model it on American non-recognition policy regarding the
Soviet occupation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Not surprisingly, the Kremlin and
those close to it don’t want Washington to adopt such a policy; but they cannot
admit that they don’t because the policy was effective as it represented a
clear declaration of America’s commitment to a basic principle of international
law and it helped keep hope alive in the occupied Baltic countries that they
would one day again be free.
That, of course, happened in August
1991, and the leaders of the restored Baltic states have relied on US
non-recognition policy since because it emphasized what they knew to be true:
they were occupied and thus have had certain rights that they otherwise would
not have had, including on the granting of citizenship, had they “seceded” as
Moscow viewed it.
But since Moscow can’t admit the
power of non-recognition policy for the Baltic countries earlier and
potentially for Crimea now, it has sunk to new lows in its arguments about the
realities of US non-recognition policy about the Baltics to claim simultaneously
that it made no difference and that it must not be adopted with regard to Crimea,
the Kremlin’s latest victim.
In today’s Vzglyad, commentator Yevgeny Krutikov attacks the three senators
for proposing the adoption of a non-recognition policy regarding Crimea,
arguing that if the senators knew the history of that policy, which he says
they clearly don’t, they wouldn’t be pushing it at all (vz.ru/politics/2018/7/14/932376.html).
But
if they or anyone else are going to learn about the nature of that policy and
its impact, they won’t be able to do so by perusing Krutikov’s article which inter alia says that the so-called declaration
of Sumner Welles of July23, 1940, was not a policy statement but only “a publicistic
essay … for the press.”
According
to Krutikov, it was entirely written by Loy Henderson who “was married to a
Latvian and worked in Estonia and Latvia in the 1920s and 1930s” and who later
was pulled from the US embassy in Moscow at the insistence of First Lady
Eleonor Roosevelt and dispatched to Baghdad.
Consequently,
the Moscow commentator says, “’the Welles Declaration’ is not considered a
legal document: it was something like a public declaration of a position in a
maximally pompous form.” In Krutikov’s
telling, it had no impact at all until 1952 when the Baltic lobby in the US
forced the Congress to echo it.
“In
part,” the Russian writer continues, “this was connected with the fate of Wells
himself: he was caught in a VIP car of a train having sex with two black-skinned
porters and as a result of this scandal at the end of 1942 was forced to retire
and later worked as a radio commentator.”
Krutikov
says that “in practice then, this ‘non-recognition of the occupation of the Baltics’
looks like a symptom of a split personality. Somewhere on the periphery of the
American consciousness existed émigré ‘governments’ and ‘diplomatic missions’
of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.”
But
“it was impossible to deny the objective reality” that they were three
republics in the USSR. Because that was so, Krutikov says, “Washington did not
once include the Baltic issue on the agenda of talks with Moscow … More than
that ‘the Wells Declaration’ is not mentioned in the official documents of the
State Department – and in [its] text is not mentioned the Soviet Union even in
an abbreviated form.”
“That
is,” Krutikov continues, “we recognize ‘the occupation of the Baltics, but we cannot
do anything with this so we will make it appear that the Baltics do not exist.
In the depth of our souls, we morally support the Latvians, Lithuanians and
Estonians … and every ten years can organize some jubilee hearings in Congress.”
“But
at the level of practical politics, we will not raise the Baltic issue; doing
so isn’t recommended,” the Russian writer suggests American diplomats and
officials concluded and thought.
According
to him, “the single practical consequence of this ‘non-recognition of
occupation’ was the absence of consulates of Western countries in the
Lithuanian SSR, the Latvian SSR, and the ESSR,” a lack that complicated the
lives of Western sailors who ended up in Baltic ports but that residents of these
republics found ways to work around.
Official
American delegations faced
some problems because they weren’t supposed to visit “’occupied territories,’”
but “nevertheless,” Krutikov says, “they actively travelled there to look at
the horrors of occupation and taste Rigas
Balsams.”
“In other words,” he says, “’the
Wells Declaration’ on which American senators now suggest applying to Crimea in
practice did not work and did not have any legally enforceable consequences.”
Perhaps not for Moscow in the way
Krutikov imagines but certainly for the United States and the peoples of the three
Soviet-occupied Baltic republics. Non-recognition
policy meant that the US government never published maps showing Estonia,
Latvia, and Lithuania as being legitimately part of the USSR.
It meant that the US maintained contacts
with the diplomats of the last pre-war governments right up to August
1991. (Despite what Krutikov implies,
the US never recognized any “émigré governments.) The State Department had a
Baltic desk and kept the flags of the three occupied countries up in the lobby
of its main building. Moreover, every year after 1940 the US sent a national
day message to the Baltic legations.
It further meant that no US official during
a time in office that he or she had been confirmed to by the Senate could visit
the occupied Baltic countries. And it
meant that the US continued to recognize pre-1940 Baltic passports as legally
valid travel documents for admission to the United States.
It wasn’t just some hearing every decade
as he implies. And US representatives at various talks with the Soviets did
raise the issue of the status of the Baltic countries and routinely referred to
non-recognition policy, something that was broader and far more institutionalized
that Krutikov’s dismissive remarks would suggest.
And finally non-recognition policy
also meant that no US official during a time in office that he or she had been
confirmed to by the Senate could visit the occupied Baltic countries. And it meant that the US continued to
recognize pre-1940 Baltic passports as legally valid travel documents for
admission to the United States.
But the real meaning of US
non-recognition policy isn’t captured by those actions and prohibitions.
Instead, it lies in another dimension altogether. It was the expression of American
support for a principle that borders are not to be changed by force alone, and
it was a sign to the Baltic peoples that they had the moral support Krutikov
dismisses as meaningless and would once again be free.
Despite being equally illegal under
international law, there are obvious differences between the Soviet occupation
of the three Baltic countries and the Russian occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea. In
the first case, there were entire countries involved with governments and
diplomas and in the second, there is a region that lacks some of those
institutions.
Consequently, the specifics of a
non-recognition policy regarding Crimea will inevitably be somewhat different
than the specifics of US non-recognition policy on the Baltic countries. But the principle that must be reaffirmed is exactly
the same; and one very much hopes that the outcome will be the same as well.
Krutikov in his attacks on Welles
and Henderson fails to discuss what they really said. And one detail is especially
critical in the current context: Henderson’s memorandum on which the Welles
declaration was based explicitly drew on an argument Herbert Hoover’s secretary
of state Henry Stimson had made in 1930 regarding Japanese actions in China.
At that time, Stimson refused to
recognize Japan’s carving up of China because, he said, the US has long had a
settled policy of not recognizing changes in borders achieved by force alone
rather than by international negotiation.
That makes what Wells said in 1940 and what the US senators are saying rather
more important than Krutikov and Moscow can admit.
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