Barbarians.

SABBATICAL NOTES. 17 JULY 2014. FRIDAY. N3. 
Barbarians. 

WE WONDER IF a new country can be ever built upon the ashes of the dead, like this one purportedly wanting to get out of the hold of Ukraine. 

I remember that in the early 90s, when I was a younger kibitzer-in-residence of the University of the Philippines Diliman, I joined the Asian-Pacific Conference on East Timor, or APCET it was, and attended the presentation of the leaders trying to lead their people in getting out of the hold of Indonesia.

The leaders, including Jose Ramos Horta, were a picture of calm, and I was there at the Malcolm Theatre where they presented the real picture of their homeland.

[Of course, these leaders were hidden in a safe house somewhere; the Philippines had a bilateral relations with Indonesia, and President Fidel Ramos did not want to have any direct hand in this solidarity movement gathering steam in the Philippines at that time. So much for international relations, and that delicate dance and calculated moves and PR-quality language one has to deploy so the imaginary masters and partners would not get mad.]

East Timor was once a Portuguese colony, and then when Portugal left to give freedom to the East Timorese, Indonesia grabbed that country so small it could not defend itself at that time.

It looked like the Indonesians were not benevolent colonizers.

It looked like these new colonizers were barbaric, the sense of the term suggesting brutality, cruelty, and oppression.

Every act of colonization, they say, is an act of violence.

By that alone, Indonesia did violence upon a hapless, supposedly newly-freed people, freed from the clutches of Portugal and what Portugal represented. Ah, the land grab of the West that spanned continents and centuries, and these land grabbers are now talking about 'egalite, fraternite, and liberte.' It must be that its Portuguese equivalent of the French mantra is not far off.

Now comes this self-appointed minister of war of the Donetsk People’s Republic, this minister boasting of liberation for the Donetsk people. [Are they not Ukrainian too, these Donetsk people? Or, are they Russians? Or, are there both Ukrainian and Russian, people of the border, people who are beyond borders, people who stride both political and administrative boundaries so that they are both Ukrainian and Russian, and not only one of the labels, and thus, irreducible to an either/or?)

A retired Russian intelligence professional, Igor Girkin, or Igor Strelkov, this last one his nom de guerre, had taken upon himself that the birth of this 'new republic' out of the womb of Ukraine shall come about, with 295 people dead notwithstanding.

Someone took a screen grab of his Facebook, and this Moscovite warrior fighting for the Donetsk Republic of his imagination boasted of shooting down a plane.

That plane is the Malaysia Flight 15.

"We did warn you — do not fly in our sky," he wrote.

What was he thinking?

Girkin or Strelkov, whatever is his name, can help give birth to a new country by murdering nearly 300 people?