The latest breaking news about the agreement of the insurgents in eastern Ukraine to permit Dutch forensics experts on Monday to search the wreckage of the downed Malaysia Airlines jetliner and to transfer the bodies of the victims, as well as the plane’s flight recorder boxes to the Malaysia government – these news put in question the long-repeated mantra of top persons in the US and the UK about the villainous nature of the insurgents.
Even after the train with the bodies set on its way to Kharkov – the nearest big east-Ukrainian city where the war is not raging, Obama and Cameron kept insulting the rebels. “As Russia-backed separatists continue to block the investigation, what exactly are they trying to hide?” Obama was asking as if the teams from OSCE and Holland never searched the site of the plane’s crash, which (surprisingly for the readers of the Western mainstream media) finds itself in the middle of a war zone. And in war zones, instant access to some areas can be a problem – especially for international observers whose safety needs to be guaranteed.
The US secretary of state John Kerry did not stop short of outright insults. “Today we have reports of drunken separatists piling the remains in an unceremonious fashion and actually removing them from the location”, Kerry said on CNN’s “State of the Union”. (For days after the crash, the Western media and political leaders had been blasting the rebels for letting the corpses lie on the ground.)
These “reports” were not backed up by any video or sound recordings; most likely, they stem from Ukrainian media. The same media which had already “informed” the international community about “Russia’s ultimatum to Ukrainian forces in Crimea” (which was proven to be fake) or about the “peaceful protesters in Kiev” (the ones who burnt policemen alive), or about the current camping of protesters on Maidan being “a project of the Russian special services”. Western leaders’ statements about the rebels’ “looting the dead people’s bodies” quotes most likely stem from the statements of Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s “bloody billionaire” interior minister – Arsen Avakov. A day before these statements were made, Gerashchenko said in an interview that he had “information” that the rebels were cashing the victims’ credit cards (no complaints from relatives or bank records were produced, of course).
After Mr. Kerry’s statement in Kiev in March this year that the Ukrainian capital is not a scene of crime and anarchy since he “was driven around Kiev and did not see anyone being killed or looted” – his statements on “drunken separatists” will enter diplomatic history as one of the most unfounded and insulting.
Of course, even Mr. Kerry looks like an objective and patient observer in comparison with the British tabloids’ reports about “Putin’s missile” which “shot MH17 out of sky” (this headline appeared in Murdoch’s “Sun” hours before any of international observers even touched the debris). So much for the UK media’s objectivity and presumption of innocence.
It should be said, however, that Polish, German or Swiss media in its coverage of the story with the airliner was not much better than the British one with its catchy headlines (“Putin killed my son”, etc.)
All in all, the Western coverage of the disaster can be best summarized by a quote ascribed to Obama by the Russian users of Facebook: “We still don’t know whether this Russian-destroyed plane was actually destroyed by the Russians.” The desire to make hasty accusations while talking about “impartiality” can play terrible tricks with people.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not reflect the official position of Sputnik.
