t’s not every day you see a blog published on Oxford University Press (OUP) that is so riddled with legal flaws, you would pull your hair out in frustration if a student had composed it. However, Thursday was obviously not an ordinary day, as OUP saw fit to publish this masterpiece by Bournemouth Associate Professor and Lieutenant Colonel in the German Army Reserves, Sascha-Dominik Bachmann. In his article, Bachmann, a one-time military exchange officer to the US, compares the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 to the sinking of the Lusitania (a passenger ship) by German forces during World War I, as well as the shooting down of Iran Air flight 655 by American forces in 1988, before announcing: “What has become clear already today is Russia’s potential new role as state sponsor of terrorism.” ...The Donetsk rebels may have attempted to commit an “act of terrorism,” namely shooting down a Ukrainian fighter jet. But even this action could only be construed as an act of terrorism if the rebels around Donetsk were common criminals and not parties to a civil war. This is a very thorny issue under international law, and therefore it is jaw-dropping that anyone would publish a blog on this topic without examining the all-important question as to whether the rebels around Donetsk are party to a civil war, especially since several aspects uphold this interpretation. The rebels have been in position for several months now. They clearly control an area of territory which the Ukrainian army cannot penetrate and they obviously possess a certain level of organization, not to mention clearly formulated goals. Once a movement gets to that stage, you have to at least entertain the possibility that the situation amounts to a civil war. It is always a tough call to make, but the manner in which past cases have been treated usually sheds some light on the correct answer, particularly cases that are only recently past. In this context, it is noteworthy that the rebels in Syria and Libya seem to have acquired the status of parties to a civil war (and not “terrorists”) quite quickly.
Posted on: Sun, 27 Jul 2014 11:15:30 +0000
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