SECOND WORLD WAR LINGERS 70 YEARS ON
This year marks the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, but, in some ways, the epochal conflict is far from over. Washington Post’s Ishaan Tharoor shows how the global legacy of the war remains very much a source of tension.
ADEMAND FOR GERMAN REPARATIONS
Greece’s economic woes, which include a crippling 300 billion euro ($ 410 billion) debt, are very much a problem of the present, but its new leftist government has decided one solution lies in seeking redress for the past. Greece’s justice minister recently said he’d be willing to allow authorities to seize millions of dollars in German assets in Greece in compensation for war crimes carried out in the Second World War. Germany already paid reparations to Greece as part of an agreement in 1960, but Greeks contend that the millions paid did not account for all the damage the Greek state incurred during the Nazi occupation.
As the main engine of the European economy and a bulwark of the E. U., Germany has played a prominent role in the international project to keep Greece in the eurozone, and is blamed by many Greeks for foisting destructive policies of austerity on Athens.
“It’s not a material matter, it’s a moral issue,” said Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, at a meeting Monday with German officials.
PUTIN AVOIDS VISIT TO AUSCHWITZ
On Jan. 27, 1945, the Soviet army entered what was left of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Its soldiers were the first to encounter the horrors of the facility, where more than one million people, mostly Jews, had been killed by the Nazis. Yet when world leaders staged a memorial earlier this year, Moscow’s top politician was nowhere to be seen. The absence of Russian President Vladimir Putin at the event in Poland was a consequence of Russia’s power play in Ukraine, which has led to a severe deterioration of relations with other Baltic and Eastern European countries wary of Putin’s ambitions, including Poland.
THE SPECTRE OF FASCISM IN UKRAINE
And what about Ukraine? Ever since a political crisis exploded a year ago, the legacy of the Second World War has cast a huge shadow. After Moscow annexed Crimea, Putin repeatedly grandstanded on the sacrifices Soviet soldiers made defending the strategic Black Sea peninsula from invading Nazi forces. Some 27 million people in total from the Soviet republics perished during the war.
Meanwhile, Russian media and politicians have frequently accused the government in Kyiv of harbouring neo- fascists and Nazi sympathizers. That’s because a segment of Ukraine’s nationalist right- wing, active in anti- Moscow street protests a year ago, embraces controversial Ukrainian heroes such as Stepan Bandera, a guerrilla who fought the Russian and Polish occupation of what’s now Ukraine and won Nazi patronage.
Moscow’s critics say the real fascism lies in the neo- imperial ideology supposedly motivating Putin.
FORGOTTEN IN CENTRAL ASIA
Last week, authorities in the city of Angren, Uzbekistan, demolished a tall, spire- like statue of a Soviet soldier bearing a rifle. It had been erected in 1970, to mark the 25th anniversary of the Soviet victory in the Second World War. Uzbek authorities aren’t as sanguine about the war’s history as their Russian counterparts appear to be — tens of thousands of Uzbek soldiers were drafted to fight and die in battles far from their homeland. The Soviet Union might have been in the front lines of the war against the Nazis, but it is still remembered as an occupying power by many in countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
According to Radio Free Europe, authoritarian Uzbek leader Islam Karimov changed the name of the May 9 holiday that marks the war’s end — known as “Victory Day” in Russia — to the Day of Remembrance.
EAST ASIA’S END LESS DISPUTES
For Japanese, Chinese and Koreans, the war bubbles up each time a Japanese leader visits the controversial Yasukuni shrine, which honours Japan’s war dead, including 14 individuals convicted of war crimes by an Allied tribunal in 1948. Beijing and Seoul frequently fume about the supposed revisionism found in some Japanese school history textbooks, which downplay the atrocities carried out by Japan’s military during its occupations of parts of Asia. The planned Second World War speech of hawkish Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who is expected to express “remorse” over the conflict, has been the source of months of scrutiny in the region. A commentary published by China’s state news agency Xinhua this week condemned Abe’s “attempts to mitigate or deny” Japan’s war guilt, a long- standing Chinese grievance that surfaces during far more current territorial disputes.