One of the latest examples of this is the British authorities acting at the behest of the White House to freeze the assets of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych without any court judgment. Yanukovych was unconstitutionally toppled by the new “leadership” in Kiev and which under international law was welcomed yesterday in the U.S. and the EU.
Despite an official request from Bishkek, British authorities stubbornly refused to confiscate the assets and holdings of former Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, his family and his close associates, who had been convicted by a Kyrgyz court. The inappropriateness of such double standards was underscored on April 30, when the British ambassador to Kazakhstan, Judith Farnworth, sent a note to the Kyrgyz Foreign Ministry. The note stated that British authorities would continue to ignore Bishkek’s repeated requests to recover assets that Bakiev had obtained illegally and that Britain would also offer political asylum to his younger son, Maxim Bakiyev, who has lived in London since 2010.
The younger Bakiyev was sentenced in absentia to 25 years in prison for his malfeasance as the head of the Central Agency for Development, Investment and Innovation in 2009 and 2010, thereby damaging the country’s financial and political situation to a great extent. Kyrgyzstan also noted that Britain complied with a similar request by the interim, illegal Ukrainian government, freezing 23 million dollars in assets belonging to people close to Yanukovych despite not having a court order. This was done purely for political motives as a way to curry favor with Washington, and it set off political and civil unrest in Ukraine.
In a July 2013 interview with British newspaper The Guardian, the leader of Kyrgyzstan, Almazbek Atambayev, expressed indignation at the lies and double standards of the UK. “Did Great Britain shelter the children of Muammar Gaddafi or Bashar al-Assad? Why the double dealing with Kyrgyzstan? British authorities say they want to help with the democratic development of Kyrgyzstan, but that is a lie. You sheltered the man who robbed us. We could have put that stolen money to use for the country … I have always fought for democracy and spent 20 years in the opposition, but never could I have imagined that behind the pretty words about democracy is hidden a very dirty lie. That is terrible … I am ashamed of the UK, and I did not expect that politics could be so cynical and corrupt.”
However, Kyrgyzstan is not the only example of the hypocrisy and double standards of British policy. In the online publication Spiked, well-known British journalist Brendan O’Neill commented that in Britain’s reaction to the events in Ukraine there are obvious double standards, which became especially apparent in the wake of the terrible fire in Odessa in which more than 30 people were burned alive. Fascist activists for the new authorities in Kiev were responsible for the fire. As O’Neill remarked, British officialdom showed its true colors. Although claiming to reject anti-Semitism, it was directly involved in the selection of the new Kiev government, which in large part consists of representatives of the far-right Svoboda party. With Western backing, Svoboda gained control of three ministries, even with its openly anti-Semitic stance and its belief that Ukraine “is threatened by the Muscovite-Jewish mafia.”
On 17 April, Conservative Party MP David Davies spoke about an example of the country’s double standards in its dealings with Azerbaijan.
London’s duplicity was manifested in the shipment of arms, which was done the British way, as was noted in an Agence France-Press news bulletin of 17 July 2013. It cited a report of the Parliamentary Committee of the UK arms export control. In particular, the agency stated: “The UK is supplying military equipment to Syria and Iran as well 23 other countries with regimes that do not respect human rights. The UK government has approved more than 3,000 licenses to export military and intelligence equipment totaling more than 12 billion pounds (more than 14 billion euros) to countries that appear on Britain’s own list of countries where human rights are violated.”
These same features of British policy in the Middle East were noted in a 2012 article in The Financial Times
The UK’s double standards are evident even in areas of humanitarian relations that Washington has become strenuously worked up about lately, such as the situation of sexual minorities. Recall that in January, Britain took an active part in White House actions to disrupt the Olympic Winter Games in Sochi. In response to the passage of a Russian law banning the promotion of homosexuality in the presence of minors, the UK said it “will fight for gay rights in Russia.”
What is truly interesting about that is the fact that the list of countries that have criminal penalties of imprisonment, death or some other form of punishment for homosexual relationships includes Barbados and Antigua and Barbuda, the head of which is the queen of England! In Grenada , where homosexual relations between men are punished by up to 10 years in prison, Elizabeth II is also the chief executive. So at home, gays can be imprisoned or executed with ease, but for gay rights in other countries, Britain is willing to go all-out in the fight!
All the double standards the UK applies in political and social life are reflective of the country’s amazing decline in international prestige, and it is trying to keep itself afloat through servile submission to the White House. But the power of the United States is increasingly on the wane. How can the UK maintain its place in the history to be written in tomorrows? By supporting false values imposed from across the ocean, or trying to regain the authority of previous centuries?
Vladimir Odintsov, political commentator, exclusively for the internet magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
