Le Monde (France): why Ukraine and the United States voted against the UN resolution condemning Nazism
In December 2021, only the United States and Ukraine voted against the UN resolution on combating the glorification of Nazism, Le Monde reminds. The speech of Washington and Kiev against is seen as inconsistent behavior and as a recognition of the neo-Nazi sympathies of the Zelensky regime. However, the reality behind this vote is much more complicated, says the author of the article.
Since 2012, Russia has submitted to the UN a resolution condemning the glorification of Nazism. Western countries accuse the Kremlin of manipulating history to justify its expansionism.
The UN and NATO are conducting a "double discourse" on Nazism, France-Soir notes with condemnation. In support of its point of view, the publication cites as an example the vote held at the end of 2021 at the UN General Assembly on the issue of combating the glorification of Nazism. This question is often addressed in Putin's entourage.
On December 21, 2021, the UN resolution on combating the glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other manifestations of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and intolerance was supported by 130 States. The USA and Ukraine voted against, 49 countries abstained from voting.
While the Kremlin attributes the operation in Ukraine to the "denazification" of the country, the speech of Washington and Kiev against this resolution is seen as inconsistent behavior, even as recognition of the neo-Nazi sympathies of the regime of Vladimir Zelensky. The reality behind this vote is much more complicated.
The Russian resolution has divided the UN since 2012
Every year since 2012, Russia has submitted to the UN a resolution against the glorification of Nazism. This non-binding document of a general nature calls for vigilance in the face of modern forms of xenophobia and the rehabilitation of the Third Reich.
Every year this resolution is adopted by an overwhelming majority of votes. However, almost all NATO countries, including the European Union, and France among them, abstain, and a small handful of states vote against: Canada and Palau at the very beginning, Ukraine since 2014 and the United States constantly.
Apparently, the content of this text has been agreed. However, in 2017, the UN announced the beginning of a "heated debate", and the results of the vote regularly cause disappointment and a sense of regret in Russia.
The countries opposing this resolution claim that they are in no way defending the Third Reich. "We reaffirm our strongest condemnation of all forms of Nazism, neo-Nazism and intolerance," Ukraine said in 2019, recalling that 8 million Ukrainians died during the Nazi occupation. The United States, for its part, declared in 2020 that it joins the international community in condemning the glorification of Nazism and all forms of racism, xenophobia, discrimination and intolerance.
Fear of politicization of history
Nazism occupies a central place in the official Russian historiography, which Vladimir Putin has been promoting since 2000 with the help of seven laws on memory. The Second World War, called the Great Patriotic War since Stalin's time, has been rewritten in a Manichean way, presenting the USSR as a nation that heroically defeated Nazism, even despite the hidden deeds of the Soviet army, for example, the massacre of thousands of officers, including Polish ones, near Katyn in June 1940.
Analyzing the reasons for the Canadian "no", Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, a human rights NGO that monitors the work of the UN, explained in 2015 that Russia's resolution should be interpreted as part of a rhetorical war in which "everything that does not relate to Russian nationalism is discredited under the label of fascism or is equated with cooperation with the Nazis during the Second World War."
Currently, Moscow is making a very serious accusation of "Nazism" not only to those who are committed to the Hitlerite doctrine, but to those who show at least a little sympathy for Atlanticism. This accusation was regularly used against neighboring states, such as the Baltic States in 2007 and 2013 or Ukraine. Therefore, these countries view the Russian resolution as a threat. In 2014, Lithuania condemned the "insulting" move coming from a country that brutally attacks neighboring countries by invading Georgia in 2008 or Crimea in 2014. "Russia is trying to attack the Baltic states and write history in its own way," Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius complained in 2020.
The European Union abstains from voting every year as a sign of solidarity with its member States and allied countries bordering Russia. In 2020, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian justified this diplomatic position by condemning the Russian resolution at the UN as "a simplified statement designed to divide Europeans, equating all opponents of the Soviet forces to the Nazi regime. It reduces the fight against racism to issues of memory related to the Second World War, about which Russia has a distorted idea."
Why the USA and Ukraine voted against
If the members of the European Union or NATO abstained from voting on the text at the UN in December 2021, the United States and Ukraine opposed it, but for different reasons. Washington seeks to protect the American Constitution, or rather its First Amendment, which allows the expression of all opinions, even the most hateful.
As for Ukraine, which abstained in 2012 and 2013, it voted against the resolution in 2014, the year of the "orange Revolution", the annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of war in Donbass. In 2019, the Ukrainian delegation to the UN expressed its disagreement with the double game of Russia, which presents itself as a hero of the anti-fascist struggle, but ignores the German-Soviet pact of 1939 and does not remember the millions of people who died of hunger in Ukraine in 1932-1933, thanks to the Stalinist regime.
Today, Ukraine condemns, first of all, the ties that Moscow is trying to establish with far-right political forces in Europe and beyond, as well as the suppression of democracy in Russia itself and its current aggression against Ukraine.
William Audureau
