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While Mishin was quietly attending the rapidly growing anti-Maidan meetings, Enrique Menendez, a businessman, was himself getting worried. Menendez, who is named after his grandfather, a Spanish Republican soldier who retreated to France and after the war ended up in the USSR, is thirty years old. He grew up in a town fifty miles north of Donetsk and moved to the city after high school to seek his fortune. Too poor to afford university, he found he could navigate the media business, and got work at a growing internet company in Donetsk. Three years ago he started his own company, the Ad Factory, which did online marketing for businesses in Donetsk. He was doing well and had seven employees. But he began to feel his city slipping away from him.
In early March, Menendez and some other local professionals decided to organise a big pro-Ukraine meeting. Menendez was tasked with ensuring security for the protesters: everyone knew they might be attacked. He approached the staff of the newly appointed governor, but they couldn’t guarantee the protest’s safety; eventually he got in touch with the organised fans of Shakhtar Donetsk (shakhtar means ‘miner’ – Donetsk is coal country). These ultras, who had been supporters of Maidan, agreed to provide security. The meeting went off, thousands came, and at the end a group of men approached with sticks. The ultras were as good as their word and confronted the attackers, with the result that several of the ultras (as well as several of the attackers) ended up in hospital. This was as expected, but Menendez was discouraged.
The first thing he noticed was that the separatist forces were simply stronger: there were more of them in general, and there were more of them who were willing to employ physical violence. The second thing he noticed was that they were local. The third thing he noticed was that the police were at best passive and at worst openly hostile to the pro-unity protesters, and it didn’t get much better the higher up you went. In mid-March representatives of the post-Maidan Ministry of the Interior visited Donetsk. They met with civic leaders but most of all they met with the football ultras, and demanded that they arm themselves and prepare for battle against the pro-Russian forces in the city.
Menendez was furious. The government was coming to his city and trying to get football hooligans to beat up protesters. ‘Resolving conflicts – that’s what government is for. If you’re incapable of that, you’re not a government, you’re a profanation. Either from ignorance of the situation, or from understanding it full well, they were igniting a civil war.’
Menendez wanted to set up a dialogue with the pro-Russian activists, but his fellow pro-unity organisers wanted another rally. Menendez refused to participate. He thought it was unsafe, and on Facebook he discouraged people from attending. The march went ahead anyway. At the end of it a group of unity supporters was surrounded by a much larger group of separatists. The separatists threw bottles, cans and punches; at the end of it, one of the pro-unity marchers, the 19-year-old secretary of the local branch of the ultra-nationalist Svoboda party, was dead.
full: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n17/keith-gessen/why-not-kill-them-all ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
