(Dobbs) Nothing Benign About Martial Law in Ukraine
It will likely impose the most iron-fisted aspects of military rule.
Martial law is not always a bad thing. In the history of the United States, according to calculations by the Brennan Center for Justice, it has been declared almost 70 times. Sometimes to bring peace when violence broke out between labor unions and management. Sometimes to protect property after a calamitous natural disaster. Sometimes to enforce laws meant to desegregate the South.
But in Ukraine, where Vladimir Putin has imposed martial law on the four regions he is trying to steal, it is a bad thing. A very bad thing. Especially since it’s not even forced on the nation by its sovereign government, but by its occupiers.
Martial law takes many forms, some more short-lived than others, some more benign than others. But in its most common configuration, it puts government in the hands of the military. This often means the end of civil laws, the end of civil rights, the end of civil justice.
It’s a sure bet that Putin’s martial law won’t be benign and won’t be short-lived. It will more likely look like what I saw in four nations I covered in the span of just three years where martial law was laid down. Pity the poor victims in Ukraine.
In Iran in 1978, to quell public demonstrations against the Shah, martial law was declared in the capital, Tehran, and in several other cities where protests were aimed at his government. Ironically as a precursor to what we see there today, shoot-to-kill became the government’s policy. I saw cases where more than a hundred unarmed civilians were gunned down. The law silenced the media and prohibited large public gatherings, but it was sometimes ignored and that led to more massacres of defenseless protestors.
In Afghanistan, shortly after I got there just days after the Soviet Union invaded on Christmas week of 1979, there were demonstrations against the godless Soviets, threatening enough to the new Afghan president backed by Moscow that he declared martial law. Every citizen who didn’t wear a uniform was ordered to surrender his weapons within 24 hours. People couldn’t gather in groups any bigger than four. A nighttime curfew was imposed. No one could leave the capital, Kabul, without a government escort. Violators weren’t ticketed, they were shot… unless they were foreign journalists like me, who were simply evicted from the country.
In Egypt in 1981, martial law was declared when President Anwar Sadat, watching a military parade, was assassinated by Islamic fanatics. By late that night I had landed in Cairo and almost immediately, after Egypt placed the blame for Sadat’s death on its neighbor Libya and Libya’s leader Colonel Gaddafi, I was dispatched with a camera crew to the Libyan border where a war was expected to start. We had a travel permit signed by the Minister of Defense but still, with travel otherwise forbidden, we were stopped and frisked and interrogated at desert checkpoints a half-dozen times. The war never happened, but the state of martial law, euphemistically called “emergency powers,” never lifted. The military could arrest civilians. Soldiers could shoot protestors. Civilians could be tried in military courts. Egypt’s parliament periodically has renewed the state of emergency ever since.
In Poland, later that same year, the Solidarity Trade Union led by shipyard electrician Lech Walesa— who years later won the Nobel Peace Prize and became Poland’s first democratically elected president— literally revolutionized the nation by creating the first independent trade union inside the Soviet bloc and signing up ten million workers who demanded workplace concessions from their Communist leaders. Initially the military government run by General Wojceich Jaruzelski negotiated with the union, but eventually he had to please his Soviet masters and bring in the tanks and arrest Solidarity’s leaders and shut the union down. With its borders closed, a nation that heavily depended on imported food became a nation that dined, night after night, on homegrown potatoes. Martial law lasted for two-and-a-half years. But people there told me they’d had a taste of democracy and were determined to taste it again. They did, but it was years more in the making.
And now it’s the turn of Ukraine. So-called emergency powers have been put in the hands of Putin’s hand-picked governors in the four regions he now calls Russia’s. It will be no surprise to see severe limits on travel, stricter censorship on media, harshly enforced curfews, government seizures of private property, and more brutal behavior by Russian soldiers and police. Analysts predict Putin’s martial law will lead to Ukrainian citizens being involuntarily deported to Russia, and tough treatment for those who don’t leave. The Russian despot already made it clear that political parties and other public groups cannot meet.
It is “to ensure Russia’s security and safe future, to protect our people,” Putin told his security council. We all know differently. It is to ensure an even more repressive rein on the Ukrainian people. And, since he also put new regulations in place in more than two dozen parts of Russia itself, it is to stifle dissent by his own citizens against the war.
The Ukrainian mayor of the Russian-occupied city of Melitopol this week called martial law “a new manifestation of genocide in the occupied territories.” The president of the E.U.’s European Commission called Putin’s latest wave of civilian-targeted attacks in Ukraine “war crimes.” The 46-member Council of Europe has declared Russia a “terrorist state.” President Biden earlier this year called Putin “a dictator who commits genocide.” There is a bipartisan bill in Congress to label Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism.
With a terrorist like Vladimir Putin running this war, there will be nothing benign about martial law in Ukraine.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Astonishing audacity by Putin. Thanks once more Greg for sharing your perspective.