MH17 murder charges bring vital justice for all victims
Is charging four men for the downing of flight MH17 too little too late? Absolutely not, writes Charles Miranda. It is a step towards justice, not just for the victims’ families, but for the Ukrainians caught in the bloodshed.
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Jane Malcolm had waited five years for this day but when it came, it still shocked her.
“It’s upsetting to see their actual faces. I didn’t like to have to look at them,” she said, as the photos of four men appeared on TV screens across the world this morning.
“But I think it is important to get the truth out even if you can’t expect any of these people to see the inside of a jail.”
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Those four men — the first of a dozen individuals expected to be identified — have been named as suspects in the deaths of 298 people, including 38 Australians, aboard Malaysian Airlines flight MH17.
MORE: Four charged with murder over downing of Malaysia Airlines plane
They are four alleged mass murderers, three Russian and one Ukraine, charged as such and to be tried most likely in absentia next March in The Hague over bringing down the passenger airline over eastern Ukraine almost five years ago.
Clearly pre-empting the global announcement that three of the four suspects were Russian citizens (and indeed senior military men with the State’s intelligence services), the Kremlin not only denied any knowledge or involvement.
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Kremlin also reminded the world that under the Russian Constitution, no Russian nationals could be extradited for trials abroad and that for crimes committed overseas, Russians can only be tried in Russia.
End of story.
Of course, Russia’s attitude was obvious before the protracted multinational investigation that cost tens of millions of dollars and countless investigative hours.
So was it worth it? Is it too little too late? Will naming four suspects bring any closure for the families of the 298 killed or the governments wanting to pursue justice on behalf of their respective nations?
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The answer is abso-bloody-lutely. If further reinforcement was required, just ask the victims’ families themselves.
Or go broader.
Ask the 20 orphans outside of Ukraine’s restive Donetsk city, who had already suffered so much horror and loss and were enjoying a picnic on that July 2014 day when they saw what they thought were black birds falling from the sky only to see three passengers fall on their party, including a Malaysian boy.
The orphanage has since closed with the horror described by traumatised staff as end-of-days “biblical”.
Ask the citizens of Donetsk on the banks of the beautiful Kalmius river, once known as the City of a Million Roses, now ravaged by war after columns of tanks flying Russian flags rattled across the border to begin the protracted program of annexation.
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For the two grandmothers cut down by a grad missile as they crossed the road with their groceries, for the farmer killed by a stray bullet while tending his wheat belt, for the man who lost half the lower half of his body from a stray bomb as he walked to his mother’s house, finishing the journey dragging himself on the ground by his knuckles.
Since 2013 and the battle in Kiev, then the fall of Crimea and then outright conflict in Eastern Ukraine, 13,000 people were killed in the crossfire, many of whom were innocent citizens going about their lives — just like those on-board MH17.
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I was there for this period. I saw events unfold and the horror first-hand.
I can tell you that all these people want is peace and justice — not necessarily in that order — and for the world to expose Russia’s horror.
Yesterday’s MH17 criminal report, that will identify up to a dozen other suspects, is for all of these victims, as much as it is for those on the doomed flight.
Jane’s parents Carol and Michael Clancy were on a dream holiday, a retirement reward for a lifetime of teaching special needs students in the Illawarra region of NSW and were on their way home to share the memories when they boarded Malaysian flight MH17.
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She now makes the point that like the Lockerbie Disaster — the Pan AM flight 103 bombed by Libyan terrorists as it flew over Scotland in 1988 — justice eventually came, albeit two decades later.
“It is important to have established facts,” she said.
“There’s not much we can do but keep pushing. Really. Nobody expected when Lockerbie was bombed that anybody would face justice and it took them 20 years but they did get there eventually. You cannot just give up. This has to continue.”
Meryn O’Brien, who lost her son Jack, and Paul Guard, who lost his parents Jill and Roger on MH17, strongly agree this is for the other nameless 13,000 of the Ukraine conflict.
MORE: Parents of children killed on MH17 want answers
In Ukraine they say justice has already come for some with the assassination of four key rebel figures including the head of the self-proclaimed Russia-backed Donetsk Republic, Alexander Zakharchenko, and mysterious deaths of three other senior figures in recent years linked to the uprising in what has been described as a “purge” by Moscow of those with knowledge about the missile attack on MH17.
But a lasting peace would be a better outcome and the report will go a little way toward serving some justice and bring a degree of closure.
Charles Miranda is a News Corp Australia senior reporter.
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