MH17 wreckage near village of Rozsypne (Reuters)
Australians are still coming to terms with the tragedy which befell a Malayasian Airlines Boeing 777 airliner which was shot out of the sky as it flew over eastern Ukraine on 17 July 2014. All 15 crew and 283 passengers—including 27 Australian nationals—were killed when the wreckage of Flight MH17 crashed to earth about 40 kilometres from the Ukraine-Russia border. The cause of this disaster has, from the outset, been attributed to a Russian-made anti-aircraft missile fired from an area under the control of Russian-backed separatists engaged in a conflict with the Ukraine government.
Despite forensic confirmation that a Russian Buk-M1 surface-to-air missile system was used in the shoot-down, the Russian Federation has consistently denied involvement. Moscow not only refused to co-operate with any independent investigation into the causes of the incident, it has used its veto power in the United Nations Security Council to block efforts to establish an international tribunal to prosecute those suspected of downing of the plane. It has also dismissed claims for compensation from the families of the victims, most recently on 9 May 2016 when lawyers acting for many of those families filed a lawsuit in the European Court of Human Rights.
How redolent all this is of an incident which occurred 58 years ago when the Soviet Union—the predecessor of the Russian Federation—also allowed passengers on an international air service to become innocent victims of a political power play of its making.
Back in 1948 the Russians had fallen out with the allies with whom they had defeated Nazi Germany during World War II and were determined to force the United States, Britain and France to relinquish their shared control of the former Nazi capital Berlin. That city lay deep inside the eastern half of Germany which the Soviets then occupied, and the zones administered by the western powers were completely dependent on outside supplies for the essentials of life.
To achieve Moscow’s aims, various pressures were applied to the road, rail and canal links into the western zones of Berlin that effectively amounted to a blockade. When the allies resorted to increasing their usage of the guaranteed air corridors into the city, the Soviets began applying pressure there, too, using military aircraft to violate airspace over West Berlin and harass commercial flights by “buzzing” them as they landed or departed.
This was the background to events on 5 April, when a Russian fighter plane collided midair with a British civil transport that was on a scheduled service from London to Gatow airport in West Berlin. The Russian Yak-3 had been observed performing aerobatics in the area for some time before the Vickers Viking airliner began its landing approach. The fighter’s pilot decided (whether under orders was open to conjecture) to play “chicken” with the liner, but instead of merely frightening those on board the Yak-3 clipped the Viking, tearing wings off both aircraft which then crashed causing the deaths of all on board. Among the ten passengers killed was a 58-year-old businessman from Sydney.
(Left) Viking airliner; (centre) Waldemar Hald, the Sydney businessman killed in the Gatow disaster; (right) Soviet Yakovlev (Yak-3) fighter
Separate enquiries held by British and Soviet authorities both concluded that the Gatow disaster was the result of an accident, but whereas the British panel held the fighter pilot to blame the Soviets reached the bizarre conclusion that the Viking’s pilot was at fault. Moscow also rejected requests for compensation for the civilian victims, disregarding the efforts of the Australian government on behalf of the widow and seven children left behind in Sydney.
The tragedy that occurred over Berlin was quickly swallowed up in the “non-kinetic” campaign that followed in June 1948 and lasted for more than a year. Known as the ‘Berlin Airlift’, it saw the allies stare down the Soviets’ efforts to starve them out of Berlin by maintaining an air bridge into the city—even at the expense of triggering a bigger and nastier, low-level but long-lasting, conflict known to history as the Cold War. Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and its replacement by the Russian Federation, a pattern of behaviour had been established by Moscow’s rulers which still shows little regard for the safety of international travellers.