介绍:
Today we are talking about the shooting down of the Malaysian Airline MH17 with nearly 300 people killed.
I guess the following step would be naturally about investigation into the causes of what really happened to this airliner. Here’s the Malaysian Prime Minster Najib Razak, “Just now, I received a call from President Obama, he and I both agree that the investigation must not be hindered in anyway and international team must have full access to the crash site and no one should interfere with the area or move any debris including the black box.”
So they have a commission responsible for investigating the causes of the missing airline MH370, and now you have this another tragedy, so are we going to see a separate investigation team or simply the same investigation team to take on additional responsibility?
First of all, the Malaysian Airline has been hit by kind of a double jeopardy, the missing airline to start with and then this huge tragedy of commercial airline brought down by whatever reason from mid-air and huge losses of lives. I think for any airline, to suffer these two big tragedies is more than enough and I really worry about the financial liability of the airline itself. In terms of the investigation team set by Malaysian Airline, these two tragedies are very very different in nature. For what we just now witnessed in the eastern part of Ukraine, I think of crucial importance is to maintain the integrity of the evidence, so they need to call an off to the site where all these debris and relics may have been found to prevent anyone from tempering with the evidence. The evidence is there on the ground right now. The key is how to collect them and how to prevent anyone from removing them for whatever reason. Whereas for the missing Malaysian airline, we do not know where it is and we do not know the region where the missing airplane might have dropped. So these are very very different two scenarios. Also in terms of the passengers on board of these two planes, they are very different. In the first instance, mostly was Chinese nationals, but in the incident today we are going through, it’s mostly the Dutch and the Europeans and the Australians, so I think all the countries involved may demand justice to be made and evidence to be collected and eventually as I said, of top priority, of most urgent need right now, is to create an international framework where thorough investigation can be done and efforts need to be made so that no evidence will be tempered with to start with in the east Ukrainian situation.
The Ukrainian separatist forces have said that they are handing the black box, plane recorder information over to Russia, is this going to complicate the situation?
I would say that the rival forces have to hand it over to someone. They obviously don’t have the capability to pretty much even access the black box, let alone interpret any information. In reality, they are going to have to give it to somebody. It is making a logical sense from their point of view to hand it over to Russia, so obviously there’s really just no way to complain about that. What we can do is to do sort of what Victor was saying earlier about American intention, whether they are really the unbiased observer. If Russian are the only one that would ever look at the black box, there’s going to always be a question about what information we have now, about how thorough or how unbiased there final report is. If the Russian bring it to an international group, it’s still going to be a question because everything would be within their control. We will be in a very suspicious mode. On a broader sense though, the black box is not going to tell us the whole story. Black boxes are designed to tell us about internal problems on an aircraft. They are designed to tell us if mechanical errors are the cause. Largely what the black boxes do is they will eliminate that option and then say that we have another option including what everyone is jumping to right now which is a missile attack, it’s not going to tell us unless we get lucky and that the pilots were able to survive long enough to say through microphone that oh my goodness we were to sit by a missile and probably to disintegrate in the air. But that’s pretty unlikely. So what we really going to have to do is to look at the debris that’s on the ground, collect that, literally rebuild the aircraft to get an idea of how big the blast was, what kind of weapon may have done it. To do that, we would need high-tech investigator on the ground for weeks. And I don’t think we are ever going to find a way to get the forces on the ground to cooperate in a way that everyone’s comfortable with.
This is a quite likely scenario. It will take a very long time, or even probably we will never know. But anyway, Victor, what would be the impact on the ongoing Ukrainian conflict? Right now it seems that there is a temporary ceasefire from the rivals saying that we will stop fighting and we will welcome and allow international investigator to this tragic scene over there, but in a long term point of view, what kind of impact is going to have?
I’m afraid that this incident will create more dynamics for Ukraine to be divided up. The two sides are now increasingly engaged in military operations against each other. More lives have been lost. It is more and more difficult to achieve national reconciliation and this incident itself will in history be looked upon as another dividing line eventually leading to the disintegration of Ukraine as we understand. It is very unfortunate, but the dynamics on the ground seem to push further and further these two sides apart and it is almost impossible to achieve national reconciliation for Ukraine.
So it’s getting more difficult for Ukraine to achieve peaceful unification or reconciliation here.（to be continued）
