New thinking required for
Kosovo conundrum
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF
Associate since 1991
Comments directly to
JonatPower@aol.com
July 13, 2007
LONDON - At last the Western powers are beginning to pull back a little on the vexed question of independence for Kosovo. They haven’t gone as far as conceding that Moscow’s arguments against independence make a good deal of sense, but they do realize they can’t afford to ride rough shod over Russian sensibilities. Russia is wary of giving way on the issue of a minority’s push for independence when the majority do not want it. Not only could it re-ignite the Chechnya conflict, it would set a bad precedent for the future when other of Russia’s many minorities might get the same idea in their heads. Indeed, one should be a little surprised at the attitude of the British and the Spanish who have been on the American pro-independence side on Kosovo. One would think that with the Northern Ireland and Basque problems they would have been rather more sensitive to the Russian point of view.
Nor should we forget that when the Nato bombing of Serbia ended eight years ago after forcing the Yugoslav army to pull out of Kosovo it was with an agreement with the Serbian strongman, Slobodan Milosevic, that Nato would disarm the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, and shelve its promise to the Kosovars to hold a referendum on Kosovo’s political status. (How convoluted can you get?- The negotiations at Rambouillet that preceded the war were more demanding of Milosevic than the peace deal that followed it.)
But there is also another side to the story. 1999 was the sixth war during the twentieth century affecting the destiny of Kosovo. The first was in 1912. Serbia, along with Montenegro, Greece and Bulgaria divided up the remains of the Balkan part of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire. Then the Serbian army, living out the national quest, stormed into Serbia.
The second was in 1915 when the Serbs were chased out of Kosovo by the Austro-Hungarians and the Germans, with the Albanians of Kosovo taking their sweet revenge.
The third was 1918 at the end of World War 1 when the Serbs swept back and, after taking their own revenge, they implanted Israeli-like Serbian settlements inside Kosovo.
The fourth was 1941 when the Italians fighting on Hitler’s side captured Kosovo and incorporated it into Italian-ruled Greater Albania.
The fifth was the victory of Tito against the Nazis and the Italians in 1945, which led to the reincorporating of Kosovo into Serbia, despite a promise to allow a communist Kosovo to become part of Albania. Tito later reneged on the deal.
We clearly see that the Kosovars have been fighting Serbian hegemony for a very long time. It would make a good deal of sense today to allow the Albanian Kosovars to partition Kosovo and take their majority part into a new Greater Albania. In return the Serbs could be pacified by allowing them to incorpororate the anomalous Srpska Republic, the autonomous Serbian part of Bosnia, into Serbia. Moreover, the UN Charter recognises “the self-determination of peoples”.
But, but….Because it implies a significant erosion of the long held principle of sovereignty, applying it and accepting it has been a divisive issue among international law scholars. By and large, in most cases, the community of nations has worked from the opinion of the League of Nations when in 1920 it investigated the request of the Swedish-speaking inhabitants of the Aaland Islands in the Baltic to be allowed “self-determination” from Finland.
“To concede to minorities”, the League’s advisors concluded, “whether of language or religion, or to any fractions of the population, the right to withdrawal from the community to which they belong, because it is their wish or their grand pleasure, would be to destroy order and stability within states and to inaugurate anarchy in international life.”
This is why the British government supported, in the face of an outcry at home, the right of Nigeria to put down the revolt in the dissident state of Biafra in the 1960s. It is why the Big Five of the Security Council are united in accepting the territorial integrity of Iraq. And historians like to remind us that Hitler claimed with his invasion of Sudetenland that he was merely applying Wilsonian principles of self-determination for German minorities outside the Reich.
Where do we go from here? There is no easy answer. A pause to rethink is about the best solution on offer. It may however mean that the Kosovars, feeling thwarted, will return to violence. The Balkan map never made sense and it never made peace. Russia, whilst legally in the right with its anti independence stance, has to come up with an alternative that can diffuse the violence that is bound to brew. Perhaps a deal that involves the trade off of allowing the Srpska republic to join up with Serbia would be it.
Copyright © 2007 Jonathan
Power
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Jonathan Power can be
reached by phone +44 7785 351172
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Jonathan
Power
2007 Book
Conundrums
of Humanity
The Quest for Global Justice
“Conundrums
of Humanity” poses eleven questions for our future progress, ranging
from “Can we diminish War?” to “How far and fast can
we push forward the frontiers of Human Rights?” to “Will
China dominate the century?”
The answers to these questions, the author believes, growing out of
his long experience as a foreign correspondent and columnist for the
International Herald Tribune, are largely positive ones, despite the
hurdles yet to be overcome. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, London, 2007.
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