International Herald Tribune, France
Dec 6 2007
Unrecognized States
By Mark Almond
Published: December 6, 2007
LONDON:
The recent gathering at Annapolis of most sides in the world’s most
intractable political dispute has focused attention on the Middle
East, but another set of bitter geopolitical problems is rapidly
elbowing its way into the international limelight – unrecognized
states in the Balkans and the Caucasus.
The failure of the American-EU-Russian troika to resolve Kosovo’s
status by consensus sets in motion a declaration of independence from
Serbia by its Albanian majority within weeks. That could re-ignite
conflicts across the former Yugoslavia and in the disputed
territories scattered around Russia’s rim in the old Soviet Union.
With Washington and Moscow at loggerheads as the U.S. takes sides
with the Albanians and Russia with the Serbs, it is time to look
beyond the local Balkan issue. As one negotiator in the troika
ruefully admitted, if 120 days of negotiation couldn’t reconcile the
bickering parties, 1,020 would do no better. More than Kosovo is at
stake.
With U.S. and Russian rhetoric recalling the Cold War, its essential
for the UN Security Council’s five permanent members to talk through
the big questions about separatism, otherwise their regional clients
could escalate their quarrels.
Both sides seem tempted to play zero-sum politics with the similar
issues in the Caucasus surrounding Georgia’s breakaway regions,
Abkhazia and South Ossetia or Azerbaijan’s Armenian-controlled
Nagorno-Karabakh.
Moldova and its separatist region, Transnistria, have already been
there. This no-man’s land between NATO and Russia houses a classic
contest for influence. When the Kremlin thought it had stolen a march
by mediating a deal between Moldova and its rebels, the State
Department flexed its muscles to undermine it. Smart work then, but
payback over Kosovo is coming now.
Western leaders respond to Russia’s lack of cooperation in resolving
the Kosovo issue by not engaging with her friendly "separatists."
The Kremlin is guilty of hypocrisy too. It backs secessionists riling
pro-NATO Georgia, but crushes others in Chechnya and opposes
pro-American Kosovars. This should not blinds us to the reality that
hypocrisy underpins all realpolitik – even our own.
The belief that the Kosovo issue can be resolved in isolation
ominously echoes the West’s misreading of the break-up of Yugoslavia
in the early 1990s, when the West responded to each step on the path
of disintegration by concentrating on the crisis that blew up
yesterday at the expense of the bigger explosion to come tomorrow.
First, EU mediators told Bosnia to wait in line while they calmed
down the situation in Croatia. At Dayton in 1995, Bill Clinton was so
anxious to get Slobodan Milosevic on board to settle the Bosnian war
that he put Kosovo on the back-burner – until 1999. Now the West
wants to resolve the Kosovo question while leaving all other
separatist conflicts in the freezer. Britain’s foreign secretary,
David Miliband insists that Kosovo’s case is unique, but that won’t
stop others taking recognition of Kosovo’s independence as a
precedent that could ignite piecemeal recognition of other
secessionist states. Bosnian Serbs might ask why Albanians can break
out of "democratic" Serbia but they cannot leave Bosnia, and so on.
Festering in both the Caucasus and Balkans are issues that haunt
Middle East peacemakers. Huge numbers of people displaced by war in
the 1990s now live in squalid conditions close to their old homes.
Nobody at Annapolis would need reminding that it took a generation to
grow up in the Palestinian refugee camps before international
terrorism was spawned.
Serbs from Kosovo fester with animosity about Western hypocrisy at
their "reverse ethnic cleansing." Most refugees have returned to
Bosnia but not to their former homes – now occupied by someone else.
The same recipe for future war and terrorism exists in the Caucasus,
where ethnic cleansers and the cleansed live in fear of one another.
Azerbaijan spends its oil revenue on weapons to fight to recover
Karabakh – and hundreds of thousands of refugees live in squalor in
sight of the oil derricks waiting for their chance to march home.
Georgia is spending money it cannot afford to prepare for a showdown
with Abkhazia. Facing severe local economic difficulties,
nationalists in both regions are rallying support by waving the flag.
It was not foolish to let the separatist sleeping dogs lie for a
decade because these issues – like bed sores – only get worse if you
scratch them. But by accepting that 1.6 million Kosovar Albanians
should have independence, the West has set everybody else itching
like mad.
Just as the West should admit that recognizing Kosovo won’t settle
the issue of the Albanians straddling its borders into neighboring
Macedonia, so Russia needs to realize that blocking Kosovo’s
accession to the United Nations without proposing a broader agenda to
resolve these kind of conflicts will not necessarily leave her
satellite "secessionists" untouched.
To avoid a cascade of mutually destabilizing unilateral recognitions
and the ensuing poisoning of East-West relations, Washington and
Moscow need to recognize each other’s interests, and then thrash out
a deal on how to deal with separatist states that have taken on a
life of their own since 1991. Can either really afford to let old
conflicts boil over again?
An Annapolis-style conference could develop criteria for managing the
issue of unrecognized states, including possible measures to
discourage them from independence. Without it, the problem could
explode with terrible consequences for the great powers on the
sidelines as well as their clients in the fray.
Mark Almond is lecturer in History at Oriel College, Oxford, and a
frequent visitor to the Balkans and the Caucasus.
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