KOSOVO’S DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE WAS LEGITIMATE
Family Security Matters
Aug 5 2010
The bile of the new champions of colonialism was flowing freely
last week after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that
Kosovo’s declaration of independence did not violate international
law. The New York Times’s Dan Bilefsky referred opaquely to
‘legal experts’ and ‘analysts’ who warned that the ruling could
be ‘seized upon by secessionist movements as a pretext to declare
independence in territories as diverse as Northern Cyprus, Somaliland,
Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Transnistria and the
Basque region.’ The ‘legal experts’ and ‘analysts’ in question remain
conveniently unnamed, though they are clearly not very ‘expert’,
since if they were, they would presumably have known that most of
those territories have already declared independence. The Guardian’s
Simon Tisdall claimed that the ICJ’s ruling would be welcomed by
‘separatists, secessionists and splittists from Taiwan, Xinjiang and
Somaliland to Sri Lanka, Georgia and the West Country’, leading one to
wonder what the difference is between a ‘separatist’, a ‘secessionist’
and a ‘splittist’.
Let’s get this straight. No democratic state has anything to fear from
‘separatism’, and anyone who does fear ‘separatism’ is no democrat. I
am English and British, and I do not particularly want the United
Kingdom to break up. But I am not exactly shaking in fear at the
prospect of the ICJ’s ruling encouraging the Scots, Welsh or Northern
Irish to break away. And if any of these peoples were to secede,
I’d wish them well, because I am a democrat, not a national chauvinist.
The Cassandras bewailing the ICJ’s ruling are simply expressing a
traditional colonialist mindset, which sees it as the natural order
of things for powerful, predatory nations to keep enslaved smaller,
weaker ones, and an enormous affront if the latter should be unwilling
to bow down and kiss the jackboots of their unwanted masters. Can’t
those uppity natives learn their place?!
The Western democratic order, and indeed the international order as a
whole, is founded upon national separatism. The world’s most powerful
state and democracy, the United States of America, was of course
born from a separatist (or possibly a secessionist or splittist)
revolt and unilateral declaration of independence from the British
empire. The American separatist revolt was sparked by resistance
to British-imposed taxes without representation, which seem a less
serious grievance than the sort of mass murder and ethnic cleansing
to which the Kosovo Albanians were subjected by Serbia. Most European
states at one time or another seceded from a larger entity: roughly
in chronological order, these have been Switzerland, Sweden, the
Netherlands, Portugal, Greece, Belgium, Luxemburg, Serbia, Montenegro,
Romania, Norway, Bulgaria, Albania, Poland, Finland, Czechoslovakia,
Ireland, Iceland, Cyprus, Malta, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Georgia,
Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Belarus, Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia,
Bosnia-Hercegovina, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Montenegro (for
the second time). No doubt Northern Cyprus, Somaliland, Transnistria
etc. drew some inspiration from this long separatist success story.
Serbia itself has a proud separatist tradition, going back at least
as far as the First Serbian Uprising of 1804, when the separatist
leader Karadjordje Petrovic attempted to bring about the country’s
unilateral secession from the Ottoman Empire. Some might argue that
the eventual international acceptance of Serbia’s independence in 1878
was not unilateral, since it was brought about by the Treaty of Berlin
to which the Ottoman Empire was a signatory. But this is disingenuous,
since the Ottomans only accepted Serbia’s independence after they had –
not for the first time – been brutally crushed in war by Russia.
Undoubtedly, were Serbia to be subjected to the sort of external
violent coercion to which the Ottoman Empire was repeatedly subjected
by the European powers during the nineteenth century, it would rapidly
accept Kosovo’s independence. Let us not pretend that bilateral or
multilateral declarations of independence hold the moral high ground
vis-a-vis unilateral ones – they simply reflect a difference balance
in power politics.
As an independent state from 1878, Serbia left the ranks of the
unfree nations and joined the predators, brutally conquering
present-day Kosovo and Macedonia in the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913,
thereby flagrantly violating the right of the Albanian and Macedonian
peoples to determine their own future in the manner that the
people of Serbia already had. In 1918, Serbia became hegemon of the
mini-empire of Yugoslavia. So ‘separatist’ became a dirty word for
Serbian nationalists who, in their craving to rule over foreign lands
and peoples, conveniently forgot how their own national state had
come into being. Nevertheless, it was Serbia under the leadership
of Slobodan Milosevic whose policy of seceding from Yugoslavia
from 1990 resulted in the break-up of that multinational state:
Serbia’s new constitution of September 1990 declared the ‘sovereignty,
independence, and territorial integrity of the Republic of Serbia’ –
nearly a year before Croatia and Slovenia declared independence from
Yugoslavia. This would have been less problematic if Milosevic’s Serbia
had not sought to take large slices of neighbouring republics with
it as it set about asserting its own, Serbian national sovereignty
from the former multinational Yugoslav federation.
So, plenty of precedents from which separatists, secessionists,
splittists and the like could have drawn inspiration, long before the
ICJ’s ruling on Kosovo. Why, then, the international disquiet at the
verdict ? The simple answer is that the disquiet is felt by brutal or
undemocratic states that oppress their own subject peoples, and wish
to continue to do so without fear that their disgraceful behaviour
might eventually result in territorial loss. Thus, among the states
that oppose Kosovo’s independence are China, Iran, Sudan, Morocco,
Sri Lanka, Indonesia and India, all of them brutally oppressing
subject peoples or territories and/or attempting to hold on to
ill-gotten conquests – Xinjiang, Tibet, the Ahwazi Arabs, Darfur,
Western Sahara, the Tamils, West Papua, Kashmir, etc. At a more
moderate level, Spain opposes Kosovo’s independence because it fears
a precedent that Catalonia or the Basque Country could follow. Spain
is a democracy, but a flawed one; its unwillingness to recognise
the right to self-determination of the Catalans and Basques echoes
the policy pursued by the dictator Francisco Franco, who brutally
suppressed Catalan and Basque autonomy and culture following his
victory in the Spanish Civil War. Likewise, Romania and Slovakia
are crude and immature new democracies with ruling elites that
mistreat their Hungarian minorities and identify with Serbia on an
anti-minority basis.
Of course, states such as these will not be happy that an oppressed
territory like Kosovo has succeeded in breaking away from its
colonial master. But this is an additional reason for democrats to
celebrate the ICJ’s decision: it should serve as a warning to states
that oppress subject peoples or territories, that the international
community’s tolerance of their bad behaviour and support for their
territorial integrity may have its limits. Thus, a tyrannical
state cannot necessarily brutally oppress a subject people, then
bleat sanctimoniously about ‘international law’ and ‘territorial
integrity’ when its oppression spawns a separatist movement that
wins international acceptance: it may find that international law
will not uphold its territorial integrity. Serbia’s loss of Kosovo
should serve as an example to all such states.
Of course, there are states, such as Georgia and Cyprus, whose fear
of territorial loss is legitimate. But in this case, the problem
they are facing is not separatism so much as foreign aggression and
territorial conquest. The ‘secession’ of Abkhazia and South Ossetia
from Georgia was really the so-far-successful attempt by Georgia’s
colonial master – Russia – to punish Georgia for its move toward
independence, and exert continued control over it, by breaking off
bits of its territory. Georgia was the state that was seeking national
independence – from the Soviet Union and Russian domination – while
the Abkhazian and South Ossetian separatists were the ones wanting
to remain subject to the colonial master. In Abkhazia, it was the
ethnic Georgians who formed a large plurality of the population,
being two and a half times more numerous than the ethnic Abkhaz –
any genuinely democratic plebiscite carried out before the massive
Russian-backed ethnic cleansing of the 1990s would most likely have
resulted in Abkhazia voting to remain in Georgia. South Ossetia
might have a better demographic case for independence, though not as
strong as the larger and more populous republic of North Ossetia in
Russia, whose independence, should it ever be declared, Moscow is
unlikely to recognise. In the case of Northern Cyprus, the foreign
aggression was more blatant still: there was no ‘Northern Cyprus’
until Turkey invaded the island of Cyprus in 1974, conquered over a
third of it, expelled the Greek population and created an artificial
ethnic-Turkish majority there. It is above all because of the reality
of Russian and Turkish aggression against, and ethnic cleansing of,
smaller and weaker peoples, that Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Northern
Cyprus should not be treated as equivalent to Kosovo.
Milorad Dodik, the prime minister of Bosnia’s Serb Republic (Republika
Srpska – RS), has suggested that the ICJ’s ruling on Kosovo opens
the door to the potential secession of the RS. The RS is not a
real country, but an entity created by genocide and massive ethnic
cleansing; anyone who equates it with Kosovo is at best an ignoramus
and at worst a moral idiot. Nevertheless, we sincerely hope that the
RS’s leadership be inspired by the Kosovo precedent and attempt to
secede – such an attempt would inevitably end in failure, and provide
an opportunity for the Bosnians and the Western alliance to abolish
the RS or at least massively reduce its autonomy vis-a-vis the central
Bosnian state, thereby rescuing Bosnia-Hercegovina from its current
crisis and improving the prospects for long-term Balkan stability.
Finally, if the ICJ’s ruling on Kosovo really does inspire other
unfree peoples to fight harder for their freedom, so much the better.
As the US struggle for independence inspired fighters for national
independence throughout the world during the nineteenth century,
so may Kosovo’s example do so in the twenty first. May the tyrants
and ethnic cleansers tremble, may the empires fall and may there be
many more Kosovos to come.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributor Dr Marko Attila Hoare is a
historian and university lecturer, who has written several books on the
history of nations that once comprised Yugoslavia. He has lived and
worked in the southeastern Europe as a translator, and has assisted
in official inquiries on war crimes carried out in Bosnia. He is the
European Neighborhood Section Director for the Henry Jackson Society,
(where this article appeared) and has a blog called Greater Surbiton.
From: A. Papazian
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.6964/pub_detail.asp