Bosnian Institute News
July 30 2010
The ICJ ruling – a blow for freedom
Author: Marko Attila Hoare
Uploaded: Friday, 30 July, 2010
The ICJ ruling on Kosovo sets a precedent that is dangerous only for
tyrants and ethnic cleansers
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 mind-set, 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 seems 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-Herzegovina, 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 1912-13, 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 RS. RS is not an 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 leadership will 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 RS, or at least
massively reduce its autonomy vis-a-vis the central Bosnian state,
thereby rescuing Bosnia-Herzegovina 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.
This article was published 29 July on the author’s Greater Surbiton
website
From: A. Papazian
http://www.bosnia.org.uk/news/news_body.cfm?newsid=2755