Dispatches from the Fronts

1. Associated Press, February 16, 2008. By William J. Kole

Sean Connery thinks a Scottish
nation is a bonnie notion.

How about Spain’s Basque country becoming a
real country?

And what’s wrong with a People’s Republic of
Vermont?

Kosovo’s looming
independence raises all those questions and more. For starters: why is
statehood okay for some people but frowned on for others? After
all, isn’t the right to self-determination the essence of democracy
itself?

There are at least two dozen
secessionist movements active in Europe alone, and scores of others
agitating for sovereignty around the globe. All of them, experts
warn, will be emboldened by Sunday’s expected proclamation of the
Republic of Kosovo.

2. BBC News, February 17, 2008
Kosovo’s parliament has
unanimously endorsed a declaration of independence from Serbia, in a
historic session.
Celebrations went on into the
night after Prime Minister Hashim Thaci promised a democracy that
respected the rights of all ethnic communities.
Serbia’s PM denounced the U.S. for helping create a “false state.”
Tens of thousand of people had
thronged the streets of Kosovo’s capital, Pristina, since
morning. When news came of the declaration, the center of the
city erupted with fireworks, firecrackers, and celebratory gunfire.

3. Pristina, Kosovo, February 24, 2008, New York Times
The Serbian police said they had
arrested nearly 200 rioters involved in Thursday’s protests, in which
demonstrators, outraged at American support for an independent Kosovo,
stormed the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade and set part of it on fire.
The Serbian government has
condemned the attacks. But Serbia’s minister for Kosovo, Slobodan
Samardzic, blamed the United States. “The U.S. is the major
culprit for all the troubles since Feb. 17,” Mr. Samardzic told the
state news service.

4. Letters, New York Times, February 28, 2008
To the Editor:
While paying lip service to the
principle of national sovereignty, the United States and the European
Union argue, in effect, for a “Kosovo exception” on the grounds that
the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo have suffered historic oppression. But
lots of ethnic groups can make exactly the same claim – the Basques,
the Kurds, the Chechens. On what principled basis is the
situation in Kosovo any different?
Supporters of an independent
Kosovo don’t even bother to address this question, and it is difficult
to avoid the conclusion that they are doing this simply because they
can, Serbia being weak. Quite obviously, they would not even think of
proposing similar solutions in Russia or Spain….
Stanley A. Bowker

5. Chronicles Magazine, February 2008. By Thomas Fleming
Secession, and the communities of scale that would
result from secession movements, are the remedy, both in principle and
in application, for many of the moral, social, and cultural problems
engendered by Leviathan states around the globe…. Not all secession
movements have laudable objectives or deserve support, however.
Some secessionist nationalities – Kurds and Chechens, for example –
threaten peace and have a long record of violence….
Throughout the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia,
the United States has played a major role in breaking up historic
nations and unions, not on some idealistic principle of national
self-determination but on the well-worn maxim of all empires, divide et
impera; the intended result is to make them all…slaves on the vast
plantation of transnational corporations.
If someone asks if you believe in secession, the
proper answer is: It depends on who is seceding from whom and for what
reasons in what manner.

6. Letter to the Editor. Chronicles Magazine, March 2008.
Dr. Fleming makes a case, the best that
can be made, for selective support of secession movements, arguing that
he is in favor of some, but “not all secession movements have laudable
objectives or deserve support.”
But I don’t see how you can recognize the virtues of
secession and then decide that those don’t apply to certain peoples you
don’t like. It seems to me that the right to secession—made
explicit in some cases, as in the Soviet Union and Canadian
constitutions—admits of no exceptions, particularly since the right may
be said to be something of a universal common law and is explicitly
granted in the Montevideo Convention. That document, a spelling
out of customary international law, declares that “the political
existence of the state is independent of recognition by the other
states” and furthermore that “a state has the right to organize itself
as it sees fit” regardless of recognition. No picking and
choosing.
Of course as an individual, one is free to support
or not support any nation or movement, but that is entirely different
from support of secession itself – a political tool of great importance
that we must do our best to establish as legitimate wherever it arises,
whether we like the Tajikis and Kosovars who use it. To demand
that it must be a means “for arriving at worthy and honorable ends” is
to make of it a religious, not a political, tool—and anyway, just who
is to decide?
Besides, governments, I would argue, do not have the
liberty to support or refuse support to entities that declare their
statehood, at least on the moral and legal, as apart from the financial
or political, level. That is obviously to the benefit of those
parts of the United States that contemplate secession and would want to
have—would need to have, I’d say—the support of other countries of the
world in order to forestall impetuous action by a Washington
administration little disposed to their departures.
Kirkpatrick Sale

7. New York Times, March 2, 2008. By Graham Bowley
Now comes Kosovo…and so the idea [of European
Union] goes a step further: that Europe’s identification as a continent
has become strong enough to rewrite the definition of nationhood
itself. Now, perhaps, the continent as a whole can protect at
least the self-governance of national groups too small and weak to form
self-sufficient states of their own.
The agony of such national groups, when
contained within larger states that oppress them, has, after all, been
a historic source of genocidal mayhem on the Continent. The
Yugoslav breakup showed that the century-old formula for
self-determination—forcing together tribes who hate each other just to
make them viable states—has failed. Now, rather than let the
ministates that are breaking off founder, they may have a chance to
make it anyway—as wards of the whole continent.

8. New York Times, March 20, 2008. Reuters
In Washington, President Bush authorized
the sale of weapons and other defense materiel to the government of
Kosovo, a step that will almost certainly inflame Serbian and Russian
officials who oppose Kosovo’s independence. In a formal notice to
the secretary of state, Mr. Bush said the sales, along with defense
training and military exchanges, would “strengthen the security of the
United States and promote world peace.”

9. New York Times, March 25, 2008. By Dan Bilefsky
Serbia formally proposed dividing newly independent Kosovo
along ethnic lines, a move that was immediately rebuffed by Kosovo’s
ethnic Albanian leadership in Pristina.
The proposal is the culmination of a campaign
by Serbia to entrench its political and administrative control over the
northern part of Kosovo, which has a Serbian majority. Kosovo’s
leadership said they will not accept partition, and European countries
and the U.S. would reject such a proposal.