Kosovo comes back to bite the US
Ccommentators have said that the US should have understood when Kosovo declared independence six months ago that the issue of forming an international precedent is not as simple as declaring it as such or not.
(Ali Gharib, Asia Times) Thursday, August 21, 2008
With the conflict between Georgia and Russia lowered to a
simmer after the signing of a ceasefire agreement, questions still remain about
the United States role and positions on the start of the conflict as well as
where it stands moving forward towards a resolution.
Ten days ago, a full-scale war broke out when Russian and Georgian forces
clashed over the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia.
The US role
during the beginning of the conflict on August 7 is unclear, but a Washington
Post article this weekend revealed that Matthew Bryza, a deputy assistant
secretary of state and a US
special envoy to the Caucuses, was aware of the Georgian military operations
before they started.
At a press conference Tuesday in Washington,
and in line with the Georgian position, Bryza said the Georgian military
movements were a response to attacks from Ossetian separatists and initial
large-scale Russian movements into South Ossetia.
"Who shot whom first?" said Bryza at the Foreign
Press Center.
"I don't know if we'll ever know the answer to that question," he
continued, before going on to call the answer "irrelevant" because
"Russia
has escalated so brutally" that the international community turned against
it.
Moscow has denied the Georgian and US
timeline, but did not provide the Washington Post with a Russian timeline of
the military movements.
Speaking at a forum at the Atlantic Council for the United
States, the immediate former secretary of
state for political affairs, R Nicholas Burns, said he blamed Russia
completely for the conflict and that the Russian incursions were the "most
disappointing" turn Russia
has taken since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Burns, toeing a line pushed strongly by the US
representative to the UN, Zalmay Khalizad, last week - and strongly denied by
the Russian representative - said the Russian actions were a response to
increasing freedom and democracy in Europe since the end
of the Cold War.
"Russia
has put this at risk," Burns said.
Responding to criticisms that unflinching US
support for Georgia
may have emboldened Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili to make the misstep
of a military move into South Ossetia, a generally
pro-Russian province that has been pushing for independence since the early
1990s, Burns said that the charges were unfounded.
Those "pointing the finger" at Georgia
and the US were
wrong, and Russia
was solely to blame for the conflict, he said.
"I don't think the US
is to blame for what's happening in Georgia,"
Burns reiterated to IPS after the Atlantic Council conference. "I think Russia
is to blame."
But Paul Saunders, the executive director of the Nixon Center and a specialist
on Russia and US-Russia relations, told IPS that he was not surprised that the
US and Georgia don't blame themselves.
"Burns is a person who, as undersecretary of state until recently, was
part of forming the US
policy towards Georgia,"
he said, making it unlikely for him to find fault with those very policies.
As for the US
siding with Georgia, a democratic, pro-Western ally, over South
Ossetia and its Russian backers, Burns said the US
should not take a role in deciding the borders of European countries.
"We must not be part of the redrawing of lines in Europe,"
Burns told the wider audience at the Atlantic Council event.
When asked later in the day by IPS if Burns' comment mirrored the US
position, Bryza said that he wasn't sure exactly what Burns was talking about.
But he was willing to confirm Burns' general message as an appropriate position
for the unique case of the Georgian conflict.
"We should not allow this current situation to draw new lines in Europe
and prevent a democratically elected government to join NATO if they
want," he told IPS.
Many commentators have noted that Russian ambitions to realize independence for
South Ossetia and another pro-Russian breakaway region
in Georgia, Abkhazia, were greatly bolstered by US
support for the independence of Kosovo, which Serbia
still considers part of its territory.
But many US
officials and their defenders have strongly denied that US
support of Kosovo - which came swiftly after its declaration of independence -
created a legitimate precedent for Russia
to support the independence of the Georgian breakaway regions.
In questions after the conference, Burns told IPS that the Kosovar independence
and South Ossetian and Abkhazian independence are "fundamentally
different".
"We were right to support the right of independence for Kosovo,"
Burns said, explaining that the fundamental difference was UN control over Serbia
since the war there in late the 1990s sparked by what Burns called Serbian
leader Slobodan Milosevic's "savage attack" on Kosovo.
But some commentators have said that the US
should have understood when Kosovo declared independence six months ago that
the issue of forming an international precedent is not as simple as declaring
it as such or not.
"[The US]
tried very hard and assertively to support Kosovo's independence, but [to not
make it] a precedent," Saunders said. "What the administration
doesn't understand is that what's a precedent is in the eyes of the
beholder."
"We don't get to decide how other people react to what we do," he
said. "Other people get to decide."
Looking forward to a final resolution of the conflict, Bryza said that Russia
and Georgia
would be the main players because of their democratically elected leadership,
which the US
views as legitimate.
"We support Georgia's
territorial integrity," Bryza said. "That means that the leaders of
the Abkhaz and South Ossetians are not on the same legal
grounds as the democratically elected leaders of Georgia
or the leader of Russia."
South Ossetia and Abkhazia, lacking independence, do not
have internationally recognized de jure governments. However, both regions do
have de facto independently operating governments with leaders.
Moreover, with the US
constantly citing Georgia's
status as a democracy as a strong reason to back it, many are left curious by
the absence of talk of a 2006 referendum in South Ossetia
when residents unanimously voted for independence. Whether the leaders of the
breakaway region were democratically elected by international standards or not,
their leaders certainly and legitimately represent this view.
"If you asked the people in those two regions where they want to live [in
terms of independence or under the Georgian state], it's quite clear that the
leadership is representative of that," said Saunders.
But if the US
continues to ignore that reality, it could further dilute the US's
international standing as an advocate of democracy and self-determination.
"People start to wonder why we are taking these positions," said
Saunders. "It gets a lot harder to say we are standing on principle."
