Byzantine Blog

Russia-EU Summit Ends Without a Breakthrough for Colonial Masters

Summit in Samara where, after the U.S. State Department, it was the EU heads’ turn to try and bend Russia’s arm forcing the awakened giant back into submission, has ended without success. Without ever considering the only acceptable option—treating Russia as an equal partner—colonial masters kept poking and prodding in an attempt to find the piece of dirt big enough to beat Russia over the head with it and make it kneel again.

Poland buys unsanitary meat for peanuts in the third world countries and wants to make killing profits by selling it to 150 millions Russians; Russia clues in and bans meat imports from Poland, EU throws a fit over Russia’s “intransigence” — why wouldn’t they feed their children the rotten meat, why create problems?! Estonia goes back to celebrating fascists and starts dismantling statues of liberators, their third-rate citizens—Russian minority—protest, get savagely beaten by the Estonian police which even kills one demonstrator, the EU blames Russia. Serbia struggles to preserve its borders, EU keeps pushing to dismember Serbia, Russia opposes reverting to the law of the jungle — Russia gets accused of creating problems. And on, and on, and on, it’s a Blame it On Putin Year (since you can’t buy him, bribe him and get him drunk).

Lavrov: EU, US Blinded by Colonial Instincts

After the summit, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov again did exactly what makes Western leaders cringe the most: called the things their right name.

In a BBC interview after the summit, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the future status of Kosovo should be decided by the Serbian people.

He said those who thought it could be determined by Russia, the EU and the US were burdened by colonial instincts.

EU leaders have recently expressed alarm about Russian threats to veto a UN Security Council resolution proposing Kosovo’s de facto independence from Serbia.

Mr Lavrov said: “It’s a case which, according to the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244, adopted by consensus, supported by Russia, by the European Union, and by the United States, must be resolved in negotiations between Belgrade and Pristina.”

AP, Guardian: Separatists Everywhere Encouraged

Meanwhile, the AP and al-Guardian make an amazing discovery, realizing Serbian Kosovo-Metohija is not just another tool for humiliating Serbs, but a patch of land that, if forcefully detached, would cause a wave of secessions around the globe. Gee, who would’ve thought!

Other Separatists Buoyed by Kosovo Push

Article by Slobodan Lekic, Associated Press Writer

From the jungles of Indonesia to Spain’s Basque country, separatists of the world are drawing hope from the approach of U.N.-approved independence of Kosovo.

“The Kosovo precedent will be important for us,”' said Igor Smirnov, leader of the Trans-Dniester region that seeks to break away from Moldova. He maintains that his tiny enclave has an even better case for independence than Kosovo.

Another hopeful Kosovo-watcher is Iraqi Kurdistan. “It’s important that Kosovo achieves independence through a U.N. Security Council resolution because that will establish a legal principle which will also some day apply to Kurdistan,”' said Mahmoud Othman, a senior Kurdish member of the Iraqi parliament.

The United States and European Union, which are backing a U.N. plan to grant “supervised independence” to the predominantly ethnic Albanian province of Serbia, dismiss suggestions that it would encourage separatist movements elsewhere.

But the plan is strongly opposed by Serbia and Russia, which will settle at most for wide local autonomy.

Russian President Vladimir Putin warned in February that independence for Kosovo would be taken as a precedent by others, including pro-Russian breakaway provinces in the ex-Soviet republics of Georgia and Moldova.

This issue has become a major irritant in the already strained relations between the West and a resurgent Russia.

The latest attempt to defuse tensions foundered this week after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Putin failed to find common ground. Kosovo also figures in Russia’s wider dispute with the EU, jeopardizing plans to create a “strategic partnership” between Moscow and Brussels.

Four Dozen Territories Around the World Eagerly Awaiting Kosovo Precedent

The author of the Kosovo plan, former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, said he did not believe a precedent would be set by granting the province independence. “No two problem areas are the same,” he said.

But in some of the four dozen territories around the world aspiring to break free, Kosovo’s future looks set to have far-reaching effects — especially if separation is engineered through a Security Council resolution.

“Kosovo’s independence would certainly have broad and destabilizing consequences for many other secessionist conflicts,” warns Bruno Coppieters, head of the Political Sciences Department at Brussels Free University.

In Indonesia, it could have a powerful impact on the two separatist-minded provinces of Aceh and West Papua, said Damien Kingsbury, a key adviser to the separatist Free Aceh Movement.

Indonesia, which has already lost East Timor, “is always sensitive about issues affecting territorial integrity, so it will be very worried,” Kingsbury said.

The U.S. and EU insist Kosovo is a special case because it has been a ward of the international community since a U.N. administration was set up in 1999. That followed a brief aerial war during which NATO ejected Serb forces accused of mounting a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the 2 million Albanian inhabitants.

“A new Security Council resolution would clearly specify that this was a unique case not applicable to other regions,” Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried said in a recent interview.

Fried said the Bush administration intends to sponsor the new resolution, based on Ahtisaari’s plan. “Kosovo will be independent one way or the other,” he said.

EU Member-States Equally Plagued by Separatist Threats

While the European Union also insists Kosovo is no precedent, some of its member states have their own restive regions to contend with — Catalonia and the Basque country in Spain, Flanders in Belgium, Hungarian nationalists in Slovakia and Cyprus’ breakaway Turkish Republic.

A parliamentary spokesman for the Basque Nationalist Party, the main party in the regional government of northern Spain’s Basque region, sees the Kosovo plan as “a very positive development.”

“We think this could be a very good precedent, and someday we could aspire to something similar,” said Josu Erkoreka.

Othman, the Kurd, said it is inaccurate to argue Kosovo is somehow special.

“Just like Kosovo, Iraqi Kurdistan has also been under international protection (since the 1991 Gulf War). There is no difference,” he said in a telephone interview from Baghdad.

Any move by Iraq’s Kurdish provinces to break free would create a major political headache for Washington and invite armed intervention from neighboring Turkey, which has its own restless Kurdish minority.

Tim Judah, a London-based Balkan analyst and author, said the Security Council ideally should grant Kosovo independence but simultaneously repudiate unilateral secessions elsewhere.

But he expects that “whatever the Security Council does may nonetheless encourage some secessionist groups somewhere.”

Serb-Basher Judah, Naturally, Disagrees

Sadly, the extraordinary article was almost ruined by Tim Judah’s nonsensical claptrap — just how would the Security Council deciding to uphold the UN Charter and Helsinki Final Act by preserving the internationally recognized borders of a UN member state “encourage some secessionist groups somewhere,” that’s what I’d like him to explain. But get a Serb-basher to throw in his two cents and he’ll twist and turn the whole thing on its head for sheer pleasure.

Slovenia: Ahtisaari’s Proposal Sets a Dangerous Precedent

Slovenian daily underscores the point made by an AP reporter, writing on Thursday that, contrary to the claims by those supporting Ahtisaari’s plan for Kosovo-Metohija province, establishment of a new state on the Serbian territory would be a dangerous precedent.

Dnevnik assessed that “although requests for independence are justifiable to a certain extent, international law does not allow nations that already have a state to establish new states in the territories of other recognized states.”

“Ahtisaari’s proposal is in fact doing that, which is new and dangerous,” wrote Ljubljana’s Dnevnik, adding that “it is strange to believe that a long-lasting peace could be achieved with imposed solutions supported by one side only.”

“It is even more strange that the principle of territorial integrity, urged by majority countries, including the United States of America and the EU, should not be applied to the Serbian province. Because, if the principle gets violated in Kosovo, it could be the first in a long file of dominoes” that would collapse, the daily wrote in its article titled “The Kosovo Dominoes.”

Dnevnik also emphasized the main point made by an AP reporter, stressing that there are a number of unrecognized states that are awaiting for a precedent to be set in the case of southern Serbian province, such as Nagorno-Karabakh, the Republic of Srpska and the northern part of Cyprus.

Cartoon by Toso Borkovic (Serbia)