UnRecognized States

By Mark Almond
Published: December 6, 2007
IHT

The recent gathering at Annapolis of most sides in the world's most intractable political dispute has focused attention on the Middle East, but another set of bitter geopolitical problems is rapidly elbowing its way into the international limelight - unrecognized states in the Balkans and the Caucasus.

The failure of the American-EU-Russian troika to resolve Kosovo's status by consensus sets in motion a declaration of independence from Serbia by its Albanian majority within weeks. That could re-ignite conflicts across the former Yugoslavia and in the disputed territories scattered around Russia's rim in the old Soviet Union. With Washington and Moscow at loggerheads as the U.S. takes sides with the Albanians and Russia with the Serbs, it is time to look beyond the local Balkan issue. As one negotiator in the troika ruefully admitted, if 120 days of negotiation couldn't reconcile the bickering parties, 1,020 would do no better. More than Kosovo is at stake.

With U.S. and Russian rhetoric recalling the Cold War, its essential for the UN Security Council's five permanent members to talk through the big questions about separatism, otherwise their regional clients could escalate their quarrels.

Both sides seem tempted to play zero-sum politics with the similar issues in the Caucasus surrounding Georgia's breakaway regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia or Azerbaijan's Armenian-controlled Nagorno-Karabakh.

Moldova and its separatist region, Transnistria, have already been there. This no-man's land between NATO and Russia houses a classic contest for influence. When the Kremlin thought it had stolen a march by mediating a deal between Moldova and its rebels, the State Department flexed its muscles to undermine it. Smart work then, but payback over Kosovo is coming now.

Western leaders respond to Russia's lack of cooperation in resolving the Kosovo issue by not engaging with her friendly "separatists."

The Kremlin is guilty of hypocrisy too. It backs secessionists riling pro-NATO Georgia, but crushes others in Chechnya and opposes pro-American Kosovars. This should not blinds us to the reality that hypocrisy underpins all realpolitik - even our own.

The belief that the Kosovo issue can be resolved in isolation ominously echoes the West's misreading of the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, when the West responded to each step on the path of disintegration by concentrating on the crisis that blew up yesterday at the expense of the bigger explosion to come tomorrow.

First, EU mediators told Bosnia to wait in line while they calmed down the situation in Croatia. At Dayton in 1995, Bill Clinton was so anxious to get Slobodan Milosevic on board to settle the Bosnian war that he put Kosovo on the back-burner - until 1999. Now the West wants to resolve the Kosovo question while leaving all other separatist conflicts in the freezer. Britain's foreign secretary, David Miliband insists that Kosovo's case is unique, but that won't stop others taking recognition of Kosovo's independence as a precedent that could ignite piecemeal recognition of other secessionist states. Bosnian Serbs might ask why Albanians can break out of "democratic" Serbia but they cannot leave Bosnia, and so on.

Festering in both the Caucasus and Balkans are issues that haunt Middle East peacemakers. Huge numbers of people displaced by war in the 1990s now live in squalid conditions close to their old homes. Nobody at Annapolis would need reminding that it took a generation to grow up in the Palestinian refugee camps before international terrorism was spawned.

Serbs from Kosovo fester with animosity about Western hypocrisy at their "reverse ethnic cleansing." Most refugees have returned to Bosnia but not to their former homes - now occupied by someone else. The same recipe for future war and terrorism exists in the Caucasus, where ethnic cleansers and the cleansed live in fear of one another.

Azerbaijan spends its oil revenue on weapons to fight to recover Karabakh - and hundreds of thousands of refugees live in squalor in sight of the oil derricks waiting for their chance to march home. Georgia is spending money it cannot afford to prepare for a showdown with Abkhazia. Facing severe local economic difficulties, nationalists in both regions are rallying support by waving the flag.

It was not foolish to let the separatist sleeping dogs lie for a decade because these issues - like bed sores - only get worse if you scratch them. But by accepting that 1.6 million Kosovar Albanians should have independence, the West has set everybody else itching like mad.

Just as the West should admit that recognizing Kosovo won't settle the issue of the Albanians straddling its borders into neighboring Macedonia, so Russia needs to realize that blocking Kosovo's accession to the United Nations without proposing a broader agenda to resolve these kind of conflicts will not necessarily leave her satellite "secessionists" untouched.

To avoid a cascade of mutually destabilizing unilateral recognitions and the ensuing poisoning of East-West relations, Washington and Moscow need to recognize each other's interests, and then thrash out a deal on how to deal with separatist states that have taken on a life of their own since 1991. Can either really afford to let old conflicts boil over again?

An Annapolis-style conference could develop criteria for managing the issue of unrecognized states, including possible measures to discourage them from independence. Without it, the problem could explode with terrible consequences for the great powers on the sidelines as well as their clients in the fray.

Mark Almond is lecturer in History at Oriel College, Oxford, and a frequent visitor to the Balkans and the Caucasus.