THE KOSOVO PRECEDENT: RECOGNIZING GEORGIA’S REGIONS
By Alissa de Carbonnel

Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Aug 25 2008
Germany

Moscow (dpa) – When the West recognized Kosovo’s independence half a
year ago, Russia’s leaders warned the move would open ‘Pandora’s Box’
in the Caucasus.

The mountainous region’s patchwork of ethnicities and states have
long been difficult to reconcile into coherent nation states.

The bloody ten-day war between Russia and Georgia last week over the
former Soviet states’ rebel region of South Ossetia is the realization
of that Pandora’s Box scenario.

Russia has long supported Georgia’s two ethnically separatist provinces
of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but stopped short of recognizing their
independence – until now – fearing that secessions in those provinces
would provide a dangerous precedent for other minority nations within
the Russian Federation.

Nevertheless, Russian lawmakers on Monday unanimously passed a motion
urging President Dmitry Medvedev to recognize Georgia’s rebel regions
as independent – 15 years after they won de facto autonomy in a war
of succession from Tbilisi in the early 1990s.

By some counts over 80 per cent of the populations in the regions
have been issued Russian passports under an especially generous
Russian policy that Saakashvili decried as the creeping annexation
of Georgian territory.

As Russian tanks rolled into South Ossetia on August 8 to push back
Georgia’s offensive to re-assert control, Medvedev took the national
stage, invoking the army in defence of Russian citizens.

In a series of interviews by Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa after Kosovo’s
independence in February, Russian analysts foresaw a military flare
up, but did not predict the possibility that Moscow’s policy could
turn to recognizing the regions.

The threat that Kosovo could stand as a secessionist precedent in the
Caucasus had formed the Kremlin’s most vivid protest to the province’s
break from its ally Serbia.

But while Moscow is still confronted by the problems that the
Kosovo precedent raises, paradoxically, the comparison has now been
turned into a justification of South Ossetia and Abkhazia’s right
to self-determination.

Western leaders have labelled Russia’s move to recognize Georgia’s
regions as hypocrisy, while Russian leaders hit back with the
accusation that a double standard has been applied in the case
of Kosovo.

The resolution passed on Monday argued that by its assault on civilians
Tbilisi had forgone all moral right over the area, drawing a direct
link between Russia incursion and the justification of NATO’s bombing
campaign in Serbia in 1998.

Appealing before Russian lawmakers South Ossetia’s President Eduard
Kokoity repeated what has become a maxim: ‘We have more political-legal
grounds than Kosovo does to have our independence recognized.’

But Professor Yury Kolosov of the Moscow Institute of International
Relations threw cold water on the much-cited ‘Kosovo precedent.’

‘There is no such thing as a ‘precedent’ in international law … And,
if this is a precedent, then it’s a bad one,’ Kolosov, an eminent
member of Russia’s Association of International law, told Deutsche
Presse-Agentur dpa.

In other words, the Kremlin has the last word. While the threat of
recognizing the breakaway region adds to its bargaining power with the
West, analysts said it would look for ways to delay such recognition,
for example, by requesting the provinces hold a new referendum.

‘It seems to me that now politically it would be more favorable to
leave this situation hanging,’ Moscow-based analyst Vyacheslav Nikonov,
head of the Politika foundation, told news agency Interfax on Monday.

The Kremlin and its allies, meanwhile, aren’t deaf to its own warnings
that seizing on Kosovo as a precedent could spark a ‘chain reaction’
in the region.

Medvedev sought to reassure the Molodovan and Azeri presidents –
who have similar secession worries to Georgia – on Monday over the
respective breakaway regions of Nagorno Karabakh and Transnistria.

South Ossetia’s ultimate ambition to unite with Russia’s
ethnically-similar region of North Ossetia is no less problematic.

Russia’s ties to Abkhazia, which seeks only self-determination,
have traditionally been stronger, as has its economic interest in
the region.

A poll by the independent Levada centre in the aftermath of the
conflict show near half of Russians – or 46 per cent – say South
Ossetia should become part of Russia.

Only 4 per cent of those surveyed in interviews with 2,100 adults
believed the province should remain part of Georgia.

But whatever the populations of the Caucasus think, with the fate
of both provinces of intimate interest to Moscow and beyond, the
situation is likely to remain – for now – in legal limbo.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress