Outside View: Learning from Kosovo

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 21 (UPI) -- A specter is haunting capitals around the world. It is the fear that Kosovo's independence may prove infectious. From Moscow to Beijing, Baghdad, New Delhi, Lagos, Ankara, Manila and other seats of power, leaders express fear that Pristina's birthday may create a domino effect encouraging disgruntled groups within their boundaries to follow suit.

Kosovo's success begs the question: Would the world be a better place were other dissatisfied peoples to break away? While the answer is not black and white, history suggests an affirmative answer. However, it also shows all too often the effort will be met by bloody and senseless resistance when the benefit of peaceful paths is evident. The global community would do well to promote the latter by developing a formalized system of international mediation to resolve internal disputes that approach the cusp of mayhem.

Kosovo would have benefited from such an institution. The collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s spiraled into a conflict that swept the Balkans and took the lives of hundreds of thousands. Serbia's efforts to maintain the Muslim Albanian province in its domain marked the last act. And while negotiations with the West promised a solution, implementation proved impossible given the tug of words and incidents that characterized Serbo-Kosovar relations.

As opposed to other national groups -- Chechens, Tibetans, Kashmiris, Biafrans, Tamils, Mindanao Muslims and others -- who fought and in some cases still fight for independence, Albanian Kosovars were lucky. They had CNN and the U.S. Air Force on their side. The first generated global sympathy through a steady stream of real-time coverage of the Serbian military pushing thousands of Kosovar Muslims out of their homes. The second pummeled that same army in a multi-month air campaign resulting in an immaculate victory -- no American lost his or her life in combat -- then followed a successful NATO-led, U.N.-endorsed trusteeship that laid the foundation for the birth of this new nation.

Midwifing partition, as Washington did, is rare. India's 1971 intervention into East Pakistan resulting in the creation of Bangladesh and the U.S. commitment to protect Taiwan after Mao took hold of the mainland furnish two post-World War II examples. But midwifing will continue to be the exception as countries recoil at jeopardizing their own internal and external peace and security to create a country out of another's country.

The result leaves peoples seeking divorce two options. Hope that time and circumstance will allow partition through state collapse or the taking up of arms to force the issue.

Recent decades witnessed the promise of the former in the remarkable collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire. A slew of new independent countries emerged. Czechoslovakia's dissolution, in turn, demonstrated that separation can be turned into an elective process. Montenegro followed suit in its 2006 detachment from Serbia.

But the human consequences of Yugoslavia's earlier collapse demonstrated the flipside of self-determination when peaceful options fail. In other instances -- the emergence of Eritrea from Ethiopia and East Timor from Indonesia -- partition came only after decades of conflict resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands. Southern Sudan garnered its right to exit from Khartoum's hold in elections promised for 2011, but only after its own decades-long civil war sacrificed a million souls.

In today's world, wars or skirmishes over partition continue in the Philippines, Kashmir, Israel/Palestine, Iraq, Sri Lanka, etc. These and other conflicts prompt the question, is there a better way? Although U.N. resolutions speak of self-determination, with the exception of the decolonization that promoted the geographic integrity of countries, the international community does not recognize the unilateral right of groups to secede; this view holds partition remains an internal matter.

But this ought not to absolve the international community from ignoring or giving more than lip service to the challenge, particularly when partition risks civil war and potential metastasis into neighboring countries. Rather, the time has come to formalize an international mediation corps composed of competent problem-solving experts to help parties help themselves first to resolve conflict and, in extremis, facilitate state dissolution. Mayhem is not the better choice.

--

(Bennett Ramberg, Ph.D. (Johns Hopkins), JD (UCLA) served in the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs in the George H.W. Bush administration. The author of three books and editor of three others on international security, he has written for such prestigious journals as Foreign Affairs and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Ramberg's op-eds have appeared in major newspapers around the world.)

--

(United Press International's "Outside View" commentaries are written by outside contributors who specialize in a variety of important issues. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of United Press International. In the interests of creating an open forum, original submissions are invited.)