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.
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