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World's Separatists Eye Kosovo
Independence Push As Precedent
18.5.2007
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Just
like Kosovo, Iraqi Kurdistan has also been under
international protection
May
18, 2007
BRUSSELS, Belgium - 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.
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.
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."
AP
There are over 40 million Kurds live in
Big Kurdistan (Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Iran, Armenia),
which covers an area as big as France, about half of
all Kurds which estimate to 25 million live in
Turkey.
Before August 2002, the Turkish government placed
severe restrictions on the use of Kurdish language,
prohibiting the language in education and broadcast
media.
The Kurdish alphabet is still not recognized
in Turkey, and use of the Kurdish letters X, W, Q
which do not exist in the Turkish
alphabet has led to judicial persecution in 2000 and
2003
The Kurdish flag flown officially in Iraqi Kurdistan
but unofficially flown by Kurds in Armenia. The flag
is banned in Iran, Syria, and Turkey where flying it
is a criminal offence"
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