If you abuse minority populations; if you give special privileges to majorities or any “chosen” group in a society; if you fan the flames of nationalism for political gain; if devise political structures which systematically deny a voice to minority populations; if you seek to eliminate or marginalize certain ethnic groups within your territory… you are playing with fire.
Those frustrated with the ICJ over Kosovo are saying the ruling will cause more separatist groups around the world to seek independence. Perhaps it will. But sovereign nations have tremendous advantages at their disposal in this struggle. Those advantages can be defined (and then employed) by asking these questions:
have duly elected and effective representation at the federal, state, and local levels?
have legislative and executive control over the sub-territories where they are in a majority?
have access to and representation at all levels of the nation’s judicial mechanisms?
enjoy the full and equal benefits of your nation’s educational and health systems?
participate fully in an integrated economic system with a level playing field?
Sovereign governments which flinch at these questions are likely the same ones which felt a little queasy after hearing the ICJ ruling on Kosovo today.
*with apologies to Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young.
It was a very unpleasant weekend for LGBT people in the city of Belgrade, who were “warned” it was too dangerous to participate in the second Belgrade Gay Pride march in less than a decade. Last Thursday, a French man had his head bashed in by football club hooligans. Four days later, they went after an Australian man, who allegedly “looked gay.”
The government was so intimidated by these Serbian skinheads and ultra-nationalists, who have for months have warned on Neo-Nazi websites (like Storm Front — see its Serbian thread) and in Serbian media (according to a Women in Black listserv that was provided to me) that they would do everything possible to prevent the march from happening.
Despite earlier statements to the contrary, Prime Minister Mirko Cvetkovic pulled the plug on the march early Saturday morning — twenty-four hours before it was supposed to take place — during a meeting with the Belgrade Gay Pride’s organizing committee.
The state will do everything to protect people, whatever their national, religious, sexual or political orientation, and no group must resort to threats and violence, or take justice into its own hands and jeopardize the lives of those who think or are different.
And yet ultimately in the end, the state did not do everything it could to support the march. Nice words by Tadic, yet empty and completely unfulfilled.
In the end, a combination of poor planning (by Minister of Interior and Deputy Prime Minister Ivica Dacic, who had promised adequate police protection for the Pride parade as early as August 24) and political spinelessness were enough to doom the event. Dacic went so far as to suggest that it would be better not to hold the pride parade altogether so as to prevent people from being hurt and property destroyed. He said the parade had not been banned, but simply postponed.
So much for human rights for all.
But Dadic did not reveal the full story, which is much more unsettling. The organizers, who had hired security expert Zoran Dragisic to prepare their own security plan in order to maintain order and assist the police in doing their job, were told that if they went ahead with the march without the government’s backing, they would be held responsible for any and all damage done to private and public property.
Comments from another list serve communication by “Ana” tells the full story:
The organisers commissioned a security risk study and worked intensively with the police and other state institutions in order to obtain their support for the purpose of guaranteeing the safety of the Pride participants. The importance of the safety issue cannot be overstated given that in the last month before Pride would have taken place. . .an aggressive hate-speech campaign was launched by. . .the neo-fascist groups Obraz[Honor] and Srpski narodni pokret 1389 [Serb Popular Movement 1389, a reference to the 1389 Battle of Kosovo].
I saw with my own eyes Belgrade covered with graffiti calling for a ban of the Pride [march], the murder of gay people, and the their expulsion from Serbia. “We are waiting for you” and “The streets of Belgrade will be covered with blood, but the Pride will not take place” are two examples of the [graffiti] message,s which [also] called for lynch[ing] of the people taking part in the Pride. So, not only [were] the people who wrote these. . .examples of hate-speech. . .not ready to allow their LGBT fellow-citizens the freedom of love, but they were even actively inciting violence against the LGBT population.”
The Pride committee was right when it said that “The Republic of Serbia has capitulated. We have not.”
This time around, ultra-nationalists openly celebrated their victory in stopping the march, gleefully pronouncing the cancellation of the march as “a great victory for normal Serbia.” The Serbian Orthodox Church also condemned the march, calling it a “Sodom and Gomorrah parade” but did not openly embrace violence. Nonetheless, march organizers believed that the church’s position could have helped incite violence.
The problem of violent ultranationalism, wrapped in the robes of an militantly reactionary Serbian Orthodox church, is a major problem for the Tadic government. Despite the government’s arrest of thirty-seven ultra-nationalists on Monday for assembling in the center of Belgrade in defiance of a recently passed law banning such gatherings (a law that is somewhat dubious from a civil libertarian standpoint), a much more pervasive problem remains that Serbian politicians and leaders must address head-on: the deeply embedded criminal legacy that exists in Serbian society as a consequence of the Slobodan Milosevic years.
Milosevic permitted para-military groups to proliferate and act with impunity. He supported — and often benefited politically from — ultra-nationalists like Vojislav Šešelj (who led the Serbian Radical Party and is now standing trial in the Hague for his alleged war crimes) and the notorious Željko Ražnatovic, (a.k.a. “Arkan,” who led “Arkan’s Tigers,” known for raping and plundering entire Bosniak villages and who was assassinated by other criminal elements in January 2000). The culture of hate Milosevic fomented and sustained continues to haunt Serbia to this day.
If Tadic really wants Serbia to join the EU on his watch, he will have to accomplish what no one else has before him has had the political will to do: clean up Serbia’s criminal and violent nationalistic elements once and for all.
Now is the time for Tadic to lead not by word but by deed. Only genuine and concrete enforcement of human rights for all Serbians — regardless of their sexual orientation — can begin to scrub away the stain that so permeates Serbian society.
Last night I attended a discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations featuring CFR fellow Stewart Patrick and his new book. The Best Laid Plans takes a look at the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations’ efforts to establish international institutions in wake of the Second World War.
I’ll have more on the book once I read it, but I wanted to highlight last night’s discussion, which focused on the lessons that the Obama Administration could learn from that time. In particular, I wanted to share something Patrick said last night that is the best summation of neoconservatism that I’ve ever heard:
Neoconservatives are Wilsonians who don’t believe in international instutitutions.
As Patrick noted last night, Roosevelt and Truman wanted to build international institutions that would support and strengthen American exceptionalism, not operate separately from it. That involved an act of hubris as significant as any undertaken by the Bush Administration, but it was done in a way that actually ceded significant American power in return for which international organizations (IOs) largely followed the U.S. line.
Over time, however, those institutions, particularly the United Nations, have evolved away from that standard — to the point that for many Americans, the UN and other IOs represent part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
The neoconservatives’ answer to this development was to attack or ignore the institutions and champion American “ideals,” often at the cost of international cooperation and comity. The neocons also proposed new institutions, such as the League of Democracies, to replace the UN. Of course, such organizations are merely an attempt to create a more exclusive club open only to those who would accept their brand of exceptionalism.
The Obama Administration has made it clear that it will move in a different direction, one that emphasizes cooperation rather than confrontation. But much as his predecssors did, Obama will soon learn that good intentions do not always produce good results. Although UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has expressed his desire to work more closely with the Obama Administration, there is only so much he can do to rally other nations behind him.
The irony, of course, is that the very institutions designed by the U.S. to ensure that its views would triumph — the Security Council veto, the General Assembly, the then-Commisison on Human Rights (now the Human Rights Council) are the main obstacles to greater U.S.-UN cooperation (and to a more effective UN).
During the Bush Administraiton, many felt that was a good thing. But it’s important to remember that the UN also opposed the U.S. intervention in Kosovo, leading the Clinton Administration to work around it and through NATO. In fact, many analysts have pointed out that the Bush Administration adapted the Clinton argument on Kosovo in justifying its own intervention in Iraq.
Obama’s challenge will be to walk the fine line between those who believe that the United States should always defer to the UN and those who think the U.S. can do fine without it. That’s not going to be an easy task, even if Bolton and other exceptionalists are out of power. The first time American interests clash with those of the UN, he will have to decide whether to choose a similar path as Clinton and Dubya, or to find another way to engage the UN and encourage its cooperation/participation.
And that may be one of the biggest challenges he faces, certainly greater than Iraq and perhaps as daunting as the economy.
The last two weeks have been nuts, what with the Clinton and Obama speeches, Hurricane Sarah, and all other things political. And things are unlikely to slow down anytime soon, given the fact that the election is only sixty days away.
While Americans focused on the conventions (and Hurricane Gustav), world events didn’t just grind to a halt. Over the past two weeks, there have been a number of important developments that are not only important in their own right but also may have a significant impact on the next President’s ability to govern.
Over the next few days, I’m going to try to highlight someJ of them. Let’s start with Russia-Georgia.
In the past two weeks, the Russia-Georgia conflict has increasingly turned into a proxy (cold) war between the United States and the Russian Federation. Russian President Medvedev has demonstrated a particular affection for Bushian bluster, making grandiose nationalistic statements about reestablishing a Russian sphere of influence that were meant as much for internal consumption as for global politics. Meanwhile, the Bush Administration has taken several steps to bind the United States even more closely to the fate of Georgia — including a pledge of more than $1 billion in new (non-military) foreign assistance and a visit by Vice President Dick Cheney.
John McCain’s protestations notwithstanding, most Americans still do not understand what is going on or why the conflict is relevant to their lives.
For all the jokes about Cheney being sent out of the country during the Convention, the reality is that his trip was deadly serious, designed to show the Russians that the United States would not be cowed in the face of its aggression. But it also showed Cheney’s unbelievably blinkered view of the world: in the end, the reason the U.S. is backing Georgia is because of the latter’s decision to send troops to Iraq.
The Administration’s actions are going to make it much harder for the next President to pursue a more rational, interests-based policy while at the same time defending Georgian sovereignty. Of course, if McCain is President, that will not be a problem.
The bottom line: this has become a game of low-intensity chicken, with both sides acting like 12-year-old boys. And neither side really cares to behave like adults. Georgia, which is largely (though not entirely) the victim here, is stuck in the middle, with little hope of serious support from the West or complete withdrawal of Russian forces. The real fear is that some further incident will cause one side or the other to ratchet up the rhetoric in a way that we’re suddenly looking at Bosnia 1914 all over again — except this time, it will be with thousands upon thousands of nukes on both sides.
For those interested in the specifics, you can find a straightforward report on the events of the past two weeks after the jump.
As Matthew Yglesias and other analysts have noted, the Kosovo conflict set a dangerous precedent because the United States (with the backing of most of Europe) intervened without getting authorization from the Security Council under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter. At the time, liberal internationalists cheered the move, believing that the danger of ethnic cleansing and perhaps genocide took precedence over a Security Council resolution.
The only problem was that it created a precedent for other unilateral intervention. Four years later, when the Bush Administration invaded Iraq, many of the same folks who defended the U.S. action in Kosovo found the neocons making the exact same arguments.
Now, the Bush Administration is getting a taste of the same medicine it so gleefully dished out back in 2003. The Administration finds itself trying to explain why Russian action in Georgia is somehow not the same as what the United States did in Iraq.
Let’s face facts here, folks. There is no difference. Well there’s one difference: Georgia has a democratically elected government. But in the context of contemporary international politics, that clearly doesn’t mean much.
Time to play compare and contrast. Today, Dubya said the following [emphasis added]:
I am deeply concerned by reports that Russian troops have moved beyond the zone of conflict, attacked the Georgian town of Gori, and are threatening the Georgia’s — Georgia’s capital of Tbilisi. There’s evidence that Russian forces may soon begin bombing the civilian airport in the capital city.
If these reports are accurate, these Russian actions would represent a dramatic and brutal escalation of the conflict in Georgia. And these actions would be inconsistent with assurances we have received from Russia that its objectives were limited to restoring the status quo in South Ossetia that existed before fighting began on August the 6th.
It now appears that an effort may be underway to depose Russia’s* duly elected government. Russia has invaded a sovereign neighboring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people. Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century.
[snip]
Russia’s actions this week have raised serious questions about its intentions in Georgia and the region. These actions have substantially damaged Russia’s standing in the world. And these actions jeopardize Russians’ relations — Russia’s relations with the United States and Europe. It is time for Russia to be true to its word and to act to end this crisis.
Now here’s what then-Russian President Vladimir Putin said at the time of the invasion of Iraq [emphasis added]:
Today the United States started a military action against Iraq. Already there are human victims and destruction. . . . Let me stress from the beginning that military actions are taking place contrary to the world public opinion, contrary to the principles and norms of international law and the Charter of the UN.
Nothing can justify this military action — neither accusations of Iraq of supporting international terrorism (we have never had and do not have information of this kind) nor the desire to change the political regime in that country which is in direct contradiction to international law and should be determined only by the citizens of this or that state.
[snip]
The military action against Iraq is a big political mistake. I have already referred to the humanitarian aspect. But the threat of the disintegration of the established system of international security causes at least as much concern.
If we allow international law to be replaced by “the law of the fist” whereby the strong is always right and has the right to do anything and in choosing methods to achieve his goals is not constrained by anything, then one of the basic principles of international law will be put into question, and that is the principle of immutable sovereignty of a state. And then no one, not a single country in the world will feel secure. And the vast area of instability that has arisen will grow and cause negative consequences in other regions of the world.
It is for these reasons that Russia insists on early termination of military actions. And we are still confident that the central role in resolving the crisis situations in the world, including the situation around Iraq, must belong to the UN Security Council.
I would like to stress that Russia is committed to trying to bring this situation back to a peaceful course and to achieve genuine solution of the issue of Iraq on the basis of UN Security Council resolutions, a solution that would take into account the legitimate interests of the Iraqi people, respect of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of that country.
Pot, meet kettle. Kettle, meet pot. The only fundamental difference here is that Putin framed things in terms of international law and the role of the UN, while Bush framed things in terms of Russia’s place in the world and its relationship with the United States and Europe. (Leave it to our distinguished President to allow his soul brutha to come up with the stronger argument.)
That said, somebody needs to throw these words back in Putin’s face. And Medvedev’s too. What hypocrites.
Sadly, as a result of our Iraq adventure, it can’t be the United States.
An important message from the entire Kosovo-Serbia experience, highlighted by today’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling is this: treat your minorities well*.
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