Antiwar.com
May 20, 2004
Good Fences
Partitions, Imperial and Otherwise
by Nebojsa Malic
As the Iraqi occupation continues, with a heavy toll in lives and sanity, so
does the desperate search for a solution. One was offered Tuesday by Ivan
Eland:
“What can the United States do to dampen the insurgency and avoid a
potential civil war? Something that the Bush administration and the
Washington foreign policy establishment have avoided like the plague: rapid
U.S. troop withdrawal and genuine and complete self-determination for
Iraqis.”
Though at first glance similar to the call for partition first sounded in
November 2003 by Leslie Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations in the New
York Times, it is nothing of the sort. While Gelb advocated a US-imposed
partition, something similar to the British establishment of Iraq to begin
with, Eland suggests the US should not oppose partition if it comes to pass.
And while Gelb argues for carving up Iraq by invoking the oh-so-successful
carve-up of Yugoslavia, Eland invokes a lesson not learned in that fiasco:
“Had the Clinton administration allowed the partitioning of multi-ethnic
Bosnia, the United States and other nations would probably not be saddled
with the task of keeping the peace in this continuing tinderbox nine years
after the Dayton Accords were signed. If the peacekeepers withdrew today,
the fighting among Bosnia’s ethnic groups would probably resume.”
Indeed. But insisting on Bosnia’s integrity has been part and parcel of
the Imperial policy of intervention that eventually led to Baghdad. That
alone makes it worth further examination.
Destroying Yugoslavia
Before there was Bosnia, there was the Socialist Federated Republic of
Yugoslavia (SFRY). This is an inconvenient fact for the Empire, and thus
often forgotten. Certainly, Yugoslavia may have been put together wrong
twice, no less, and its collapse was as inevitable as anything in history.
But the way that collapse took place was tantamount to murder, and the
perpetrator was no other than the currently purported “savior” of the
western Balkans, the young EU.
After World War Two, Yugoslavia’s Communist government reorganized the
previously unitary kingdom into Soviet-style “republics.” Unlike in the
USSR, they eventually overpowered the central government and in 1990 held
separate democratic elections. When two of these republics, Croatia and
Slovenia, declared independence in the summer of 1991, the federal
government was unable to stop them. The half-baked effort by the military
(sometimes referred to as the “Ten-Day War”) failed miserably.
Slovenia, a peripheral and ethnically homogenous republic, was let go.
Croatia, stretching halfway across the Yugoslav federation and encompassing
territories historically inhabited by ethnic Serbs (who had reasons to
oppose rule by an independent Croatia), was a different story. As fighting
erupted between Croatian and Serb militias, the European Community butted
in. In August 1991, it established a Peace Conference on Yugoslavia and an
Arbitration Commission, “comprising five Presidents from among the various
Constitutional Courts of the EC countries,” (per Roland Rich) which came to
be known as the Badinter Commission. It was this EU intervention that shaped
Yugoslavia’s destruction.
The Badinter Decisions
While the Badinter Commission’s Opinions (as its decisions were known) are
well worth reading in detail, what they essentially did is define the
Yugoslav crisis in a way that could only lead to bloodshed. In November
1991, when pressed to decide whether the main issue in Yugoslavia was that
of secession from the federation (as it clearly was), the Commission
declared that “the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia is in the
process of dissolution” instead. And just like that, Yugoslavia ceased to
exist once again, its carcass free for the taking.
While logic would dictate that a country that “dissolved” would be replaced
outright by successor states, in this case too, Yugoslavia was to be an
exception. The Commission issued Opinions 2-6 in January 1992, the second
ruling that only republics had the right to leave the “dissolved”
Yugoslavia, not peoples, as it had been guaranteed in the Yugoslav
Constitution and customary in international practice. This left some two
million Serbs in what were to become Croatia and Bosnia out in the cold, and
they would have none of it. Their revolt ignited the 1991-95 Succession
Wars.
Moreover, based on the Commission’s first decision, all republics were
required to apply for recognition. Serbia and Montenegro refused, having
been recognized as independent back in 1878. In April 1992, they established
a new federation and claimed sole succession to the SFRY. This followed the
Soviet precedent, which must have shaped second Opinion: the USSR split
along the “republic” lines as well, but Russia was recognized as its sole
heir. But as the first Opinion already declared Yugoslavia had simply
“dissolved,” the EU would have none of it. Not only was the right of
self-determination denied to two million Serbs outside Serbia, it was denied
to Serbia itself. In the end, the puppet government that deposed Milosevic
in 2000 eventually accepted the Badinter diktat and reapplied for
recognition.
Rothbard’s Wisdom
It is a cruel irony that Serbs had accepted the Badinter decision on the
dissolution of Yugoslavia, and did not question the secession of either
Croatia or Bosnia-Herzegovina. Instead, they tried to counter-secede, and
ran afoul of Badinter’s Paradox (Opinion 2): only republics were allowed
to do so! In both instances, the EU/US insistence on sanctity of arbitrary
“republic” borders (and complete disregard for both old Yugoslav borders and
national self-determination) thwarted the efforts of Serbs (and also Croats
in Bosnia) to counter-secede. So tens of thousands died, millions were
displaced, countless property was damaged, ethnic relations were poisoned
for generations to come, Bosnia came under international occupation, yet the
basic issue of the war, self-determination, remained unresolved.
If only the EU meddlers had listened to the great libertarian thinker Murray
Rothbard, who in his August 1990 essay “The Nationalities Question” endorsed
secession and the partition of both Yugoslavia and its constituent entities,
noting:
“In the first place, it must be recognized that there are no just national
boundaries per se; that real justice can only be founded on the property
rights of individuals. National boundaries are only just insofar as they are
based on voluntary consent and the property rights of their members or
citizens. Just national boundaries are, then, at best derivative…”
Urging against the US intervention in Bosnia in 1993, Rothbard argued:
“The only hope of genuine peace and justice is to destroy Bosnia and to
allow this non-country to be divided completely into its constituent parts.”
Since the other solutions, imposed at first by the EU then by the US, appear
to have failed abysmally, perhaps it is time to give Rothbard’s
well-reasoned argument a try.
Then There Is Kosovo
Ever since 1991, there has been a persistent effort to address the
aspirations of Albanians in Serbia and Macedonia and maybe even Montenegro
as the last chapter of Yugoslavia’s “dissolution,” creating an independent
state of Kosovo which would then annex the neighboring Albanian-inhabited
areas. The problem with this approach, aside from its obviously aggressive
character, is that it both appeals to the Badinter decision and contradicts
it. On one hand, Albanians and their partisans claim that Kosovo’s status
in the former Yugoslavia gave it a legitimate right to demand recognition.
On the other, they also base their claim on population figures (“90 percent
of Kosovo”) and ethnic self-determination, something clearly denied to Serbs
and Croats in Bosnia, for example. They also claim uti possidetis: the right
to keep what they seized by force of (NATO’s) arms in 1999. But Badinter
Commission’s Opinion 2 notes that uti possidetis applies to the
inviolability of borders of Yugoslav republics, one of which happens to be
Serbia.
Obviously, invoking mutually contradictory principles to justify something
gained through aggression isn’t a problem either for Kosovo Albanians or
their Western helpers. Law and logic are not their strong point: violence is,
whether in form of NATO’s original invasion, or the ongoing pogroms.
Quit Meddling!
The story of the Balkans wars of the 1990s and of Iraq today, one would
venture, is the same as the story of every people, everywhere. Where there
is humanity, there will always be deceit and coercion. But in the modern
world, these are institutionalized in the government, their destructiveness
amplified. While history, circumstances and the nature of their dispute all
predisposed the Yugoslavs of 1990 towards violence, it was the way the EU
and the US institutionalized that conflict that led to its horrifying
escalation. Whether through the Badinter rulings of the paradoxical Dayton
Agreement, outside meddling made the Yugoslav conflicts more intractable and
their solution that much farther away.
Arbitrary as it was, the initial Balkans meddling of the nascent EU and the
American Empire at least tried to hide under a veneer of legitimacy, while
the late-stage interventions (Kosovo, Macedonia) were simply naked
aggression and extortion, respectively. The fact that no one was either
willing or able to oppose them by force does not make them legitimate –
merely temporarily successful.
It has been plain to just about everyone in the world that the 2003 invasion
of Iraq was illegal, an act of naked aggression justified by allegations
abjectly lacking veracity. The impotence of resistance to this aggression in
Kosovo made Iraq possible. It should not make one ounce of difference that
the Iraqi occupation, or that in Kosovo, or Bosnia, isn’t going as
planned; the US should withdraw from Iraq, and Kosovo, and Bosnia, and
Macedonia, not because these interventions weren’t successful, but
because they were wrong.
And if some see this as a blow to America’s asserted total global
dominance in matters military and political, why should it be? Why should
people fear America, instead of respecting it? Surely the United States of
America stands for freedom and honor, not fear and violence?
Right.