Russian popular opinion on the "frozen conflicts"

[image source]

The Russian Analytical Digest (RAD) is a valuable resource; each issue focuses on a different topic (almost always something highly relevant to current events) and has essays as well as polling data. A recent issue focused on the "frozen conflicts" (even as that term comes to seem less and less apt) in Georgia. The lead essay provided a good overview of the ongoing tension between Georgia and Russia over Abkhazia and South Ossetia and incorporated some of the ideas that were discussed at a recent conference on the "frozen conflicts" that I was fortunate enough to attend.

One interesting thing that the RAD often does is put together relevant polls on whatever topic the issue is covering, often using Russia's major polling outfits. Even though one of them has been compromised after its director received an award from Putin for his work during the recent election campaign, their polls are still probably the best ways to follow the changes in Russian public opinion over a span of years. Here are a few of RAD's graphical summaries of their polling data on Abkhazia and South Ossetia (click on them to enlarge if you can't read the fine print):

[original source - Levada Center]

[original source - VTsIOM]

Russia's third major polling agency, FOM, also had a report in early April about the situation surrounding Abkhazia, with some interesting analysis about the changes in Russian public opinion about the secessionist region over the years:

And how have the events in Kosovo affected Russians' attitudes toward the Abkhazian problem? Reference to the example of Kosovo is encountered fairly rarely among the arguments advanced by those in favor of recognizing Abkhazia's independence - in just 2% of the responses: "how is it any worse than Kosovo?"; "America recognized Kosovo, and we need to recognize Abkhazia"; "in connection with Kosovo - likewise." [these are quotations from FOM's respondents]

There is, however, another number, which obviously demonstrates that the events in Kosovo have put Russians noticeably on guard. Since October 2006, the portion of our fellow citizens who believe that Russia should recognize Abkhazia's independence has declined by 12% - from 51% to 39%. Correspondingly, the percentage of respondents who found this question difficult to answer increased from 30 to 45%. The answers to the free-form questions prevent us from concluding that support in Russia for Georgian sovereignty over the region has increased. More likely, we should conclude that solidarity with Serbia and feelings of sympathy for the "brother Slavs" related to their loss of Kosovo forced some Russians to begin to doubt whether it is desirable or acceptable to promote separatist tendencies wherever they may arise - including in Georgia.

The FOM question discussed in the bit I translated above was worded as follows (the graphic is from the same report):

In 1999, Abkhazia declared its statehood and independence [from Georgia]. Other countries have not recognized Abkhazia's independence. Do you think that Russia should or should not recognize Abkhazia's independence?

(left column - should [recognize]; center - should not [recognize]; right column - difficult to say)

(blue - July 29-30, 2006; purple - Oct. 7-8, 2006; yellow - March 29-30, 2008)

The latest chapter (or perhaps the latest paragraph in the latest chapter) in this very long story would seem to be this report.

The lighter side of secessionism

There has been plenty of serious discussion from all quarters - not to mention overblown posturing from some - about Kosovo's declaration of independence. Heck, even here at Scraps of Moscow I have been unable to resist posting on the subject from time to time (though not because it should necessarily have any relevance or precedential value for the resolution of the other unresolved conflicts). But there is also a lighter side to the struggle of unrecognized states, de facto states, microstates and other secessionist entities for legitimacy.

For example, shortly after Kosovo's "UDI," snarky DC gossip site Wonkette - in a tongue-in-cheek style which was intended to ape American provincialism but really just confirms a sort of knowing indifference which may be worse than ignorance - posted a rundown of the other spots on the globe vying to be next:

The Foreigns Present: Your Guide To The Hellholes

Those crazy Kosovars! Their little declaration of independence has caused quite the shitstorm — not just among the great powers who are wrangling over whether to recognize them or not, but among the world’s other pissant quasi-countries, who are mad that they didn’t get to do it first....This week, The Foreigns will take you on a tour of the world’s saddest unrecognized not-countries.

The territories profiled were "TRANSNISTRIA: Come for the heroin, stay for the whores"; "NORTHERN CYPRUS: Maybe this 'independence' thing wasn’t such a hot idea"; "SOMALILAND: Proving that 'hellhole' is a relative term"; "ABKHAZIA AND SOUTH OSSETIA: Sometimes pawns are just happy to be in the game"; and "WESTERN SAHARA FREE ZONE: Sand, sand sand!"

The highlights of the comments section:

Bill Clinton: "Transnistria? I think I caught that from a New Orleans hooker once."

And:

"because nothing could possibly go wrong for you when your enormous neighbor is playing games with your sovereignty for its own larger geopolitical purposes!"

Huh. I have that EXACT phrase on my license plate holder.

But the real impetus for this rundown was not a month-and-a-half-old Wonkette post. No, it was my good fortune in happening upon a hilarious episode of Family Guy entitled E Peterbus Unum. Here is Wikipedia's plot synopsis:

Peter declares his house to be the new microstate of "Petoria." He spends a night in Quahog insulting Horace (at The Druken Clan) and bringing beer out into the streets, stepping on grass that can't be touched, and violating numerous laws such as littering, sexual harassment, and vandalism. He flaunts his diplomatic immunity by singing a parody of MC Hammer's song "U Can't Touch This" and mentions that he can’t be sued by Hammer.

Snubbed at the United Nations, Peter follows the advice of a diplomat from Iraq and annexes Joe's pool, calling it "Joe-hio." Days later, when Chris tries to go to school, he is turned away because the US Army surrounds and blockades the nation of Petoria with tanks and missiles as part of "Operation: Desert Clam." Further, all electricity and water has been cut and Lois home schools the kids.

Sadly, this is not one of the few Family Guy episodes that have been made available on the TV companies' new video site Hulu. But you can watch MC Hammer parody, "U Can't Touch Me," on YouTube, at least for now:

The idea of being "untouchable" - more commonly known as immunity - as well as a general bad-ass complex, seems like it could be common among the leaders of would-be states. The Family Guy parody calls to mind a story I heard from someone who'd had occasion to meet with Igor Smirnov, the de facto leader of Transnistria. Apparently Smirnov keeps a safe full of gold coins in his office, and when he wants to convince his interlocutor of the fact that he is both independent of Russia and not susceptible to Western inducements, he shows off his hoard.

The last bit of comic relief I wanted to share is about Kosovo, from a Wall Street Journal article last week:

Freedom's Ring: Kosovo Covets A Dialing Code

By CHRISTOPHER RHOADS
March 27, 2008; Page A1

Kosovo, which a month ago declared independence from Serbia, is working on a constitution. One problem: On the front page of the latest draft, the government phone number is Serbian.

....Kosovo has a problem, because it isn't a member of the U.N., and only countries that are can get their own dialing codes. So, land-line calls into Kosovo still must use the exchange, +381, of a group that many Kosovars detest: the Serbs.

"Every country's independence rests on certain pillars," says Anton Berisha, chief telecom regulator of Kosovo, a land of two million a little larger than Delaware. "One of them is a country dialing code."

Matters so mundane aren't usually considered the stuff of patriotic fervor. But in Kosovo during the past tumultuous decade, the battle for telephone autonomy has led to the ouster of the head of a telecom company, the dismantling of cell towers built by a Serbian company and two assassination attempts, one using a rocket launcher.

"I was not prepared for this kind of debate," says Mr. Berisha, the target of both attacks, which occurred last year. He now travels only with police escort.

In fact, dialing codes have figured in nationalist movements before, from the Palestinian territories and Taiwan to Catalonia and Sudan. "Even if it doesn't make sense, people are attaching more weight to having a dialing code," says Richard Hill, whose duties include distributing dialing codes as an official at a U.N. body in Geneva, the International Telecommunication Union, or ITU.

For those of a nationalistic bent, Mr. Hill says, a dialing code can be as meaningful as a flag, a national anthem or a team in the Olympics. He declines to comment on the Kosovo situation.

Without permission from the ITU, the Palestinian phone company has struck agreements with phone companies in sympathetic Arab countries to connect calls through the Palestinian company's unofficial code, +970. Previously, calls to the Palestinian territories connected only through the Israeli dialing code, +972, which is still used by callers from many Western countries.

As for Taiwan, as it emerged as an economic power in the 1980s, it began using an unassigned calling code, +886. Taiwan, too, persuaded some foreign phone companies to send along calls with the number it preferred. The move defied China, which has long claimed Taiwan and had assigned it a regional phone prefix as a Chinese province. After years of negotiations, the ITU in 2006 officially assigned the +886 exchange to Taiwan, while still listing the island as part of China.

Foreign Exchange

Dialing codes carried little of this political baggage in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when they first grew in use and became standardized, according to Mark Cuccia, a retired library worker in Lafayette, La., who tracks phone numbers as a hobby. Creating a single list of dialing codes made it easier for international operators to connect calls, since countries often had unique phone systems.

In the 1990s, political events turned dialing codes "into a big phenomenon," Mr. Cuccia says.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and disintegration of Yugoslavia in the early '90s led to a scramble for dialing codes by new states eager to underscore their independence. Tiny European states like Andorra and Liechtenstein, which had long shared the dialing codes of their bigger neighbors, felt compelled to get their own codes, too. Just last year, Montenegro, a former Yugoslav republic that's now independent, was granted +382.

The struggle for a Kosovo dialing code dates to as early as 1999. Bombing led by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization had just expelled Serb forces from Kosovo -- then a Serbian province -- and placed Kosovo under U.N. supervision.

The U.N. mission ousted the head of the Kosovo telecom operator after he bitterly opposed awarding a mobile-phone license to Monaco Telecom. His problem: Although the Monaco company had essential international roaming agreements, using the company would mean using Monaco's dialing code.

The disgruntled chief of the local telecom operator, which is called PTK, had wanted a bidder with no dialing code, so he could agitate for Kosovo's own code. But, a U.N. official told reporters at the time, PTK needed a solution that "would actually allow people to make phone calls."

Monaco Telecom began to charge PTK tens of millions of dollars in annual fees to handle Kosovar wireless calls. The deal meant that people abroad who called a cellphone user in Kosovo had to use Monaco's +377 exchange.

But that was still better than using a Serbian carrier, in the eyes of many ethnic Albanians, who are about 90% of Kosovo's population. Ethnic Serbs in Kosovo, most of whom live near the border with Serbia, can pick up signals from a Serbian carrier.

In 2005, a Kosovar delegation visited the ITU in Geneva to argue that Kosovo should get its own code, says Etrur Rrustemaj, a PTK official in the delegation who later served as chief executive officer of PTK.

Unsuccessful, Mr. Rrustemaj turned his attention instead to dismantling antennas installed by a Serbian wireless carrier in the Kosovo capital of Pristina, including one atop a PTK building.

He was careful not to destroy the antennas, just unplug them. "If I took them down, I'd be in jail for attacking minorities," he says.

In February of last year, after a muddled bidding process for Kosovo's second mobile-phone license, Kosovo declared the winner to be Slovenia Telekom. Mr. Berisha, the telecom regulator who oversaw the auction, had to consider foreign bidders, since Kosovo doesn't have its own dialing code.

Bullets Fly

One morning later that month, Mr. Berisha was riding in a car to work with his aunt and her daughter when gunmen emerged from the side of the road and opened fire on their car. No one was injured.

Just six weeks later, Mr. Berisha, by then commuting in a police vehicle with two armed officers, was attacked again. This time, one of the gunmen launched a rocket at the car. It didn't explode properly, and injured only the driver, he says.

One of the alleged attackers, later arrested, turned out to be an official of PTK, the local telecom operator. Mr. Berisha believes his attackers were upset that he had awarded a mobile-phone license to a Slovenian operator and at the prospect of new competition.

The solution, for nationalists who yearn for a Kosovo dialing code, would be U.N. recognition of Kosovo as an independent nation. But while the U.S. and more than 30 other countries recognize Kosovo's newly declared independence, U.N. membership is far from assured. Russia, which has a veto as a permanent Security Council member, has vowed to block it.

"We are forced to work with these mixed country codes, which has made our lives more difficult," says Mr. Berisha.

"Great cases, like hard cases, make bad law"

Nikolai Zlobin is a Russian analyst who has been based in DC for some time - I'm not sure if it's that exposure that makes him generally sound more sensible than the average pundit, or something else. He also has a blog, the insights of which I wish I had been reading last fall when I was pontificating and speculating in this space about the fate of the Russian throne presidency. The article below is from the newspaper Vremia Novostei, and there's a slightly longer version on his blog.

Anyway, although I don't agree with everything in this article, I enjoyed the blend of an "outside-the-box" approach to international law with a pragmatic assessment of why things went down as they did in this case, so I decided to translate it for the edification of anyone who is fascinated or frustrated with the idea of a "Kosovo precedent" - and where it might lead - but doesn't read Russian.

Kosovo will not return to Serbia, just as Abkhazia will not return to Georgia

Nikolai Zlobin, Vremia Novostei, Feb, 29, 2008

In international law there are two principles – the right of nationalities to self-determination and territorial integrity of states – that at first glance appear to contradict each other. But if an ethnic group wants to break away and create its own state, it has the right to do so. The right of an ethnic group is superior to the right of a state. But if another state seeks to annex a part of the territory of a neighboring country, then the principle of territorial integrity applies, and the international community must ensure that it is observed.

In other words, if Russia wants to annex Abkhazia, that would be a violation of international law. But if Abkhazia wants to secede from Georgia and create an independent state, then its people have the full right to do so. There have been similar cases since 1945. This is the case in Kosovo as well, which is not becoming part of another state but is trying to create its own state. Moreover, a prohibition against becoming part of another state was a condition of Kosovo’s independence. Therefore, there is no basis for comparing the situation in Kosovo with the “Munich Agreement” which gave Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to Germany in 1938.

International law inevitably changes. The foundations of the current system were formed in the first years following World War II. This was the international law of the Cold War period, and it does not adequately reflect contemporary realities and requires serious changes. Russia should become one of the leaders in the creation of a new system of international law, which would take into account the processes of globalization and technological developments. The way to do this is to avoid clinging to the norms and procedures of the past, whatever their benefits were in their day, and to shape the future based on the realities of the present.

The UN system, created in 1946, is in need of modification. It has long since ceased to be a politically effective international organization, has turned into a humanitarian organization and has not been in a position to solve a single significant international problem for years. In addition to Kosovo, one can point to the proliferation of nuclear weapons worldwide, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and many other things taking place which conflict with the letter of international law. We need new organizations which are capable of placing the world’s development within a manageable framework, so that events will not be left to their natural course as is the case today. Russia can and should play a large role in the creation of this new system, in cooperation with the EU, the USA, China, the Arab world, and other interested parties.

The principal complaint against supporters of Kosovo’s independence is that they have violated UN Security Council Resolution 1244 of June 10, 1999. But it’s not all that simple. That resolution concerned the territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which ceased to exist a few years later. Serbia is not mentioned once in the resolution. The document does not require a UN Security Council resolution to approve further changes to Kosovo’s status, and supporters of the region’s independence took advantage of this.

I consider what happened in Serbia to have been a huge and primarily human tragedy. It happened, though, not on February 17, when Kosovo declared independence; it has been going on for quite some time already. In recent months, Russia’s representatives at meetings in Washington and Brussels made terrible threats, but then on the sidelines said, “Don’t worry, Moscow won’t do anything in response.” Serbian politicians constantly took a ambiguous position, sent unclear signals, and tried to sit not just on two, but on three or four chairs at once. As a result, it was they who lost Kosovo. The task became to make sure that this tragedy didn’t become a larger tragedy, that it didn’t lead to another war in the Balkans. Between a very bad option and a very, very bad one, the former was chosen.

Kosovo won’t return to Serbia, just as Abkhazia won’t return to Georgia – no matter what they are promised, no matter how high a level of autonomy is offered, no matter what position the UN Security Council takes. At some point in the negotiations, it became clear that Kosovo and Serbia would never come to an agreement. The EU and the US decided to be realistic and take responsibility for the situation. They decided that maintaining the status quo in Kosovo would be more dangerous than disrupting it.

Serbia wants to become an EU member and to join NATO as soon as possible. Kosovo and the other Balkan states want the same things. Adherence to European norms is a powerful motivation and sets the standard of behavior for the region’s politicians. Each country wants to enjoy a quality of life such that no one would want to secede from it. Serbia was unable to achieve this. It’s essential to create a country which attracts everyone to join it and not one which makes entire regions want to break away. President Putin had good reason to speak about the importance of making Russia an attractive country. This is a more effective method of combating separatism than appeals to other states whose own problems will always be more important to them.

Kosovo independence is one of very few foreign policy issues on which the Bush Administration has followed President Clinton's line. The genuine feeling in Washington is that stability in the Balkans depends in large part on whether Serbia can become a truly democratic country which fully shares Western values. But this can't possibly happen as long as Serbia has the colossal problem of Kosovo weighing it down.

In Washington, they say that the independence of Kosovo will help Serbia to become a successful state.

Serbia's reputation in American political circles has been ruined over the course of the past decade. Many American politicians see Serbia as the main threat to European security. This is why American policy on this issue was openly anti-Serbian from the beginning and continues to be so. Unfortunately, neither Russia nor Serbia itself will be able to quickly change this situation. This situation, though, makes Washington's stance even more intransigent and increases its impatience and willingness to take drastic measures without listening to its opponents. And not only on the issue of Kosovo.

I would take issue with a couple of the points here – first, the idea of self-determination under international law is not generally considered to be the unfettered right implied by Zlobin's description. The self-determination he suggests is so broad that it sounds almost like Lenin's idea of self-determination inevitably involving a separate state. In fact, I believe the current state of international law (for whatever it's worth) is that the general right of self-determination refers first of all to the right of nations to enjoy their national language, traditions, etc., within the confines of the state they happen to find themselves in through representation in that state's government; and secession, also known as "external self-determination," is considered a remedy of last resort.

Moreover, in the case of Abkhazia, there is a fairly compelling argument to be made that the conflict was not the sort of national self-determination which the international community should seek to promote or reward by recognizing. The Abkhaz, who constituted 17% of the population of the region in 1989, managed to drive out well over 200,000 ethnic Georgians – nearly a majority of the region’s population – during the fighting in 1992-93, and even then did not become a plurality in the region.

But perhaps I’m simply falling victim to the “old thinking” that Zlobin would like to move beyond. In all seriousness, I too have found the existing international law framework to be insufficient to deal with or even at times to describe some of the aspects of the unresolved conflicts in the post-Soviet space. In any event, international law is at least to some extent based on state practice, so perhaps another Oliver Wendell Holmes quote (in addition to the one used in the title) might be applied to the situation surrounding Kosovo: “It is the merit [sic] of the common law that it decides the case first and determines the principle afterwards.”

It's interesting that as Zlobin proposes an innovative, cooperative role for Russia in formulating new international law norms, at least one other commentator is observing that Russia's use of international law is stuck in the past.

Also interesting are some - though by no means all - of the articles that made up the avalanche of commentary which followed Kosovo's declaration of independence. Here is a random selection of ones I enjoyed reading:

Christopher Borgen, the lead author of the definitive legal analysis of Transdniester's attempt at secession from Moldova, runs through the legal analysis of Kosovo independence and concludes that it is "a quintessential 'tough case,' demonstrating the ways in which political interests of states affect how the international law is given effect." Borgen rightly points out the importance of the facts of a potentially precedential case (and how narrowly they are interpreted) in drawing broader legal lessons, but he concludes that

Despite the declarations and best intentions, just saying something is "unique" may not be enough. States and commentators may need to ask why one claim of independence is purportedly unique and then consider its downstream political and legal effects. In the end, we need to keep in mind that sometimes the most effective law in politically-charged situations may be the law of unintended consequences.

Moldovan analyst Dumitru Minzarari believes there is now a "Kosovo precedent," and that it represents "a triumph of the law of the fist over international law." He also points readers of his blog to Charles Kupchan's article on the Foreign Affairs website and discusses that article at length.

Slate's Christopher Hitchens, with his usual acerbic tone, lays the blame for the ultimate outcome at the feet of Serbia:

Of course, one ought to acknowledge that this is a calamity for the Serbs and indeed an injustice in the sense of an insult to their pride and history. But the injustice was self-inflicted. I remember seeing, in Kosovo, the "settlements" for Serbs that the Milosevic regime was building in a vain effort to alter the demography. And who were the bedraggled "settlers"? The luckless Serbian civilians who had been living in the Krajina area of Croatia until their fearless leader's war of conquest for "Greater Serbia" had brought general disaster and seen them finally evicted from farms and homesteads they had garrisoned for centuries. Promised new land on colonized Albanian territory, they had been uprooted and evicted once again. Where are they now, I wonder? Perhaps stupidly stoning the McDonald's in Belgrade, and vowing fervently never to forget the lost glories of 1389, and maybe occasionally wondering where they made their original mistake.

Oh, and in lieu of tracking down a pretty picture for this post, I'll simply point out that you can track which countries have recognized Kosovo's independence here.

A "dead fish" precedent?

"There are some problems that, like dead fish, do not improve with age and neglect."

- Daniel Fried, Ass't Secretary of State for European & Eurasian Affairs, referring to the need to resolve the status of Kosovo sooner rather than later.

I heard this sound-bite at least twice on NPR this morning but was unable to find it online anywhere.