Posted on 07/30/2010 7:04:29 PM PDT by Bokababe
Last week's International Court of Justice decision on Kosovo could have a significant global effect. While there is less there than meets the eye in legal terms, how the ruling is read politically may be quite different.....
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonexaminer.com ...
The world is a churning mess. Righteousness prevails sometimes. Unrighteousness prevails more often these days, it seems.
Strengthen the things that remain. The fight is not over, though we know things will get worse before they get better.
Totally agree and I wish he were President!
I love this man!
“...I wish he were President!”
You and me both. I really like John Bolton. Of all the Politico’s out there running around sounding, or trying to sound Presidential, there is only one that is, and that is John Bolton IMO. He’s got the “damn the torpedoes” attitude we need in a President today.
Stay off my a— pissant. Hunter is retired, and showing no sign of coming back into the game. Keep dreaming if you wish.
This country used to be filled with men like Bolton.
That’s right. Nowadays we have “girly-men” the likes of Romney.
WHy would I ‘get on your a**’? Bolton is one of my favorite guys.
LOL, I figured you’d come back as usual and challenge the bit about Bolton being IMO the only one out there with Hunter. You have in the past.
Good. Glad we agree on Bolton.
If not Prez, Bolton would make a fantastic Scty. of State! He communicates to me through his various TV appearances that he stays on top of the details in international affairs and he was top notch when UN Amb.
I doubt he would be willing to tolerate the inanities of campaigning. He is too focused, too direct, and maybe just too smart to be a presidential candidate.
Bolton was born to be Secretary of State.
Bump! But he'd probably fire most of the State Department staff -- which would be a good thing!
Sec of State: John R. Bolton / Sec of Defense: Duncan Hunter Sr / Dept of Homeland Sec: Uncle Ted Nugent (love the Nuge too)
This would be a group of "get 'r done" guys!!!
AS usual he hits the nail on the head.
Kosovo is a perversion of justice.
Independently of the fact that, according to the Yugoslav Constitution of February 21, 1974, Kosovo had the same rights as those of the republics the independence of which has been recognized since January 1992, Mr Bolton seems to have forgotten that his own nation, the United States, as well as contemporary Serbia which claims Kosovo as its own but never exercised sovereign rights over that country, are both products of a separatism of their own.
Ever heard of the Fourth of July 1776? I wasn’t there, but some do remember what happened then, and it looked pretty much like the “dangerous precedent” Mr Bolton seems to be referring to.
The difference being that the Kosovars had been invaded —and massacred— in October 1912 by Serbia, which refused to annex them before merging into what would be later called Yugoslavia, because that would have meant giving them equal rights.
The Kosovars never accepted Serbian domination, nor did they ever regard themselves as Serbian citizens, something which was not originally the case with the colonists: a few years before the Declaration of Independence, the latter had successfully fought the French, as loyal subjects of His Majesty.
Some people have a little more historical perspective than Mr Bolton, and are less prone to applying double standards.
Here is one (note how many neo-colonialists there are among the Partisan Political Operatives of the left now —don’t be mistaken: that’s because the liberator of Kosovo was mainly the US):
http://greatersurbiton.wordpress.com
The ICJ ruling - a blow for freedom
by Marko Attila Hoare, 29 July 2010
The ICJ ruling on Kosovo sets a precedent that is dangerous only for tyrants and ethnic cleansers
The bile of the new champions of colonialism was flowing freely last week after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Kosovos declaration of independence did not violate international law. “The New York Times”s Dan Bilefsky referred opaquely to legal experts and analysts who warned that the ruling could be seized upon by secessionist movements as a pretext to declare independence in territories as diverse as Northern Cyprus, Somaliland, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Transnistria and the Basque region.
The legal experts and analysts in question remain conveniently unnamed, though they are clearly not very expert, since if they were, they would presumably have known that most of those territories have already declared independence. “The Guardian”s Simon Tisdall claimed that the ICJs ruling would be welcomed by separatists, secessionists and splittists from Taiwan, Xinjiang and Somaliland to Sri Lanka, Georgia and the West Country, leading one to wonder what the difference is between a separatist, a secessionist and a splittist.
Lets get this straight. No democratic state has anything to fear from separatism, and anyone who does fear separatism is no democrat. I am English and British, and I do not particularly want the United Kingdom to break up. But I am not exactly shaking in fear at the prospect of the ICJs ruling encouraging the Scots, Welsh or Northern Irish to break away. And if any of these peoples were to secede, Id wish them well, because I am a democrat, not a national chauvinist.
The Cassandras bewailing the ICJs ruling are simply expressing a traditional colonialist mind-set, which sees it as the natural order of things for powerful, predatory nations to keep enslaved smaller, weaker ones, and an enormous affront if the latter should be unwilling to bow down and kiss the jackboots of their unwanted masters. Cant those uppity natives learn their place ?!
The Western democratic order, and indeed the international order as a whole, is founded upon national separatism. The worlds most powerful state and democracy, the United States of America, was of course born from a separatist (or possibly a secessionist or splittist) revolt and unilateral declaration of independence from the British empire. The American separatist revolt was sparked by resistance to British-imposed taxes without representation, which seems a less serious grievance than the sort of mass murder and ethnic cleansing to which the Kosovo Albanians were subjected by Serbia.
Most European states at one time or another seceded from a larger entity: roughly in chronological order, these have been
Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Portugal, Greece, Belgium, Luxemburg, Serbia, Montenegro, Romania, Norway, Bulgaria, Albania, Poland, Finland, Czechoslovakia, Ireland, Iceland, Cyprus, Malta, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Belarus, Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Montenegro (for the second time).
No doubt Northern Cyprus, Somaliland, Transnistria etc. drew some inspiration from this long separatist success story.
Serbia itself has a proud separatist tradition, going back at least as far as the First Serbian Uprising of 1804, when the separatist leader Karadjordje Petrovic attempted to bring about the countrys unilateral secession from the Ottoman Empire. Some might argue that the eventual international acceptance of Serbias independence in 1878 was not unilateral, since it was brought about by the Treaty of Berlin to which the Ottoman Empire was a signatory. But this is disingenuous, since the Ottomans only accepted Serbias independence after they had not for the first time been brutally crushed in war by Russia. Undoubtedly, were Serbia to be subjected to the sort of external violent coercion to which the Ottoman Empire was repeatedly subjected by the European powers during the nineteenth century, it would rapidly accept Kosovos independence.
Let us not pretend that bilateral or multilateral declarations of independence hold the moral high ground vis-a-vis unilateral ones they simply reflect a difference balance in power politics.
As an independent state from 1878, Serbia left the ranks of the unfree nations and joined the predators, brutally conquering present-day Kosovo and Macedonia in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, thereby flagrantly violating the right of the Albanian and Macedonian peoples to determine their own future in the manner that the people of Serbia already had. In 1918, Serbia became hegemon of the mini-empire of Yugoslavia. So separatist became a dirty word for Serbian nationalists who, in their craving to rule over foreign lands and peoples, conveniently forgot how their own national state had come into being.
Nevertheless, it was Serbia under the leadership of Slobodan Milosevic whose policy of seceding from Yugoslavia from 1990 resulted in the break-up of that multinational state: Serbias new constitution of September 1990 declared the
sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity of the Republic of Serbia
nearly a year before Croatia and Slovenia declared independence from Yugoslavia. This would have been less problematic if Milosevics Serbia had not sought to take large slices of neighbouring republics with it as it set about asserting its own, Serbian national sovereignty from the former multinational Yugoslav federation.
So, plenty of precedents from which separatists, secessionists, splittists and the like could have drawn inspiration, long before the ICJs ruling on Kosovo.
Why, then, the international disquiet at the verdict ?
The simple answer is that the disquiet is felt by brutal or undemocratic states that oppress their own subject peoples, and wish to continue to do so without fear that their disgraceful behaviour might eventually result in territorial loss.
Thus, among the states that oppose Kosovos independence are China, Iran, Sudan, Morocco, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and India, all of them brutally oppressing subject peoples or territories and/or attempting to hold on to ill-gotten conquests Xinjiang, Tibet, the Ahwazi Arabs, Darfur, Western Sahara, the Tamils, West Papua, Kashmir, etc.
At a more moderate level, Spain opposes Kosovos independence because it fears a precedent that Catalonia or the Basque Country could follow. Spain is a democracy, but a flawed one; its unwillingness to recognise the right to self-determination of the Catalans and Basques echoes the policy pursued by the dictator Francisco Franco, who brutally suppressed Catalan and Basque autonomy and culture following his victory in the Spanish Civil War. Likewise, Romania and Slovakia are crude and immature new democracies with ruling elites that mistreat their Hungarian minorities and identify with Serbia on an anti-minority basis.
Of course, states such as these will not be happy that an oppressed territory like Kosovo has succeeded in breaking away from its colonial master. But this is an additional reason for democrats to celebrate the ICJs decision: it should serve as a warning to states that oppress subject peoples or territories, that the international communitys tolerance of their bad behaviour and support for their territorial integrity may have its limits.
Thus, a tyrannical state cannot necessarily brutally oppress a subject people, then bleat sanctimoniously about international law and territorial integrity when its oppression spawns a separatist movement that wins international acceptance: it may find that international law will not uphold its territorial integrity. Serbias loss of Kosovo should serve as an example to all such states.
Of course, there are states, such as Georgia and Cyprus, whose fear of territorial loss is legitimate. But in this case, the problem they are facing is not separatism so much as foreign aggression and territorial conquest.
The secession of Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia was really the so-far-successful attempt by Georgias colonial master Russia to punish Georgia for its move toward independence, and exert continued control over it, by breaking off bits of its territory. Georgia was the state that was seeking national independence from the Soviet Union and Russian domination while the Abkhazian and South Ossetian separatists were the ones wanting to remain subject to the colonial master. In Abkhazia, it was the ethnic Georgians who formed a large plurality of the population, being two and a half times more numerous than the ethnic Abkhaz - any genuinely democratic plebiscite carried out before the massive Russian-backed ethnic cleansing of the 1990s would most likely have resulted in Abkhazia voting to remain in Georgia. South Ossetia might have a better demographic case for independence, though not as strong as the larger and more populous republic of North Ossetia in Russia, whose independence, should it ever be declared, Moscow is unlikely to recognise.
In the case of Northern Cyprus, the foreign aggression was more blatant still: there was no Northern Cyprus until Turkey invaded the island of Cyprus in 1974, conquered over a third of it, expelled the Greek population and created an artificial ethnic-Turkish majority there. It is above all because of the reality of Russian and Turkish aggression against, and ethnic cleansing of, smaller and weaker peoples, that Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Northern Cyprus should not be treated as equivalent to Kosovo.
Milorad Dodik, the prime minister of Bosnias Serb Republic (Republika Srpska RS), has suggested that the ICJs ruling on Kosovo opens the door to the potential secession of RS. RS is not an real country, but an entity created by genocide and massive ethnic cleansing; anyone who equates it with Kosovo is at best an ignoramus and at worst a moral idiot. Nevertheless, we sincerely hope that the RS leadership will be inspired by the Kosovo precedent and attempt to secede. Such an attempt would inevitably end in failure, and provide an opportunity for the Bosnians and the Western alliance to abolish RS, or at least massively reduce its autonomy vis-a-vis the central Bosnian state, thereby rescuing Bosnia-Herzegovina from its current crisis and improving the prospects for long-term Balkan stability.
Finally, if the ICJs ruling on Kosovo really does inspire other unfree peoples to fight harder for their freedom, so much the better. As the US struggle for independence inspired fighters for national independence throughout the world during the nineteenth century, so may Kosovos example do so in the twenty-first. May the tyrants and ethnic cleansers tremble, may the empires fall and may there be many more Kosovos to come.
Yugoslav Constitution? = also a perversion—a Communist rigged document.
The kimd that hypocrites like you defer to.
Kosovo is Serbian and will always be Serbian. Every nation has its traitors including Serbia.
In your denseness you equate “liberal Serbians” with respecting the rights of neighboring peoples. Nobody ever denied the Shiptars their rights. As long as these rights are reciprocal a concept which Shiptars have never adhered to. They are muslim criminals after all.
But they do not include illegally seizing and occupying a land that they do not have historic rights to. Albanian alliance with tyrants - Turks and Nazis - allow them no rights to this land.
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