Vladimir Putin and Chris Hayes are wrong
Isidora Kranjcevic of the Belgrade daily Blic asked me this morning to comment on Russian President Putin’s remark:
Generally, I believe that only residents of a given country who have the freedom of will and are in complete safety can and should determine their future. If this right was granted to the Albanians in Kosovo, if this was made possible in many different parts of the world, then nobody has ruled out the right of nations to self-determination, which, as far as I know, is fixed by several UN documents.
What is Putin trying to do here?
He is trying to justify the holding of a referendum in Crimea on whether to join Russia, which its parliament has now been scheduled for March 16. His support for self-determination in Crimea contradicts Russia’s position on Serbia’s sovereignty over Kosovo, and on sovereignty in general. But Moscow is not known for consistency. I don’t really anticipate that it will support self-determination for Kosovo, or accept that it has occurred.
The cases of Kosovo and Crimea are of course distinct. No one has ethnically cleansed Russians from Crimea or even mistreated them en masse. To the contrary, Russians in Crimea at the moment are mistreating Ukrainians, including Ukrainian soldiers, and Tatars, who mostly support Kiev. Crimea is an autonomous province. Kosovo’s autonomy was revoked. Serbia lost a war over Kosovo, after which the UN administered it for almost a decade, during which time it set up provisional institutions of self-governance in accordance with Security Council resolution 1244. During that time, Belgrade did nothing to repair the problems the Milosevic regime had caused. Nothing comparable to this has occurred in Crimea.
In short: Kiev’s relationship to Crimea is not even remotely analogous to Belgrade’s relationship with Kosovo. Putin is wrong. He is living in a world his own propaganda machine creates to justify the takeover of Crimea and its re-incorporation into Russia.
Chris Hayes on MSNBC last night trashed the idea that energy has anything to do with Putin’s behavior:
I beg to differ. Energy revenue has a great deal to do with Putin’s sense of invulnerability and his boldness in challenging the West in Crimea and Ukraine generally. Half of the Russian Federation’s revenues come from oil and gas. Oil for several years has hovered around $100/barrel. This is far above production costs in most of the world and has provided Moscow with the means to spend $51 billion on the Sochi Olympics as well as the refitting of the Russian army that now controls Ukraine.
The question is whether anything the US does can affect oil and gas supplies and prices enough to affect Putin’s thinking. The answer for natural gas is “yes,” as detailed in the New York Times this morning. It is an even louder “yes” for oil, which has a global price with only minor source and quality variations because it is readily traded internationally. Oil prices often anticipate events, so even something like the Keystone pipeline that won’t come online for years may affect prices. And US production is already climbing sharply because of fracking.
I share the concerns of those who worry about the environmental impacts of fracking and about global warming. But those concerns do not justify Chris Hayes denigrating the argument that US energy policy and diplomacy can help counter Russian aggression against Crimea. Chris seems more anxious to get a laugh out of the notion that Republicans always come up with the same answers no matter what the problem rather than searching for appropriate responses to Putin’s land-grab in Crimea, wherever they may be found. Energy is one of the responses, perhaps the most effective one.
Vladimir Putin and Chris Hayes are both wrong. Putin about Crimea’s self-determination, Hayes about the role of energy in resolving the Ukraine crisis.
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Meanwhile, back in Belgrade, the government says it is asking the Security Council to call an emergency session to deal with its problems with Kosovo: Kosovo has stated it intends to restructure its self-defense force into an army (KFor: it’s an internal affair and we have nothing to do with it) and is holding a Kosovo Serb politician in pretrial detention in Prishtina, rather than in Kosovo Mitrovica (where crowds could usefully gather and block traffic and maybe get their pictures in the papers.)
Formal charges have not been made, or made public, but this has to involve the Pogrom of February 3-4 2000, the first one, where the Serb Bridge Watchers led by said politician expelled more than 11,000 Albanian inhabitants from majority-Serbian areas – after the end of the war – as French troops looked the other way. http://vedatxhymshiti.blogspot.com/2013/02/mitrovica-on-anniversary-of-expulsion.html
If the Serbs do get their SC meeting, it will be interesting to listen to the Russians and the Americans discuss in scholarly tones the differences between Kosovo’s long and painful road to self-determination and international recognition and the instantaneous acceptance Russia is planning to offer Crimea’s application to join the Russian Federation. China’s remarks will also be interesting – they’ve been known to talk before (if not at the SC) about taking back the Russian East once the country is stronger. The Chinese population there is rising, and Russia’s is falling, making a referendum an interesting idea for the future.
You are right Daniel, Putin is not well known for consistency, but neither you are. Crimea should stay within Ukraine as much as Kosovo should have stayed within Serbia. No wonder why Ukraine never recognized Kosovo.
However, if Kosovo’s UDI was not against international law, how the Crimea’s declaration of independence from Ukraine (pending results of referendum) would violate international law?
If we look from that perspective, Crimea has a stronger case assuming people will vote for Independence.
I had a great sympathy for Ukrainian opposition for ousting president (Yanukovich reminded me of Milosevic) but after leaked conversation between Catherine Ashton and Estonian foreign minister, not anymore. Also, listening those Ukrainian ultra right groups (patrolling Kiev with baseball bats) blaming everything on Russians and Jews makes me sick.
We in Yugoslavia had a best years of our lives during cold war era. Maybe is coming again?
The matter of regions declaring independence was discussed exhaustively at the ICJ in the case brought by Serbia against Kosovo, where the Finnish advocate provided a review of the Åland Islands case, the first heard by the League of Nations’ World Court. (By coincidence, that problem also arose out of the settlement of the Crimean War.)
The Court ruled that a people has the right to a high degree of autonomy, but could not declare independence or join another country simply by declaring in a referendum that it desired to do so. Kosovo had in fact held such a vote (after its autonomy was revoked) and the world had paid no intention. Years of UN resolutions directed at Yugoslavia had insisted that the country improve its treatment of the people there, based on reports of neutral observers, refugees had been leaving the country even before the fighting started – the two cases are a lesson in contrasts rather than being indistinguishable.
Amer, you had autonomy but you wanted republic in order to secede from Yugoslavia and join Albania. And that happened much before Milosevic came to power.
You can write your fairy tales somewhere else.
Before Serbian and Croatian nationalism exploded Azem Vlasi, recognising the danger just before the wars started, was asking, and chanting with many Albanians from Kosovo “we are yugoslavs too”, for the Kosovo Albanians to be recognised as Yugoslavs. Serbian nationalists were offended by idea that Albanians (lower nation) can have such an idea. After all they are genetic waste of the Balkans as the father of the nation, Dobrica Cosic, would state in his pamphlets or so called books. You can go and write your fairy tales somewhere else along with accompanying 20 years of indoctrinations by morons in a form of Serbian political mutant and monster composed of nationalism/communism/clerical fascism.
My friend I was doing my military service in 1986, I remember some of the fellow solders from Kosovo refused to salute Yugoslav flag.