The Kosovo precedent by Krassimir KANEV Recognition of Kosovo’s independence announced by the Kosovo parliament on 17 February 2008 by Serbia is likely to set an important precedent in international relations and international law. At first glance, there is nothing more natural than the Kosovars - a people with a different religion, language, and lifestyle from their Serbian neighbours; a people which have never in their entire history lived in love and peace with these neighbours; a people which, toward the end of the 1990s, became the object of brutal repressions by the Serbian state, a lot of which were adjudged crimes against humanity - to demand political independence. Again at first glance, it seems illogical for people who do not want to live together to be forced to do so. And since a large section of international law, or as it used to be called, ·the law of nations”, copies the law that is in place between individuals, what could be more natural than peoples living separately when they do not want to live together? Just like individuals do. There is, however, one point where the law of nations would adopt principles of diametrical opposition to the law applicable to people. This is the correlation between the principle of territorial integrity and the principal right of a nation’s self-government. True, the two principles are present in the UN Charter of 1945, and very frontline at that - in Articles 1 and 2 respectively. Moreover, they are in some sort of subordination; but that could be misleading.
States have always adhered to the principle of territorial integrity It dates further back than the principle of nation’s self-government. States have fought recognition of the right of self-government when leading to the formation of an independent state of communities distinguished by any principle within the existing state. Here is what we read in one the reports of the international team of experts appointed at the end of World War I to discuss the status of the Oland Islands in Finland, populated predominantly by Swedes: ·Giving minorities, whether identifying themselves on the basis of religion or language, or to any other parts of the population the right to sever themselves from the community they belong to based on their wish or preference, would mean to destroy the stability within states and introduce anarchy into international life; this would mean supporting a theory incompatible with the idea of a state itself as a geographical and political unit.” 1 OBEKTIV
During the 1960s, the principle of self-government of nations was reformulated into the ·nations’ right to selfgovernment”. At the time, a large majority of UN member states did their best to ensure that exercising this right does not contradict the principle of territorial integrity. When India ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which constitute this right, it made a specific point that this right ·shall only refer to nations under foreign rule, and these words shall not apply to sovereign independent nation-states or parts of a nation or people”. Although only a few Western European countries object to this declaration, it is precisely India’s interpretation that is prevailing among the member states. Therefore, were we to outline the sphere of applicability of the peoples’ right to self-governance, we would not get further than the colonial nations and peoples. Under this right, in the 1950s and 1970s, the majority of these were granted political independence. Outside the former colonies, exercising peoples’ right to self-governance, where not provided for in the national constitutions (as is the case in the former USSR and Yugoslavia),
would only become possible, in the general case, with the consent of the nation within which the severed territory lies When African countries, which had been granted their independence as a result of exercising the peoples’ right to self-governance were faced with secessionist movements, they did not hesitate to reaffirm the principle of territorial integrity over that of self-governance. Even more so, as this was happening amid the heat of decolonisation; for instance, this was the case with the severance of Nigeria from the Republic of Biafra, which had been declared an independent state by the prevailingly Christian people of Igbo. Soon afterwards, in September 1967, at the Kinshasa meeting, African heads of state condemned the severance thereby giving way to Nigeria’s organising the smashing of Biafra in a way, which led to a humanitarian crisis much more terrible than the one in 1999 in Kosovo. As a result of the domination of the territorial integrity principle over the one on self-government, following the end of World War II, an array of ·no man’s land” type of territories emerged whose peoples declared or wished to declare independence, which wishes, however,
Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn or the disgrace of a film fest by Yuliana METODIEVA
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n episode of this biographical film (the great Polish director’s father was shot in Katyn, along with the remaining nearly 30 thousand Polish officers) tells of the following. The academic society of the Krakow University is gathering in the ceremonial hall. The chancellor, deans, and professors state their firm intellectual and civic opposition to the Nazis who want to close this ·antiGerman academic lair”. The year is 1939, and the collaboration between the SS and Stalin’s NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) in Poland is in full swing! Most of the professors are arrested, while those of Jewish origin are sent to Sackhausen. The moral integrity of the aged academics, their gnawed dignity in the face of the double enemy - Germans and Russians, presents an especially painful climax in Wajda’s last film. ...And an especially strong slap in the face of those intellectuals who follow those in power today. In Russia. In Bulgaria. On 17 September 2007 Katyn had its Warsaw premiere at the National Opera. Beside the descendants of the Polish elite massacred on 5 March 1940 in the Katyn forest, there were also Russian human rights activists from the Moscow NGO Memorial. The audience was exalted and bitter. After an almost 60-year taboo on those officers’ slaughter, the truth was finally allowed to surface. Yes, in 1997, Boris Yeltsin passed to Poland the original permission of the Politbureau for the officers’ execution, and, naturally, it bore Stalin’s and Beria’s signatures. In 2005, however, Moscow’s General Prosecutor’s Office aban-
were not recognized. Take the former USSR, for in stance, where there are at least half a dozen such territories - Nagorno-Karabakh, the Pridnestrovie, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Chechnya, and possibly as many in the Northern and Southern Caucasus, as well as Central Asia. The recognition of Kosovo’s independence is, undoubtedly, a precedent in international relations and international law as regards the approbation of the principle of self-governance over the one of territorial integrity. The states which recognised Kosovo hurriedly added that they are only doing so as an exception, in this particular, unique situation, and this should not set a precedent. They see the uniqueness in the deep conflict between the Serbian state and the Kosovars in the late 1990s, which made their life impossible within Serbia. However, other peoples who fail to see the uniqueness of Kosovo’s situation over their own will be unlikely to take these statements seriously.
doned the 14-year investigation of the ·Katyn case” due to expiry of legal prescription. The Prosecutor’s Office confronted Poland’s position that this was a genocide for which there is no legal prescription. In May 2007, the Moscow City Court of Putin’s Russia refused rehabilitation to the Katyn victims. The conclusion was that they had become victim of ·abuse of trust” and ·excess of granted powers”... On 7 and 11 March 2008, within the Sofia Film Fest, Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn had two screenings. The air in Lumiere, the fest’s primary screening hall, was still thick with the greasy words of another film director and guest of honour to the festival, Nikita Mikhalkov, who had just received several awards - the Sofia Film Fest Award, the Sofia Municipality Award, and the icon of Christ the Pantocrator (the Omnipotent) from the Union of Bulgarian Filmmakers for his unique contribution to cinema. The bootlicker hosts and journalists, the Minister of Culture, and all sorts of cinema fans following Vladimir Putin’s favourite film director have nothing to do with the others, the true admirers of Andrzej Wajda, of that person who, in the dark years of brutal communism, would give us a breath of fresh air with shattering messages against communism and Nazism. The Russian state continues to brainwash claiming that Katyn is a fake. In March 2008, the Sofia Film Fest invited Wajda, but failed to give him an award. His film was sort of slipped last minute into the programme. A disgrace for Bulgaria which, too, has its 30 thousand victims of the communist terror that started on 9 September 1944. There is, however, a difference: ours were murdered by our own country.
The conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, and especially Chechnya were by no means less bloody, while for the peoples inhabiting these territories it would seem hard to accept that they are to remain part of states which they see, just like the Kosovars, as their oppressors. Even so, the Kosovo precedent demonstrates a progressive development in international law and international relations. In this area this would be equal to recognition and legalisation of divorce in human relationships - a measure which, with all its possible negative effects, makes law follow the natural logic of life, reaffirms human autonomy, and releases the weak from dependency and oppression. It is very likely that the international order will undergo further concussions as a result of this precedent. Still, let us hope that, in the end, this will be to the benefit of the people and such of their alliances as they wish to willingly partake in. OBEKTIV 2