South Ossetia's Lessons

This article comes to us thanks to The Kurdish Globe:

Plaything of the gods

The Guardian

South Ossetia is a scrap of land with only a few thousand inhabitants.

As it tries to break away from its neighbour Georgia, independence movements around the world wonder what its fate will mean for them. But is it just a pawn in a larger political game? Tim Judah, who has just visited the region, reports Even before the fighting that claimed so many lives, Tskhinvali, the putative capital of South Ossetia, was a pretty miserable place. Stalin Street (really) was its one and only proper thoroughfare; it had a tiny market with a couple of old women selling vegetables and batteries, and billboards celebrating eternal Ossetian-Russian friendship. A couple of miles away, bored Georgians soldiers sat keeping warm around a brazier.

When I visited it a few months ago, South Ossetia seemed like the end of the world, not the place that would spark a new war in the Caucasus. It was one of the four so-called "frozen conflicts" of the former Soviet Union and, as it had been for years, still very much in the deep freeze.

The mood was not much different in Sokhumi, the capital of Abkhazia, to the west. This city by the Black Sea, much of which remains in ruins from the war of the early 1990s, was once the holiday playground of the Soviet elite. Now old men played chess under gently swaying palms in front of wrecked hotels, and I visited a memorial for the Abkhaz soldiers who had died fighting the Georgians. At the Inguri river, where you crossed from Georgia proper, the Georgians had erected a sculpture of a huge pistol pointing north to Abkhazia - but in a futile gesture the barrel had been tied in a knot.

South Ossetia and Abkhazia both broke away from Georgia in savage fighting when the Soviet Union disintegrated. The other two "frozen conflicts" in this region are Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave wrenched from Azerbaijan, and Transnistria, whose Slav population rebelled against Moldova, whose people and language are closely related to Romania. All are the unhappy legacies of Stalinist map-making, lines drawn in a period when the wishes of people counted for little and the demise of the Soviet Union was beyond imagination. All are unrecognised but exist as de facto states, albeit with support from Russia and, in Nagorno-Karabakh's case, Armenia.

Take South Ossetia, which like Abkhazia had autonomous status within Soviet Georgia. Although many South Ossetians live in Tbilisi and elsewhere in Georgia, its people are really connected in terms of family, kin and language with North Ossetia, which is now in Russia, across the mountains to which it is connected through the Roki tunnel.

Ossetians speak a language related to Persian and believe (truly) that the King Arthur of British myth was actually an Ossetian. I found billboards in Tskhinvali emblazoned with pictures of men dressed as knights in armour celebrating the 17th anniversary of South Ossetia's declaration of independence.

Its population is tiny - somewhere between 22,000, as the Georgians claim, and 70,000, according to the South Ossetians. The numbers vary not least because, as there is no work (and no university) in South Ossetia, many go to Russia and only come home for the holidays.

Even before last week, South Ossetia was hardly a candidate to be a viable state, especially as large swathes of it - as much as a third - were held by the Georgians. Only 800 metres separated the centre of one Georgian-controlled village from Tskhinvali. The Georgians had recently built a brand new cinema and sports complex in that village, and roads and infrastructure were being upgraded.

The head of the Georgian administration for South Ossetia was a burly former military man who had defected from the separatists. He cut little ice in Tskhinvali, where officials scoffed at his notion of striking a deal and making peace with Georgia. Indeed, their plans were rather more ambitious.

"Our aim is unification with North Ossetia," Alan Pliev, the deputy foreign minister of South Ossetia, told me in his broom cupboard of an office. "We don't know if that would be as part of Russia or as a separate united Ossetian state." Juri Dzittsojty, deputy speaker of parliament, says: "I would prefer there to be an independent and united Ossetia, but today it is not possible. It is safer to be with Russia. The main aim of the struggle is to be independent of Georgia."

A few hours' drive away, along the road now cut by Russian troops, the Abkhaz dream was a different one. Their goal is simply to hang on to what they have got. And here's the rub. Before the Abkhaz war of the early 1990s, less than 18% of its population were ethnic Abkhaz. Today, of some 200,000 people, this group still constitutes only 45% of its people, and hundreds of thousands of Georgians who left Abkhazia in the 1990s want to return home. The Abkhaz, who are in firm control of the government and of all levers of power, argue that to allow more of these refugees back than they have already permitted would simply be to turn back the clock and to make the Abkhaz once more a small minority in their own homeland.

In the foreign ministry of the unrecognised republic I waited to see Maxim Guinja, Abkhazia's deputy foreign minister. Then he came out, and before we talked he tidied away some flags in the waiting room. There had just been a meeting in Sokhumi of the leaders of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria.

"We became 18% because of Soviet rule and Russian before that," he explained. Abkhaz were deported to Siberia and Turkey, and Georgians settled here. "My grandfather was put on a train in 1937 with thousands of others, and the next day a train arrived with Georgian settlers. No one returned from Siberia." His dream is that one day hundreds of thousands of Abkhaz - or rather their descendants who fled the Tsarist invasion to Turkey in the late 19th century - will come home. A pipe dream? Maybe, but Guinja said that he had a very clear precedent in mind. Israel did it, so why not Abkhazia?

In the meantime, the Abkhaz have to play gingerly with the Russians, whom they distrust as much the Ossetians trust them. "For Russia, Abkhazia is just a card that can be played," I was told by Leyla Taniya, who runs a thinktank in Sokhumi. "Abkhazia is linked to Russia, and Russia is the only country that actually cooperates with Abkhazia, and today many are afraid this could lead to our political absorption." She wants to correct a "common misunderstanding" in the west: despite its small size, Abkhazia "is not a Russian puppet".

It is easy to comprehend why such a misunderstanding should exist. The Abkhaz, like the South Ossetians, have all been given Russian passports and vote in Russian elections, even though their unrecognised statelets are legally part of Georgia. They use the rouble, their people work and study in Russia and they speak Russian at least as much as Abkhaz or Ossetian. Their elderly receive their pensions from Russia. And, as the last few days have helped demonstrate, without Russian military support, it is doubtful whether the breakaways would still exist.

Yesterday, Abkhazia began a military operation to take back a strategic sliver of territory held by the Georgians within Abkhazia. They could do this because Russian troops had struck far outside Abkhaz territory, routing the Georgian forces. No wonder everyone was so relaxed when I was in Sokhumi. I went to see Stanislav Lakoba, the Abkhaz official in charge of security. Georgia, I put it to him, was pouring 10% of its GDP into its army, was bidding to join Nato, had intensely courted the US and was demanding that Russia pull its so-called peacekeeping troops out of Abkhazia, 14 years after their deployment. "Georgia just screams about it," he said laconically. "It would just mean suicide if they attacked." He obviously knew what he was talking about.

Despite its massive military support for the breakaways, the curious thing is that Russia does not actually want their full secession. It is a case of, "Listen to what I say, not what I do." After battling separatists in Chechnya and beyond for well over a decade, Moscow is afraid of anything that might set a precedent and encourage the break-up of the Russian Federation. It is not the only big power with such concerns: China is nervous about anything that might boost separatist hopes in Tibet or Xinjiang, let alone Taiwan.

This year the argument over breakaways and precedents has reached fever pitch, and the reason for that is Kosovo. On February 17, Kosovo, which has a population of some two million, 90% of whom are ethnic Albanians, declared independence from Serbia. Serbia of course rejects its independence, as does Russia, China and indeed the majority of countries in the world, including Georgia. Twenty out of 27 EU states have recognised it, however, alongside the US and other western countries. But in doing so these 45 states seem to have crossed a legal Rubicon. Until then, the only new states in Europe had been the six republics of the old Yugoslavia, such as Croatia or Bosnia, the 15 former Soviet republics and the Czech and Slovak republics. Kosovo is different. Like the four post-Soviet breakaways, it was a province or part of an existing republic. So, argued Serb leaders, it did not have the same right to independence as the republics did. "Yes, we do," argued the Kosovo Albanians. Their struggle, they argued, was based on the legal right of a people to self-determination - just like the Serbs argued in 1991 when they briefly set up a breakaway republic of Krajina in Croatia.

Quite simply then, in Kosovo as in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two pillars of international law - that is to say, the territorial integrity of states versus self-determination - stand in stark opposition to one another.

Hence Russia's refusal to back Kosovo's independence. "The threat of a disintegrating Russia - comparable to the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 - is still today seen as a very real threat by the Kremlin and the Russian elite," says Pavel Felgenhauer, a leading Russian commentator. "The west is seen today by many in the Russian elite and public as a threatening force that is plotting to tear Russia apart and rob it of its natural resources. By supporting Serbia's right to veto Kosovo's secession, the Kremlin clearly believes that it is defending Russia's undisputed right to sustain its territorial integrity by any means available."

Of course, Russia is interested in its territorial integrity, not Georgia's. By supporting Abkhazia and South Ossetia, it has the means to keep Georgia at its mercy and prevent it from following the pro-western path chosen by its electorate. But beyond that, it has little real interest in the breakaway states. Where the EU has poured billions into the reconstruction of Sarajevo and other Balkan cities ruined by wars of the 1990s, Russia has spent not a kopek in rebuilding Sokhumi or Tskhinvali.

In September, Serbia will ask the General Assembly of the United Nations to ask the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to hand down an advisory opinion on whether Kosovo's declaration of independence was legal or not. If this ever happens, the ruling could have tremendous impact - or not, as the case may be. If Kosovo's 1.8 million people can declare independence and be recognised without the permission of Serbia, then so can Abkhazia or South Ossetia, to say nothing of the Republika Srpska (the Serb part of Bosnia), Iraqi Kurdistan and - who knows? - one day perhaps even Catalonia or the Basque country.

On the other hand, the ICJ could declare that Kosovo's declaration was indeed illegal - and then what? Not much, probably. In 1975, the ICJ ruled that the people of the former Spanish colony of Western Sahara had the right to self-determination. This was disputed by Morocco, which had occupied the country. Now, 34 years later, Morocco, a good friend of the west, is still occupying Western Sahara, most of the population has been driven out and lives in miserable camps in the Algerian Sahara, and the Moroccans have built a wall around the country to keep separatist guerrillas out. No one outside the region cares a hoot about them because, when it comes to these types of conflicts, hypocrisy is everyone's order of the day.

What it comes down to is simple: being in the right place at the right time and having the right friends with the right guns and interests. Precedent, for all of the diplomats' fear of the word, is only part of it. It is where you are on the map and what you can get away with that counts. In 2002, on a trip to Iraqi Kurdistan, I was struck by the way the Kurds' homeland had been carved up as the Ottoman empire collapsed. Few Kurds I met then made any secret of their desire not just to achieve independence from Iraq but also to act as a vanguard that would eventually rally Kurds from Iran, Syria, and Turkey into one large Kurdish state.

I asked one official if the aim of a Kurdish federal unit in Iraq was to provide an example for Kurds in Turkey and so that later they could join together. "Yes," he said. "That's the aim." Then, embarrassed, he added: "But don't write that down." Musa Ali Bakr, the man who was then in charge of refugees in the Kurdish region of Dahuk, explained that if the Iraqi Kurds moved too quickly their neighbours would strangle them by closing the borders. He then summed up what for me then was the Kurdish dilemma, but I now realise is really the dictum of all successful separatists: "If you are sick, you visit the doctor. He prescribes the medicine. You take a spoonful three times a day and eventually you are better, you are free. However, if you drank the whole bottle all at once, it would kill you."

· Tim Judah covers the Balkans for the Economist. He is the author of The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia, and Kosovo: What Everyone Needs to Know, which will be published by Oxford University Press in September.

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Hands Off

This article published at the Media Monitors Network highlights the hypocrisy by the leaders within the international community that one day demand freedom for the Kosovars, the next day they deny that same right to the Kurds and one day later they are back to demanding independence for the Tibetans, here you have it:

"Not You! You!!!"

Uri Avnery

"The world media are shedding tears for the Tibetan people, whose land is taken from them by Chinese settlers. Who cares about the Palestinians, whose land is taken from them by our settlers?"

"Hey! Take your hands off me! Not you! You!!!" - the voice of a young woman in the darkened cinema, an old joke.

"Hey! Take your hands off Tibet!" the international chorus is crying out, "But not from Chechnya! Not from the Basque homeland! And certainly not from Palestine!" And that is not a joke.

LIKE EVERYBODY else, I support the right of the Tibetan people to independence, or at least autonomy. Like everybody else, I condemn the actions of the Chinese government there. But unlike everybody else, I am not ready to join in the demonstrations.

Why? Because I have an uneasy feeling that somebody is washing my brain, that what is going on is an exercise in hypocrisy.

I don't mind a bit of manipulation. After all, it is not by accident that the riots started in Tibet on the eve of the Olympic Games in Beijing. That's alright. A people fighting for their freedom have the right to use any opportunity that presents itself to further their struggle.

I support the Tibetans in spite of it being obvious that the Americans are exploiting the struggle for their own purposes. Clearly, the CIA has planned and organized the riots, and the American media are leading the world-wide campaign. It is a part of the hidden struggle between the US, the reigning super-power, and China, the rising super-power - a new version of the "Great Game" that was played in central Asia in the 19th century by the British Empire and Russia. Tibet is a token in this game.

I am even ready to ignore the fact that the gentle Tibetans have carried out a murderous pogrom against innocent Chinese, killing women and men and burning homes and shops. Such detestable excesses do happen during a liberation struggle.

No, what is really bugging me is the hypocrisy of the world media. They storm and thunder about Tibet. In thousands of editorials and talk-shows they heap curses and invective on the evil China. It seems as if the Tibetans are the only people on earth whose right to independence is being denied by brutal force, that if only Beijing would take its dirty hands off the saffron-robed monks, everything would be alright in this, the best of all possible worlds.

THERE IS no doubt that the Tibetan people are entitled to rule their own country, to nurture their unique culture, to promote their religious institutions and to prevent foreign settlers from submerging them.

But are not the Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria entitled to the same? The inhabitants of Western Sahara, whose territory is occupied by Morocco? The Basques in Spain? The Corsicans off the coast of France? And the list is long.

Why do the world's media adopt one independence struggle, but often cynically ignore another independence struggle? What makes the blood of one Tibetan redder than the blood of a thousand Africans in East Congo?

Again and again I try to find a satisfactory answer to this enigma. In vain.

Immanuel Kant demanded of us: "Act as if the principle by which you act were about to be turned into a universal law of nature." (Being a German philosopher, he expressed it in much more convoluted language.) Does the attitude towards the Tibetan problem conform to this rule? Does it reflect our attitude towards the struggle for independence of all other oppressed peoples?

Not at all.

WHAT, THEN, causes the international media to discriminate between the various liberation struggles that are going on throughout the world?

Here are some of the relevant considerations:

- Do the people seeking independence have an especially exotic culture?

- Are they an attractive people, i.e. "sexy" in the view of the media?

- Is the struggle headed by a charismatic personality who is liked by the media?

- It the oppressing government disliked by the media?

- Does the oppressing government belong to the pro-American camp? This is an important factor, since the United States dominates a large part of the international media, and its news agencies and TV networks largely define the agenda and the terminology of the news coverage.

- Are economic interests involved in the conflict?

- Does the oppressed people have gifted spokespersons, who are able to attract attention and manipulate the media?

FROM THESE points of view, there is nobody like the Tibetans. They enjoy ideal conditions.

Fringed by the Himalayas, they are located in one of the most beautiful landscapes on earth. For centuries, just to get there was an adventure. Their unique religion arouses curiosity and sympathy. Its non-violence is very attractive and elastic enough to cover even the ugliest atrocities, like the recent pogrom. The exiled leader, the Dalai Lama, is a romantic figure, a media rock-star. The Chinese regime is hated by many - by capitalists because it is a Communist dictatorship, by Communists because it has become capitalist. It promotes a crass and ugly materialism, the very opposite of the spiritual Buddhist monks, who spend their time in prayer and meditation.

When China builds a railway to the Tibetan capital over a thousand inhospitable kilometers, the West does not admire the engineering feat, but sees (quite rightly) an iron monster that brings hundreds of thousands of Han-Chinese settlers to the occupied territory.

And of course, China is a rising power, whose economic success threatens America's hegemony in the world. A large part of the ailing American economy already belongs directly or indirectly to China. The huge American Empire is sinking hopelessly into debt, and China may soon be the biggest lender. American manufacturing industry is moving to China, taking millions of jobs with it.

Compared to these factors, what have the Basques, for example, to offer? Like the Tibetans, they inhabit a contiguous territory, most of it in Spain, some of it in France. They, too, are an ancient people with their own language and culture. But these are not exotic and do not attract special notice. No prayer wheels. No robed monks.

The Basques do not have a romantic leader, like Nelson Mandela or the Dalai Lama. The Spanish state, which arose from the ruins of Franco's detested dictatorship, enjoys great popularity around the world. Spain belongs to the European Union, which is more or less in the American camp, sometimes more, sometimes less.

The armed struggle of the Basque underground is abhorred by many and is considered "terrorism", especially after Spain has accorded the Basques a far-reaching autonomy. In these circumstances, the Basques have no chance at all of gaining world support for independence.

The Chechnyans should have been in a better position. They, too, are a separate people, who have for a long time been oppressed by the Czars of the Russian Empire, including Stalin and Putin. But alas, they are Muslims - and in the Western world, Islamophobia now occupies the place that had for centuries been reserved for anti-Semitism. Islam has turned into a synonym for terrorism, it is seen as a religion of blood and murder. Soon it will be revealed that Muslims slaughter Christian children and use their blood for baking Pitta. (In reality it is, of course, the religion of dozens of vastly different peoples, from Indonesia to Morocco and from Kosova to Zanzibar.

The US does not fear Moscow as it fears Beijing. Unlike China, Russia does not look like a country that could dominate the 21st century. The West has no interest in renewing the Cold War, as it has in renewing the Crusades against Islam. The poor Chechnyans, who have no charismatic leader or outstanding spokespersons, have been banished from the headlines. For all the world cares, Putin can hit them as much as he wants, kill thousands and obliterate whole towns.

That does not prevent Putin from supporting the demands of Abkhazia and South Ossetia for separation from Georgia, a country which infuriates Russia.

IF IMMANUEL KANT knew what's going on in Kosova, he would be scratching his head.

The province demanded its independence from Serbia, and I, for one, supported that with all my heart. This is a separate people, with a different culture (Albanian) and its own religion (Islam). After the popular Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, tried to drive them out of their country, the world rose and provided moral and material support for their struggle for independence.

The Albanian Kosovars make up 90% of the citizens of the new state, which has a population of two million. The other 10% are Serbs, who want no part of the new Kosova. They want the areas they live in to be annexed to Serbia. According to Kant's maxim, are they entitled to this?

I would propose a pragmatic moral principle: Every population that inhabits a defined territory and has a clear national character is entitled to independence. A state that wants to keep such a population must see to it that they feel comfortable, that they receive their full rights, enjoy equality and have an autonomy that satisfies their aspirations. In short: that they have no reason to desire separation.

That applies to the French in Canada, the Scots in Britain, the Kurds in Turkey and elsewhere, the various ethnic groups in Africa, the indigenous peoples in Latin America, the Tamils in Sri Lanka and many others. Each has a right to choose between full equality, autonomy and independence.

THIS LEADS us, of course, to the Palestinian issue.

In the competition for the sympathy of the world media, the Palestinians are unlucky. According to all the objective standards, they have a right to full independence, exactly like the Tibetans. They inhabit a defined territory, they are a specific nation, a clear border exists between them and Israel. One must really have a crooked mind to deny these facts.

But the Palestinians are suffering from several cruel strokes of fate: The people that oppress them claim for themselves the crown of ultimate victimhood. The whole world sympathizes with the Israelis because the Jews were the victims of the most horrific crime of the Western world. That creates a strange situation: the oppressor is more popular than the victim. Anyone who supports the Palestinians is automatically suspected of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.

Also, the great majority of the Palestinians are Muslims (nobody pays attention to the Palestinian Christians). Since Islam arouses fear and abhorrence in the West, the Palestinian struggle has automatically become a part of that shapeless, sinister threat, "international terrorism". And since the murders of Yasser Arafat and Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the Palestinians have no particularly impressive leader - neither in Fatah nor in Hamas.

The world media are shedding tears for the Tibetan people, whose land is taken from them by Chinese settlers. Who cares about the Palestinians, whose land is taken from them by our settlers?

In the world-wide tumult about Tibet, the Israeli spokespersons compare themselves - strange as it sounds - to the poor Tibetans, not to the evil Chinese. Many think this quite logical.

If Kant were dug up tomorrow and asked about the Palestinians, he would probably answer: "Give them what you think should be given to everybody, and don't wake me up again to ask silly questions."

A few days ago we published a similar opinion by Michael Collon at the Spanish version of our blog.

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Independence Rights

When you read that a Chinese, or a Serbian or a Sudanese reporters speaks against the right of self determination of the nations without statehood you can easily understand it, they are mouthpieces for governments that are dealing with a people who are doing anything they can to preserve their identity, their culture, their ways.

But when you read an US reporter who shares those backwards views then you start to wonder why US citizens always brag about living in the "land of the free". Have they forgotten they too gained independence from England? Have they forgotten that they promoted and funded so called separatist movements in Texas and California?

Having said that, let us read this article published by The New York Times:

Idea Lab

Independence Daze

By GARY J. BASS
Published: January 6, 2008

At some point early in this new year, President Bush and major European Union leaders are likely to recognize the independence of Kosovo over the furious objections of Serbia and its traditional protector, Russia. Such a decision may have unintended consequences. If Kosovo successfully achieves statehood, Republika Srpska, the Serb entity in Bosnia, will be tempted to follow suit in reprisal, slicing Bosnia almost in half. Meanwhile, Belgium has been gripped by talk about repeating Czechoslovakia’s 1993 “velvet divorce,” with Flemings and Walloons possibly splitting and forming their own little states. What about the claims for the independence of Kurdistan from Iraq or Chechnya from Russia or Transdniestria from Moldova? Referring to two regions of Georgia, President Vladimir Putin of Russia remarked, “If someone believes that Kosovo should be granted full independence as a state, then why should we deny it to the Abkhaz and the South Ossetians?” It’s not a bad question — and it’s sure to bedevil Bush’s successor in the White House.

Who deserves statehood? In the early 21st century, it seems a number of the most time-honored answers to that question are unworkable. Woodrow Wilson famously maintained that nations have a right to self-determination. This corrosive principle was applied to the defeated Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires at the end of World War I (although not the victorious British and French ones). But what defines a nation? Ernest Renan, a 19th-century French philosopher, asked, “Why is Holland a nation, while Hanover and the Grand Duchy of Parma are not?” Is it language, ethnicity, religion, a common political system, territory, size (19th-century liberals thought that some nations, like Sicilians or Bretons, were too small for statehood) or what? Language can’t be the answer: there are perhaps 6,900 languages in the world today, but only 192 states in the United Nations.

Another Wilsonian determinant would be democratic choice: if a group of people votes fairly for self-rule, outsiders should honor their decision. In 1999, the East Timorese voted for independence from Indonesia; in 2011, South Sudan is set to hold a referendum on secession. But honoring plebiscites alone could be setting the bar too low. There are a great many potential “splittists” out there (to use the Chinese government’s derogatory term), from Aceh to Xinjiang; the prospect of achieving independence at the ballot booth could ignite chaos and civil wars if it was dangled in front of all of them. And majority votes for secession could invite the persecution of minorities who remain loyal to the old parent country. A better approach, as some political philosophers suggest, would rest on individual rights and not on collective prerogatives. A group can properly ask for international recognition when it is being oppressed so harshly that self-rule becomes the best method to save lives and liberties. As Allen Buchanan, a Duke University philosopher, has argued, the right to secede is a “remedial right only” — a way of rectifying a wrong. This rule should be taken together with the late John Rawls’s reminder that there is no right to secede when secession entails subjugating another people. Rawls thus denied a Southern right to split off from the United States in 1861, since that course of action perpetuated slavery. These two guidelines would help insulate international political debate from the endless claims and counterclaims of nationalist rhetoric.

A human rights standard means that Scots, Québécois and Basques don’t have much of a claim to break away from stable, prosperous, liberal democracies. Guarantees of individual rights or local self-government should suffice. Conversely, the Kurds — divided and abused in Syria, Turkey, Iran and Iraq — have a more urgent case for statehood. As for Kosovo, Slobodan Milosevic relinquished Serbia’s claim to authority by having the province stripped of its autonomy and later crushing its civilians. Even so, to earn international recognition, the Kosovar Albanians must stop menacing their Serb minority.

Whatever the proper standard for secession might be, the next president cannot simply improvise. Following the Paris peace conference in 1919, Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy adviser, Col. Edward M. House, reflected: “It was the gladdest and yet, in some ways, the maddest movement in history. In the endeavor to be free everything else was overlooked.” Without clear standards of justification, Western approval for Kosovo’s statehood could make it even harder to persuade the recalcitrant Sudanese government to allow joint U.N.-African Union peacekeepers to deploy effectively in Darfur, lest a protected Darfur one day seek independence, too. The costs of fogginess are too high, and we aren’t the ones who pay them.

Gary J. Bass is a Princeton professor and the author of “Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention,” which will be published next summer by Knopf.

Hold your horses Gary, Spain may be considered a democratic state, but let us remember that the Basques have suffered political apartheid, its language and cultural expressions have been suffocated, laws of exception have been created for use only against Basque political prisoners, torture is widespread against Basque activists and death squads have been deployed to bring violence to the civilian population.

If Serbia relinquished its rights over Kosovo when Milosevic bombed the region in the 90's, then Spain relinquished its rights over Euskal Herria when Franco bombed Durango and Gernika back in 1937, it's been a long time don't you think? What happened to the first come first served?

Oh yeah, I was forgot to mention that the Basques are divided and abused by Spain and France, like the Kurds.

But beyond all this non sense, why do the Basques have to support their claim to self determination, independence and self rule? When did the USA provided the credentials to support their right to secede from England?

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Attacks Against Maoris and Kurds

As a Basque I feel disheartened when I read news like these.

First New Zealand:

Raid on Maori village opens old wound

by RAY LILLEY, Associated Press Writer
53 minutes ago

Armed police stormed into this quiet village at dawn, threw up roadblocks, shot out truck tires and forced families out of their homes at gunpoint.

The rare show of force, with its dark subscript of terrorism and assassination plans, stunned this placid nation where beat cops don't even carry guns. It has since sparked charges of racism and inflamed historical resentments.

The October raid was part of a nationwide sweep in which 16 people were arrested and authorities said they shut down military-style camps on Maori ancestral lands where both Maori militants and environmental activists trained.

But a bid to charge 12 of the 16 with terrorist activities unraveled on technical grounds, triggering complaints of police heavy-handedness. While the facts remain unclear, the way police handled the case has strained relations with the 540,000-strong Maori community, which makes up 15 percent of the country's population.

What many found most appalling were the tactics used to arrest three of the suspects in Ruatoki and the nearby town of Whakatane, both home to the uncompromising Tuhoe — the only Maori tribe that still rejects the government's sovereignty, 167 years after the British colonized the islands. For some, the raids stirred memories of repression of Maori more than a century ago.

"They came in here like in a B-grade film," said Tame Iti, a well-known Tuhoe activist arrested in the Ruatoki raid. "It was an attack on the community. It was an attack on me as a freedom fighter, and as a sovereign person of this country."

The town of Ruatoki is dotted with small houses, some just sheds, that lie in flat fields by a rural highway on the northern of New Zealand's two main islands.

Iti said police stormed in and held his family including children at gunpoint, firing two shots into tires on his truck to immobilize it.

After the arrests, protests broke out in a dozen towns and cities and abroad in the United States, England and Australia, itself home to 250,000 Maori.

The police actions against the Tuhoe "set back relations between Maori and the government 100 years," said Pita Sharples, co-leader of the Maori Party and a member of parliament.

Authorities said that during 18 months of covert monitoring, they had heard armed activists at the camps — in the forested hills of Te Urewera, the Tuhoe ancestral lands — talking of political assassinations and bombing power plants. The arrested included some white New Zealanders.

In a controversial move, local newspapers published police intercepts of those conversations. In them, the suspects discuss using "sudden" and "brutal" attacks to divide "Aotearoa," the Maori name for New Zealand. The suspects also surmise that foreign terror groups would be blamed, according to the newspaper accounts.

Iti said the camps he was involved in taught bush survival skills and firearms safety, something he has been doing for Tuhoe and other youth for 30 years. He rejected any connection to terrorism.

Iti was charged last year with reckless use of a shotgun and desecrating the New Zealand flag at a Maori ceremony on Tuhoe lands. The charges were dropped after he pointed out that it was an Australian flag and that he had fired into the ground.

The Tuhoe said four weapons were seized in the raids, but Detective Inspector Bruce Good told The Associated Press there were 20, including AK-47 assault rifles, shotguns, rifles and pistols, plus silencers, scopes, ammunition and firearms parts.

The government planned to charge 12 suspects under the Terrorism Suppression Act, enacted following the 9/11 attacks. But Solicitor General David Collins, the country's top justice official, ruled the anti-terror law was too complex to apply in this case.

The arrested, now free on bail, face lesser charges of illegal possession and use of firearms.

The Maori are descendants of Polynesians who migrated to New Zealand about 1,000 years ago.

Tuhoe, the most isolated and poorest of the Maori tribes, are proud that their ancestors refused to sign the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, which created New Zealand under British sovereignty.

The treaty guaranteed the Maori could keep their lands, forests, fisheries and culture — commitments Maori say were broken as European settlers flooded in.

In 1867, colonial troops invaded Tuhoe territory and confiscated much of its land. Twenty years of guerrilla fighting ensued.

The Tuhoe resistance has won wide respect from other Maori, who remain proud of their fierce warrior heritage. Other Maori have been "colonized" by European culture, the Tuhoe say.

Prime Minister Helen Clark said police and the government will need to start building bridges over the divide. They face an uphill battle, particularly with the Tuhoe.

Sharples, the Maori Party co-leader, said invoking the Terrorism Suppression Act has branded all Maori as possible terrorists with international links.

It "could create repercussions on peoples' attitudes to authority and the police in the future," he said. "It's created further mistrust by Maori of the authorities."

Then Turkey:

Turkish planes bomb villages inside northern Iraq

by Shwan Mohammed
Sun Dec 16, 6:16 AM ET

Turkish planes bombed villages inside northern Iraq on Sunday targeting Kurdish rebels in at least the second such operation this month even as Ankara held back from launching a ground assault.

"According to our preliminary reports, eight Turkish warplanes bombed some villages along the border near the Qandil mountains early today," said Jabbar Yawar, spokesman for the Kurdish militia that provides security in northern Iraq.

In Ankara the Turkish army confirmed its warplanes had carried out air strikes on Kurdish rebel targets in northern Iraq.

The planes hit the "regions of Zap, Hakurk and Avasin as well as the Qandil mountains", the general staff said in a statement.

The rebel Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has waged a deadly insurgency in southeastern Turkey since 1984, maintains a network of rear-bases in the rugged Qandil mountains near where the borders of Iraq, Iran and Turkey meet.

The Turkish military said the bombardment began at 1:00 am (2300 GMT) and all its aircraft had returned safely to base by 4:15 am (0215 GMT). Artillery continued to pound the targets once the planes had left.

Turkey's CNN-Turk television said more than 20 planes took part in the air strikes, while the NTV news channel said that some 50 planes had taken part.

The Anatolia news agency said "many F-16 fighter jets", equipped to carry out night-time missions, took off from a base in Diyarbakir province in southeastern Turkey and returned about three hours later.

The military stressed that the raids targeted the PKK, not Iraqi Kurds.

Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Cemil Cicek warned Ankara would carry out more cross-border strikes, if necessary.

"Such operations will continue if need be," the Anatolia news agency quoted him as saying.

"The government, working in harmony with all state institutions, primarily the armed forces, is determined to take this scourge off the country's agenda."

Yawar said the air strikes damaged some bridges connecting villages near the Qandil mountains.

"Some familes are fleeing from the villages attacked today. We have dispatched our border teams to check the casualties and damage," he added.

But Turkish Foreign Minister Ali Babacan denied that any civilian areas had been hit.

"You should trust statements made by the Turkish armed forces," Babacan said in televised remarks.

The air strikes were at least the second Turkish operation against the PKK inside Iraq this month, Turkish helicopters pounded suspected rebel rear-bases on December 1.

The Turkish parliament gave the army authorisation to launch cross-border operations in October but Ankara has so far held back from any ground assault amid strong lobbying by Washington.

The vote by MPs followed a PKK ambush against Turkish troops in which 12 soldiers were killed and eight captured. The captives were released in November.

The United States has expressed concern that any ground incursion might unsettle the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq which is the most stable area of the country.

But Turkey has warned Iraq that it reserves the right to resort to a ground assault.

In recent weeks Turkey has deployed around 100,000 soldiers along its 380-kilometre (235-mile) border with Iraq.

Baghdad has promised to rein in the PKK, and in early November President George W. Bush said Washington would provide Ankara with "real-time" information on rebel movements from its satellites.

The pledge was widely regarded as tacit US approval for Turkey to carry out air strikes and limited cross-border operations against PKK targets.

The United States, like the European Union, blacklists the PKK as a terrorist organization.

More than 37,000 people have been killed since the rebels took up arms against Ankara in 1984, drawing a scorched earth response from the military in the mainly Kurdish southeast.

Kurds straddle the borders between Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey and form significant minorities in all four countries.

When will the nations without statehood get some respect?

When will the colonialist powers evolve and leave behind their blood lust and greed?

When will the mega-nations understand that they need a more organic approach towards their view of the world?

When will the occupying armies stop labeling resistance fighters as "terrorists"?

When will humankind put the crimes committed by the colonialist powers into the correct perspective?

When will nation-states will embrace different cultural expressions and stop killing people over their obsession with one nation, one language and one cultural standard?

When will the voices of those who claim for freedom will be heard?

When will the Maori, the Kurds, the Basques, the Palestinians, the Corsicans, the Catalonians, the Guanche, the Mapuche, the Bretons, the Tibetans and so many others be allowed to be what they are?

When?

~ ~ ~

The Basque and Kurdish Issues

This article appeared at the website called Kurdish Aspect talks about the new political panorama in Turkey and what could represent for the Kurds in that country.

This is how it starts out:

Turkey at the Cross Roads

Kurdishaspect.com - By Handren Delan

Justice and Development Party, known by its initials AK, which gained landslide support from the Turkish voters on the July 22 election, finally forged its government. It is ironic that the new cabinet, unlike the previous one, comprises of members from AK with religious background and the seculars whose social lifestyles greatly differ from religious conservatives. If the composition of the new cabinet is any thing to go by, it must be indicative of the fact that Prime Minister Erdogan intends to make his new government more comprehensive and more representative so that it will re-shape the political map in Turkey.

Prime Minister Erodogan realizes the facts that even though AK received approximately 47 percent of the national vote in the election, the social and political cleavages in Turkey are to be taken into account.

Then, it leads us into familiar ground, the misconception around the world that democracy took hold of Spain in the aftermath of Franco's death:

It is nothing new that some circles in the Turkish political establishment are pre-occupied with the Spanish political structure. Reportedly, Tancu Cillar, the leader of True Path Party (1991-1997), the partner of the collation government led by the Welfare Party at the time, visited Madrid in 1996, and her visit, which received tacit support from the government, was aimed at exploring prospects for the resolution of ethnic conflicts in Turkey based on the post-Francoist political blueprint. Once the idea reached the pan-nationalists and the military circles, they out rightly scoffed at Cillar and other politicians voicing their support to her.

The Spanish model looks impressive for chiefly two reasons: heterogeneity of the Spanish make up; and a post-dictatorship political arrangement which resulted in the establishment of democratic institutions with effective checks and balances on the executive. Compared to other emerging democracies which are part of the third wave of democratization as titled in Samuel Huntington’s thesis, post-Francoist Spain is the most stable and well-established democracy.

Spain, in comparison with her sister western liberal democracies which took decades for the democratic institutions to take hold, made a painful and a hasty transition from authoritarianism into a democracy. Although the transition was painful for the elite who undertook the interval between the transition and consolidation period, it was smooth and quick (1975-1882).

The transition was painful for the elite?

Non of them were ever brought before a judge for their ghastly crimes against humankind, they still call the shots thanks to their political vehicle called Partido Popular.

Anyway, this of course leads to the Basque issue:

The country during the Francoist rein had a constitution with a centralized structure ruling over the periphery. The regions were not accorded with powers necessary to govern their regions, and the peripheral populations lagged behind in terms of economic development. In a more strict sense, the Basque and Catalonia, the two regions with distinct populations in social and cultural realms within the unitary state, were completely left at the mercy of the central government in Madrid.

The Spanish elite who emerged largely in the post-1975 rightly understood the nature of the problem their country faced, namely the ethnic challenge from the periphery.

The dictatorship of Francois like the predecessors of the AK government in Turkey employed the most repressive policy to undermine the groups holding aspirations for a degree of self-rule or outright independence. Identical to the founding fathers of modern Turkey, the Spanish national identity was imposed by repressive means, and as a result the concept of the Spanish-ness seemed less appealing for the population in the periphery.

The nature of the challenge the post-François elite encountered were twofold: on one hand, they had to retain the integrity of their unitary state; and on the other they had to build a cohesive national discourse which could encompass all population living within the Spanish territory, regardless of sectarian or ethnic background. In particular, the Basque region spelled a major challenge to the Post-Franco rulers since the secession of the region from Madrid would have had a serious repercussion for Spain and France, which has a significant Basque population. The Basques in France have their own grievances against Paris which almost terrorized and vanished their culture since the time aggressive nation-building was aggressively pursued by Napoleon, a post- France revolutionary leader, and in it’s aftermath in the 19th Century.

The underlying and far-reaching impact of the Basque secession would affect other national state borders Europe-wide beyond the borders of France and Spain. In other words, the fragmentation of the country along ethnic fault lines, to an extent, could have been a blueprint for other minorities living within national states in Europe. The daunting task in the years that followed 1975 was the writing of a new constitution which could introduce a new concept of citizenship and the recognition of nationalities with distinct cultural and social characteristics.

Obviously, the issue of national minorities is not simply confined to Spain, but to most countries that made transitions into a democracy. Naturally, countries in transition from authoritarian systems into democratic forms of governance have a tough time passing through uncertainties. The role that the ruling elite play during the transitional era is vital. According to the studies conducted on the transitional countries in the post-Cold War Eastern Europe, there are three benchmarks which make the transition successful: cohesive leadership with ability to compromise; a vibrant economic structure; and decentralization of power in the societies with heterogeneous composition. Aside from cited benchmarks, in some cases, the charisma of a leader matters. For instance, the role Vaclav Havel played during the transition in the Czeech Republic significantly helped in bringing together the main political factions in the country and built a coherent national the consensus in aftermath of the secession of Slovakia. It is worthwhile to note that transitions do not lead to full-fledged democracies.

That last paragraph is what really applies to Spain, not the rosy outlook previously described. But what is must important, it details the real reason why the European Community turns a deaf ear towards the plea by the Basque society to its self determination. Yes, there is a new European map, one that contains new countries like Latvia, Slovakia, Macedonia and soon Kosovo. But the reality is that all these new countries have reshaped the map of the other Europe, the one that for a few decades was behind the Iron Curtain, but to allow for the Basque Country (or Catalunya, or Scotland, or Corsica for that matter) to break free would be a direct hit to the real Europe, the one conformed by the powerful mega-states, the one made up by old colonialist powers, the one that counts to the international community. Therein lies the double standard applied against the nations in Western Europe that long for statehood and international recognition, trapped withing the mega-states that control the European Community, an institution that ironically is supposed to encompass not the European states but the European peoples.

So finally, the author ties things up with the possible consequences for the Kurdish plea:

The smartest move taken by DTP (Democratic Society Party) was to escape from the 10 percent threshold regarded as a constitutional trap since early 1970s.

The members of DTP who fought in elections as independents landed the party in the Grand Assembly with 26 lawmakers. It is the first time since the inception of Republic that a party with particular Kurdish affiliation has presence in the Turkish Grand Assembly. The DTP must calculate carefully its policy options within a parliament with critical divisions between the forces of moderation and change, and forces with a mindset to maintain the status quo. The AK with significant majority in the Parliament still need the support of other parties for basically two reasons: the passage of certain legislations, according to the constitution, must enjoy an overall majority for which the support of at least 20 lawmakers is a must; and the seriousness of the current government to show that it’s policies enjoy wide support from forces in parliament other than the AK. DTP‘s support serves both purposes for government.

If Kurdish parliamentarians are keen to be a relevant force in parliament, they should make it clear which aspect of political spectrum they side with. The early indications do not paint an optimistic picture.

They already made a strategic error in not supporting Gul, AK’s presidential candidate and now president. Their abstaining vote does not serve any purpose in the long run. It is of the paramount importance for them to increase their political and diplomatic leverage with the ruling elite. Sticking to impractical policies renders them completely irrelevant. Given the present Turkish political context, the Kurdish interests, for the first time since the foundation of Republic, clearly lie with the policies of the government. There is enough room for the DTP to become the most relevant force in the newly emerged political setting.

Raising premature demands at this stage does not serve Kurdish long term interests. The representative of northern Kurdistan must with all subtlety weigh time and space for the AK to further institutionalize its political agenda: broadening of democratic reforms and consolidation of the democratic institutions.

Pragmatism based on long term visions must guide our brethren Kurds in Turkey. Northern Kurdistan is a sure winner of the consolidation of democratic institutions in the country. It will be a litmus test for DTP as an institutionalized party now, whether it advances the Kurdish interests or fail in this historic juncture.

Yes indeed, these last few paragraphs sound awfully familiar, they sum up the way the big bosses at the PNV (Basque Nationalist Party) see things. Pragmatism is what keeps the Basque people divided in three different political entities, without an unified voice, without having their real demands heard in fear of making someone uncomfortable.

The result is there for all of us to see, Madrid continues to erode the political and social life of the Basque people refusing to resolve the problem knowing that Europe is all too happy to keep thing the way they are as spelled previously in this very same article.

Let us hope that the Kurds will learn from this lesson.

~ ~ ~

One More Albanian Nation

The note you are about to read is a perfect example of just how sick and twisted international politics really are.

It tells us about the decision by the UN to go ahead and provide the Albanians with a second nation, since Albania was not enough apparently.

The note by Slobodan Lekic appeared at Yahoo News, it is called "Other Separatists Buoyed by Kosovo Push" and it starts out like this:

From the jungles of Indonesia to Spain's Basque country, separatists of the world are drawing hope from the approach of U.N.-approved independence of Kosovo.

"The Kosovo precedent will be important for us," said Igor Smirnov, leader of the Trans-Dniester region that seeks to break away from Moldova. He maintains that his tiny enclave has an even better case for independence than Kosovo.

Another hopeful Kosovo-watcher is Iraqi Kurdistan. "It's important that Kosovo achieves independence through a U.N. Security Council resolution because that will establish a legal principle which will also some day apply to Kurdistan," said Mahmoud Othman, a senior Kurdish member of the Iraqi parliament.

So far so good, but then things start to turn for the worst:

The United States and European Union, which are backing a U.N. plan to grant "supervised independence" to the predominantly ethnic Albanian province of Serbia, dismiss suggestions that it would encourage separatist movements elsewhere.

Excuse me?

What did I miss here?

Let me start by saying that is quite appalling that the USA and the EU have the gall to dismiss what they call "separatist movements elsewhere". For Christ sake, they are about to provide the Albanians with a second nation just like that, out of the blue, but they refuse to acknowledge the legitimate demand by other nations to their own sovereignty?

Does Europe really need a second Albanian state? I mean, lets be honest, the first one is not faring that well and at least it has a coast line, the new one is landlocked besides being tiny and sadly underdeveloped.

How can the Europeans thinks that a second Albanian state is a good thing while at the same time openly stating that a Basque state, or a Scottish state, or a Corsican state are not needed.

And how come the Albanians can be called ethnic Albanians but according to the extreme right in the USA and other parts of the world if the Basques or the Sami claim to be an ethnic group they are labeled racists?

And so it is that the Albanians are different from the Serbians, but the Basques are not different from the Spaniards, how inconsistent don't you think?

Then the article goes on telling us about how Russia and of course Serbia, oppose the creation of this new Albanian state:

But the plan is strongly opposed by Serbia and Russia, which will settle at most for wide local autonomy.

Russian President Vladimir Putin warned in February that independence for Kosovo would be taken as a precedent by others, including pro-Russian breakaway provinces in the ex-Soviet republics of Georgia and Moldova.

This issue has become a major irritant in the already strained relations between the West and a resurgent Russia.

The latest attempt to defuse tensions foundered this week after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Putin failed to find common ground. Kosovo also figures in Russia's wider dispute with the EU, jeopardizing plans to create a "strategic partnership" between Moscow and Brussels.

But wait, there is more, check out this paragraph by this Finnish gentleman:

The author of the Kosovo plan, former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, said he did not believe a precedent would be set by granting the province independence. "No two problem areas are the same," he said.

How so?

How come Kosovo and Euskal Herria are not the same? Could he be more explicit please?

The author of the article provides an answer for double faced Ahtisaari:

But in some of the four dozen territories around the world aspiring to break free, Kosovo's future looks set to have far-reaching effects — especially if separation is engineered through a Security Council resolution.

"Kosovo's independence would certainly have broad and destabilizing consequences for many other secessionist conflicts," warns Bruno Coppieters, head of the Political Sciences Department at Brussels Free University.

In Indonesia, it could have a powerful impact on the two separatist-minded provinces of Aceh and West Papua, said Damien Kingsbury, a key adviser to the separatist Free Aceh Movement.

Indonesia, which has already lost East Timor, "is always sensitive about issues affecting territorial integrity, so it will be very worried," Kingsbury said.

The U.S. and EU insist Kosovo is a special case because it has been a ward of the international community since a U.N. administration was set up in 1999. That followed a brief aerial war during which NATO ejected Serb forces accused of mounting a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the 2 million Albanian inhabitants.

Oh yes, and then the fail to mention the ethnic cleansing of Serbians and Macedonians carried out by the ethnic Albanian KLA/NLA.

Now check out this Daniel Fried idiot being just plain fascitious:

"A new Security Council resolution would clearly specify that this was a unique case not applicable to other regions," Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried said in a recent interview.

Fried said the Bush administration intends to sponsor the new resolution, based on Ahtisaari's plan. "Kosovo will be independent one way or the other," he said.

What he is saying is, the world will do whatever the USA says, hey, the Albanian Americans are paying me good money to say this.

Enter the European Union:

While the European Union also insists Kosovo is no precedent, some of its member states have their own restive regions to contend with — Catalonia and the Basque country in Spain, Flanders in Belgium, Hungarian nationalists in Slovakia and Cyprus' breakaway Turkish Republic.

Hold your wild horses European Union.

Kosovo is not a precedent?

Are Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bosnia, Slovenia, Macedonia and Montenegro a precedent?

Why is Europe being so blind about what just happened in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland?

Why nothing seems to be a precedent for the hopes of self determination of the Basques, Catalans, Corsicans and Britons among others?

Well, according to the article, Basque and Kurds have something to say about it:

A parliamentary spokesman for the Basque Nationalist Party, the main party in the regional government of northern Spain's Basque region, sees the Kosovo plan as "a very positive development."

"We think this could be a very good precedent, and someday we could aspire to something similar," said Josu Erkoreka.

Othman, the Kurd, said it is inaccurate to argue Kosovo is somehow special.

"Just like Kosovo, Iraqi Kurdistan has also been under international protection (since the 1991 Gulf War). There is no difference," he said in a telephone interview from Baghdad.

Any move by Iraq's Kurdish provinces to break free would create a major political headache for Washington and invite armed intervention from neighboring Turkey, which has its own restless Kurdish minority.

And finally, some rather cryptic words by some Tim Judah:

Tim Judah, a London-based Balkan analyst and author, said the Security Council ideally should grant Kosovo independence but simultaneously repudiate unilateral secessions elsewhere.

But he expects that "whatever the Security Council does may nonetheless encourage some secessionist groups somewhere."

But of course Judah, because no matter how many colonialist minded lunatics like yourself are out there, the will of the people will always prevail.

Because you know what Tim Judah?

The Security Council is telling people that when the United Nations demand from the nations without statehood to find a peaceful and negotiated solution to their self-determination dreams it is plain out being deceptive, because the Security Council is about to grant independence to a region of Serbia as a feeble response to the pressure exercised by the Albanian-American community and the lobbyists they hired to turn the Congress members attention over the issue.

As always the media has played an important role by creating a wall of lies and misconceptions around the Kosovo Liberation Army, a murderous organization that under the protection of the UN Blue Helmets carried out authentic ethnic cleansing operations against the Serbian population of Kosovo. This KLA later morphed into the National Liberation Army because many Albanians wish to wrestle away portions of land from Macedonia, Greece, Croatia and Montenegro to create what they call the Greater Albania. The NLA had its 15 minutes of fame a few years ago when again, protected by the UN, tried to spark conflict in neighboring Macedonia claiming that the Albanians were too being mistreated by the Macedonians.

They failed then, but after Kosovo gains its independence the NLA will make sure to keep expanding Albania. And a whole new ethnic cleansing era will start, because these NLA thugs really enjoy murdering defenceless people.

One last thing, the UN is being so hypocritical about the whole issue that it is not mentioning that one of the reason why this independence is supposed to be "supervised" is because they are requesting from Kosovo not to join Albania at the most pure Texan style.

But I am telling you now, Kosovo will become part of Albania within five years of winning its independence.

I leave you with a couple of questions; why is the UN so adamant about telling other ethnic groups to forgo of their self determination plans when the own UN Charter enshrines the right of all people to their self determination?

Why is the European Union, a union of European nations playing by the rules of the states, forgetting about all the nations within those states?

~ ~ ~

A Kurdish Voice

Most excellent.

Mizgin, a Kurdish blogger, has drawn some interesting paralells between the ceasefire announced by ETA, the alleged willingness of Rodríguez Zapatero to find a democratic solution, and the situation between the Kurds and Turkey in his post "The ETA example" at his blog Rasti.

For those of us who believe on the right of the Kurds to a free and independent Kurdistan, I recommend you read this post in particular and his blog in general.

Here I present to you the part I liked the best about his post:

Now this makes me think: What if someone or some group had been talking with some seriousness to Kurds under Turkish-occupation for four years, especially with PKK, especially after 1999? What if the five-year unilateral ceasefire had been a time when Turkey allowed the Irish, for example, to act as mediators? Where would we be now? Here we have a country, Spain, who has suffered some 850 deaths as a result of ETA operations, yet it is willing to negotiate. Or we have Northern Ireland, where some 1800 died as a result of IRA/Sinn Fein operations, yet they managed to negotiate with the British.

The problem appears to be one in which the British government and the Spanish government seek peace, seek negotiation, seek to end grievances, with Spain willing to consider more autonomy for Spanish provinces, while the Basque province enjoys a number of rights that Kurds under Turkish occupation can only dream of. The Basque Country enjoys its own language rights, education and health care systems, police force and radio and TV stations. It enjoys one of the best economies in Europe, with the GDP per capita at 20.6% higher than the European average.

Today, the Basque provinces have their own regional police force, television station and education and health systems, and collect their own taxes. Euskera is taught in schools and universities, though only one-quarter of Basques speak the language. It is unclear whether most Basques even want full independence.


On top of all this, it became clear that Tony Blair, as well as the Norwegian foreign ministry facilitated and encouraged secret talks between the Zapatero government and ETA.

We are constantly reminded that ETA was considered by the US and the EU to be a "terrorist" organization, but that didn't stop Northern Ireland, Britain and Norway from spending time and effort in order to get ETA and Spain to talk to each other.

Let Zubeyir Aydar go to Northern Ireland and seek to begin a process of negotiation for PKK. Then let Murat Karayilan go too. In the meantime, let someone from the Turkish government go to Spain to learn what negotiation is. If this doesn't happen, what shall we make of the UN scheme for "Alliance of Civilizations," which Spain and Turkey have recently agree to co-chair? What good will it be?

Am I dreaming? Is it not possible for these things to happen for Kurds?

.... ... .

One Basque Country in Peace

Seems like I got a few Basque-phobes incensed at HispaLibertas.

They came up with some sort of non sense that they think insults me.

Just a couple of things here:

a) I like Spaniards, have nothing against them, I think they got a raw deal from the hands of Franco and again from the hands of the Neo Francoist Partido Popular.

Other than that, their unability to understand that Euskal Herria, Catalonia and Galiza are bound to go their own way sooner or later can be blamed on a lack of consistency between what they believe in and what was ingrained in them by their older generations.

It is that inconsistency what leads them to champion the cause of self determination and independence of Tibet, Palestine, Kosovo, Checnya and Kurdistan at the same time that they refuse to let go of the nations trapped in this monolythic ideal of a One Spain.

b) Not all of us Basques come from Hegoalde, something that the dimwits from HispaLibertas seem to miss when addressing the author of this blog.

Their own fault, they are so obsessed with this idea that the Basques want to break up Holly Spain that they really believe the Basques are Spaniards.

And that would be all Basques, including the ones from Iparralde damn it!

.... ... .

Gerry Is Ready

On an interesting developement, Gerry Adams from Sinn Fein says he is ready to aid the Basque peace process.

There is a number of discrepancies in the way the international community reacts towards the different conflicts around the world that pit a former colonialist power with those that long for their self determination. Places like Puerto Rico, Kurdistan, Kashmir, Tibet, East Timor, Brittany, Corsica come to mind.

The article addresses that in this paragraph:

Parallels have often been made between the Basque conflict, which has cost more than 800 lives in the past four decades, and strife-ridden Northern Ireland, where thousands more have died as Republicans have sought to secure an end to British rule while loyalists have endeavored to retain links to London.

This is what Adams have to say:

"Dialogue is the way of resolving problems. You don't kill problems," said Adams, who noted that politics often involved "a lot of hypocrisy,"

All I can tell you is, this peace process needs all the help it can get, mostly after disastrous performances like that of Mexican president Vicente Fox last week.

You can read the entire article here.

.... ... .

Himat the Kurdish Artist

Last week I found this article at an internet version of a newspaper called The Daily Star, which I think it is published in English for people with an special interest in the Middle East.

Now, the article made a mistake on the name of the Basque sculptor Eduardo Txillida, so I sent a letter to them that they were nice enough to publish last June 17th, here you have the article and then my letter:

Thursday, June 10, 2004

Kurdish painter finds beauty in truth

Himat Mohammed Ali wonders if returning to Iraq might best be left a dream

By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Daily Star staff

BEIRUT: A few years ago, Himat Mohammed Ali, the 44-year-old painter who goes by his first name only, was participating in a group exhibition in Baghdad. The organizers asked him to make the invitation, and he responded with an abstract image bursting in reds and turquoises. A well-known Iraqi artist came to the show, looked at the invitation, and said: "Nice colors. But I could never use them." The combination was just too jarring. "The red I can understand," he said, "but not the turquoise."

"I can use them," Himat said quietly.

"But why, how?"

"Because I'm Kurdish."

Himat is telling this story while balancing on a high stool, elbows and shoulders hunched over a marble countertop in the storefront space of Beirut's Agial Art Gallery. To punctuate the punch line, a quick and mischievous smile flashes over his face.

It's a stereotypical explanation turned around, he explains, twirling two silver rings on the fingers of his left hand, one set with dull black stone, the other one deep and shining red. People often regard his paintings - multilayered abstractions all blending organic and geometric forms - and comment on the Kurdishness of his color scheme.

Indeed, to survey the 34 canvases on view at Agial, the artist's first show ever in Beirut, is to brace your eyes against an assault of vibrant shades and hues. There are sun-like splashes of yellow and orange mixed with moody mauves, bright blues, and hyper-succulent greens, all meshed into a web of earth tones, rusted reds and unforgiving browns.

"For me, it is simple to see the Kurdish colors," says Himat, because his paintings have the same exuberance and brightness of Kurdish carpets and Kurdish clothes. "But the important thing is what you can find that's more, what you can find that's different. It's very easy to see this as Kurdish. And I like to be Kurdish," he adds, "but international Kurdish."

Here, Agial's owner and director Saleh Barakat interjects: "Kurdish without the fundamentalist approach to Kurdish nationalism; Kurdish in the sense that he is somebody who has this strong attachment to strong colors. But not particularly to be Kurdish because he is part of a Kurdistan nationalist party or something."

Himat prefers the approach to national and artistic identity articulated by Eduardo Challida, the Spanish sculptor who once compared himself to a tree, saying that his roots were in the Basque, but his branches were everywhere.

"Yani, you have an imperialistic approach!" says Barakat.

"No, no, no!" laughs Himat.

Born in Kirkuk in 1960, Himat has shown his work in numerous solo exhibitions in Paris, Tokyo, Switzerland, the Netherlands and throughout the Arab world. He got a boost to his profile with the recent, well-toured exhibition and book project "Strokes of Genius: Contemporary Iraqi Art." And his work now sells for $600 to $6,000. But he may be best known for his joint projects with such poets as Adonis, Kassem Haddad, and other French and Japanese men of letters.

But despite his attraction to the written word, he says: "Sometimes it is not important for me what I do. Sometimes, what I have inside I want to speak. Sometimes you go the coffee with someone, you've been in the house all day, you want to get out and speak, and it doesn't matter what you say or to whom."

It's worth noting that Himat went through an impressionable period where his paintings were far less colorful. He reduced his compositions to black and white, not because he was down - Himat insists that his use of color is exactly the opposite of, say, German Expressionism, as his colors are not intended to evoke mood, tone, or emotion - but because he had no other materials at his disposal but black ink and white paper.

"I went to Japan, and for six months, I didn't paint. So for me, it was like prison." Himat had traveled for a show and planned to stay in Japan for just two months, the duration of the exhibition's run. "This was 1990. There was the war, Iraq and Kuwait, I don't know what. I decided I didn't want to go back," he says. "Two months has now become 15 years.

"I didn't have my materials. I didn't have my canvases, my oils. So I found Japanese inks and someone gave me Japanese paper." He painted with them for two weeks straight. "When I finished, I couldn't stop. So I painted the side of the house. And when I was finished with that, finally I relaxed. I felt empty. When I do this, it's for what I have inside. And sometimes the place decides for me what I do. When I come here," for example, "if I stayed in Lebanon, I could find my materials and automatically (my painting) changes, not the style but maybe the form, maybe the color."

As someone made rootless from his country, this sense of movable place has become a strong undercurrent in Himat's work. Every painting may be viewed as a landscape, as the artist hones in on portions of wilderness - a thicket of trees, a bunch of flowers, a handful of stray leaves - and breaks them apart in his compositions. Yet his touch is not violent but smooth.

Himat is now based in France, where by his own admission he leads something of a hermit's existence, painting every day and often all day. He works out of a studio in Paris's 18th district so small that he can rarely stand two of his larger canvases side by side. There, using acrylics, oils, lithographic inks and paper, he constructs and deconstructs his paintings, sometimes cutting up a series of canvases to make an entirely new creation out of the scraps.

"I cut, I mix, I make another painting," he says. "Sometimes it is like playing for me, like children."

Himat also says he prefers not to represent what he sees but rather to recreate it. In this way, his work bears a curious resemblance to that of the cubists. His impulse toward abstraction comes not from a physical gesture that conducts an emotion from limb through brush to canvas, but from an effort to capture some sense of perceptive truth.

Commenting on a recent survey in London on cubism and its legacy, Jonathan Jones wrote in The Guardian: "Cubism was never a style ... It was an inquiry ... Art today is made from the building blocks of ordinary life. Cubism took these building blocks, or working premises, apart ... 'I went to the cafe' - cubism asks what a cafe is, what is it to go, and, most provocatively of all, who the hell you are."

One hundred years after Braque and Picasso, Himat may have stumbled into their previously and deeply etched groove accidentally or by instinct. But where he skips off that cubist groove is in his notion of beauty. According to Jones: "Cubism claims to be not beautiful, but true."

Himat, by contrast, has said: "My artwork is an attempt to discover the truth. To me the truth equals beauty and therefore my artistic search is primarily an aesthetic quest."

It would be easy also to read into that artistic search a quest for home, homeland, return, back. "You need that," he says. "But sometimes it is not important. Because maybe if I sent you to your country, your city, your village, you couldn't live there today. Everywhere you have negative and positive."

On the likelihood of him going home anytime soon, in light of the current conditions in Iraq, he spins the rings on his fingers once more and adjusts his precarious pose. "Sure (it's difficult)," he says. "It's my dream to go back, but I don't know. Sometimes if the dream stays a dream it's better."

Himat's paintings are on view at Beirut's Agial Art Gallery in Hamra through June 19. For more information, call 01/345213

My letter:

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie "Kurdish painter finds beauty in truth" (June 10)

The name of the Basque sculptor in your story about Kurdish painter Himat Mohammed is Eduardo Txillida, in Spanish his last name is translated into Chillida. Looks like there was a typo and it appears as Challida in the article.

It is a shame that artists around the world have to go to extra lengths to explain that when they call themselves Basque or Kurdish it is from the cultural point of view and that they are not being political. It is a shame because regimes like the one in Spain reduce the spaces for ethnic groups to express themselves in their own way. Recently Madrid attacked Basque movie makers and musicians like Julio Medem and Fermin Muguruza for the sole "crime" of expressing their Basqueness.

It looks like freedom of expression is almost as scarce in Spain as it was in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. To the artists out there expressing themselves in their own cultural backgrounds, keep up the good work; the international community needs to understand that we must embrace every single cultural heritage if we want to preserve the world's humane face.

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Powell's Kurdish Pickle

One of the main strategies by those who oppose the self determination of the nations without statehood is to deny they have their own identity. We hear it from the French and the Spaniards in regards of the Basques and the Catalonians, from the French in regards of the Corsicans and the Bretons, from the English in regards of the Welsh and the Scottish, from the Israelis in regards of the Palestinians (fascist Golda Mair and her infamous "a land with no people for a people without land) and so on and so forth.

On the other hand, whenever it is convenient for them, the main stream media applies the label "ethnic" when Washington dictates it, that is the way we get to hear about ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, ethnic Tibetans in China or ethnic Chechens in Russia.

Well, one of Aznar's buddies just acknowledged the ethnic identity of a people that has been denied everything, the Kurds. Here you have the note from Berria:

Powell wants to maintain Kurds' "historical identity"

United States Secretary of State said it was up to the "Iraqis" to sort out the Kurdistan situation

Juanma Sarasola

According to an old Kurdish saying the Kurds have no other friends apart from the mountains. The country divided up among five states (Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Armenia) has over the years seen many promises broken and the support of many they believed to be their allies blown to the winds. Washington is one of those who have promised them help and who have turned their back on them many times after eating their words. Now it seems that the Iraqi Kurds have the United States of America on their side once again. Indeed, the day before yesterday Colin Powell, the White House Secretary of State, supported "their right to maintain their historical identity." Nevertheless, he made it clear that he would not support the "breaking up" of Iraq.

"The Kurds want to preserve their historical identity… but I think it is absolutely clear that that part of Iraq must remain a part of Iraq," said Powell. He explained that Washington's policy was that it was up to the "Iraqis" to find a solution in the future for the situation of the Kurds in the northern region of Iraq. The New York Times had said the day before that the decision of the United States had been to give the Iraqi Kurds a special statute to enable them to maintain their current semi-autonomy. The White House received many warnings against the decision both from Iraq and from the countries of the Middle East. In fact, many have requested that Iraq not be divided up along ethnic lines. Turkey has voiced the greatest concern
regarding an autonomous Kurdistan. As an ally of Washington and a NATO member Ankara does not view the consolidating of the Iraqi Kurds with a proper organisation favourably. Ankara feels that if this happened, the Kurds under Turkish domination might resume their armed struggle through the outlawed and actively persecuted KADEK, the Kurdistan Freedom and Democracy Congress. The Turkish Prime Minister, Tayyip Erdogan, is scheduled to meet with American President George W. Bush at the end of this month and the Kurdistan conflict will be one of the main items on their agenda.

Very well Colin, what about the "historical identity" of the Basques, you know, like the ones murdered during an air strike represented on a certain tapestry that was concealed behind a blue curtain when you were lying to the world about some inexistent WMD?

I guess Syria, Iran, Armenia and Turkey are not as important as Spain when it comes to getting support for a genocidal war.

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