Kosovo: International Law Versus Western Position
Posted by: "Rick Rozoff"
Mon Oct 22, 2007 6:02 am (PST)
Strategic Cultural Foundation
October 22, 2007
Kosovo: UN Mandated Part of Serbia
Pyotr Iskenderov
-The inviolability of state borders, the decisive role
of the UN and a severe rebuff of the armed separatism
of the Kosovo Albanian terrorists are the three
[principles] upon which any compromise over the status
of the province should be based.
A new round of direct negotiations between the
delegations of Serbia and Kosovo on October 14 in
Brussels did not produce a long-awaited breakthrough.
And given the current format of the dialogue it would
hardly be wise to expect at least some tangible
advance rather than a breakthrough.
In the past several months and years the West has done
everything it could to misbalance the positions of the
two parties.
Even before UN special envoy Martti Ahtisaari began
his rather unintelligible peacekeeping campaign,
Albanian separatists in Kosovo had been promised
independence.
Both Americans and the EU officials made such
statements.
And if independence is a possibility why make
concessions?
So, in the view of Albanians the negotiations were
dead before they were born. And the fact that the USA
and the EU are represented in the “group of three”
middlemen is just another example of Western cynicism.
In the current situation, regardless of the steady
position that meets all the requirements of
international law, to which Serbs have been sticking
for the past two years or so, it was decided they
would be the scapegoats.
By and large, the status of Kosovo was determined as
far back as June 10, 1999 by UN Security Council
Resolution 1244.
The document stipulated Kosovo’s wide autonomy
simultaneously confirming “the commitment of all
member-states to honour the sovereignty and
territorial integrity of the Union Republic of
Yugoslavia and other states in the region, as
expressed in the Helsinki Final Act.”
In line with spirit and letter of the document the
Serbian leadership has for many months been presenting
different models of Kosovo’s autonomy, always facing
accusations of its lack of willingness to reach a
compromise.
That was how the present-day stalemate was created; it
discredits both the institute of global peace making
and the United Nations as such.
There is a way out of this stalemate that meets all
norms of international law and interests of both sides
(Belgrade and Pristina).
Kosovo can be granted the status of a UN-mandated
territory.
This option is completely in line with the UN Charter,
not depriving Serbia of its sovereignty over Kosovo.
According to Article 75 of the UN Charter: ”The United
Nations establishes an international trusteeship
system under its guidance to manage such territories
that can be annexed to it on the strength of the
follow-up individual agreements as well as for
observing their performance.”
Article 77 defines the mechanism of granting the
relevant status to regions that are identified as
“territories voluntarily included in the trusteeship
system by such states that are responsible for their
guidance.”
This option adequately fits the current status of
Kosovo as identified by UN Security Council Resolution
1244.
In this case granting Kosovo the status of a
UN–mandated territory can be legalized by a special
agreement between Serbia and the United Nations.
Another option can place the province under a double
mandate of Serbia and the UN. The situation of this
kind was previously faced by Namibia, with South
Africa and the UN as its mandators.
The fact that the UN Trusteeship Committee includes
five standing members of its Security Council, Russia,
the USA, Great Britain, France and China is of
especial significance. It is instrumental for the
maintenance of continuity in solving the Kosovo
problem as well as the decisive role of the UN.
Besides, declaring an individual territory a
UN-mandated one helps avoid strict timeframes while
solving its problems and address the province’s
burning problems, making the task of a settlement a
long-term process.
And the most important thing is the UN-mandated status
of a territory does not demand that it be granted
obligatorily independence. Goa, Greenland, Hawaii, the
Panama Channel zone, Puerto Rico and Reunion went
through this phase without further claims of state
independence.
But there is another snag: Kosovo Albanians should be
made to tame their appetites, and that is hard to do.
However, NATO and the EU in the 1990s accumulated
great experience of giving the peoples in the Balkans
“forced peace.”
Why should this experience be always used against
Serbs?
Russia is also not the state it was during the years
“on the loose” under Yeltsin and his foreign minister
Kozyrev.
The inviolability of state borders, the decisive role
of the UN and a severe rebuff of the armed separatism
of the Kosovo Albanian terrorists are the three
[principles] upon which any compromise over the status
of the province should be based.
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