Editorial comment.(Editorial)

The curse of Kosovo

Georgia's military incursion into the effectively autonomous, and unwillingly Georgian, provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, where Russian peacekeepers, according to international agreement and the desire of those provinces' people, were stationed, and the subsequent and predictable Russian military incursion to drive out the Georgian Government forces--all this provides much food for a properly historical analysis. Yet there has been next to nothing in the media (or at least our media) about the nature of the problem when viewed from a longer-term perspective, and there is little room here in which to introduce such a perspective. In a nutshell, then.

We need to go back to the Helsinki Accords of 1975. These accords, and the associated Council for Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE, now OSCE), were the product of Western Europe's security angst, and the equally strong, perhaps stronger, desire of the USSR for a firm recognition of existing borders between states (states in the sense of countries). The Soviet Union signed these accords because they guaranteed the permanence of the borders of Eastern Europe. Up until 1975, West German government publications, for example, regularly referred to what we then called East Germany as Central Germany. This was because, until 1975, West Germany considered the territories lost to Poland and the Soviet Union in 1945 as merely "administered" by Poland (Pomerania, Silesia, southern East Prussia) and the USSR (northern East Prussia). The USSR and Poland wanted their new borders recognised, especially by West Germany, as final. The Helsinki Accords provided the USSR with that finality.

When the USSR broke up in 1990 the disintegration did not theoretically affect the Helsinki agreement, because the USSR had been 15 countries in a union, with each country having its own Supreme Soviet (for example). Each of those countries retained its borders with the break-up of the USSR. But when the Russians of newly-independent Moldova (for example) refused to allow their section of Moldova to be administered by the Moldovan government, and set up their own "Republic of Transdniestria", that was a de facto breach of the Helsinki Accords--Transdniestria was not of course recognised by any of the signatories (including Russia) to the Helsinki Accords, though Russia was and is very mindful of its ethnic brethren there.

When Yugoslavia disintegrated, that did not in itself affect the Helsinki accords, because Yugoslavia had been a union of several countries. But the fighting over the borders between those countries affected the Helsinki agreement. The NATO desire to maintain those borders can be seen as an attempt to preserve the Helsinki Accords.

It should be loudly proclaimed that the sanction, and de facto recognition, given to Kosovan independence on strictly ethnic grounds by NATO was the first clear breach of the Helsinki Accords. This is because Kosovo was not a country but a province of a country, Serbia, and a province ...