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  • Separatism in Kosovo-Metohija and the Caucasus:Similarities and Differences
  • Vladislav B. Sotirović

Introduction

In February 2008 Kosovo’s Albanian-dominated parliament proclaimed Kosovo’s independence without organizing a referendum, with obvious U.S. diplomatic support indicated by unilateral recognition. The U.S.’s justification that the case of Kosovo is unique, i.e., it will not be repeated elsewhere, raises the question of whether the problem of the southern Serbian province of Kosovo-Metohija really is unique or whether the U.S. administration was trying to convince the rest of the international community of this.1 The goal of this research is to investigate and compare the interethnic and interstate clashes and wars in the Balkan microregion of Kosovo-Metohija with those from the macroregion of the Caucasus from a general point of view by performing a textual analysis of the primary sources and relevant and available scientific literature on the topic.

The “Domino Effect” in Global Politics

The consequences of the recognition of Kosovo independence by a large part of the international community are already visible and will become more so in the future, primarily in the Caucasus, because there are some similarities between these two regions.2 In the Caucasus region, where about 50 different [End Page 107] ethnolinguistic groups live,3 a self-proclaimed state independence has been claimed by Abkhazia and South Ossetia,4 following the pattern of both Nagorno-Karabakh (de jure a province in Azerbaijan) in 1991 and Kosovo in 2008.5 Experts from the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs had already expressed in 2007 their real fear that, as in the case of the U.S. and EU unilateral recognition of Kosovo independence, a similar unilateral diplomatic act could be implied by Moscow’s recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as a matter of diplomatic compensation and as a result of the domino effect in international relations.6 It is also known from official OSCE sources that Russian delegates to this pan-European security organization have constantly [End Page 108] warned the West since before 2008 that such a scenario is quite possible, but with one peculiarity: since 2007 they have stopped mentioning the possibility of Russian recognition of Nagorno-Karabakh’s self-proclaimed independence on 2 September 1991. This is most probably because Moscow has not wanted to deteriorate good relations with Azerbaijan—a country with huge reserves of natural gas and oil.

The Case of South Ossetia

At first glance it can be said that the Orthodox South Ossetians are equally as separatist as the Muslim Albanians of Kosovo. However, the South Ossetians have sympathies towards the Serbs (not for the reason that they are both Orthodox Christians), but not, as we could expect, towards separatist Kosovo Albanians. The real reason for such sympathies is a similar notion of legal states rights applied by both the Serbs in Kosovo and the South Ossetians.7

Historically, South Ossetia was never really an integral or authentic part of the sovereign Georgian state (see Fig. 2),8 in contrast to Kosovo-Metohija, which was not only integral, but culturally and politically the most important region of the medieval Serbian state (called Ancient Serbia or Serbia proper) until the mid-15th century, when Kosovo-Metohija was occupied by the Ottomans (see Fig. 1).9 Before it became part of Russia politically, the territory of present-day Georgia historically was never firmly united around its capital Tbilisi, in contrast to Serbia, which had a long experience as a unified state territory, with Kosovo-Metohija as its center, before it lost its independence in 1459. When Serbia gained autonomous status within the Ottoman Empire in 1830/1833 and was later recognized as an independent state by the European Great Powers at the Berlin Congress in 1878, its rulers and politicians knew which historical territories belonged to it: Kosovo-Metohija was in first place.10 The present-day territory of Georgia entered the Russian Empire [End Page 109] in parts—segment by segment. Ossetia as a united territory (i.e., not divided into Northern and Southern Ossetia, as is the situation today) voluntarily became part of the Russian Empire in 1774, according to Russian historiography. Before incorporation...

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