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                                                                                SEPARATISM, Page 36

Splinter, Splinter, Little State

Will the global drive toward self-determination produce a
genuine new world order or chaos?

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Reported by James Carney/Moscow, William Mader/London and J.F.O.
McAllister/Washington


    The convoluted plot twists and bravura posturing might seem
reminiscent of a comic opera. Certainly the so-called Dnies ter
Republic (pop. 600,000) is among the miniest of ministates,
proclaimed by ethnic Russians and Ukrainians seceding from a
secession. Its citizens refused to stay in the new nation of
Moldova (pop. 4.4 million), a former Soviet republic that broke
away from Moscow last August, because the majority ethnic
Romanians were making noises about uniting with their brethren
across the border.

    But in little more than a week the story has turned into a
blood-soaked tragedy with ominous international implications. As
many as 500 people have been killed in savage fighting between
Moldova's Romanians and Slavs, and tens of thousands of refugees
have fled across the border into Ukraine. Worse,
Russian-controlled units of the former Soviet army have been
caught up in the battle. Russian President Boris Yeltsin has
warned that Moscow may intervene to protect its soldiers and
ethnics. That could set a precedent for further interventions on
behalf of 25 million Russians living in the Baltic states, the
Central Asian republics and other parts of the old Soviet Union,
as some of Yeltsin's nationalist opponents are already
demanding. At week's end an international conference in
Istanbul arranged a cease-fire, but there is serious doubt it
will hold.

    What is happening in Moldova is of global concern for
another reason too. It is a not at all untypical example of one
of the two main trends vying to shape the post-cold war world.
One is the move toward uniting once jealous sovereignties in
economic groupings that also have political ties, like the
12-nation European Community. The contrasting trend is toward
splitting up existing states into smaller ethnic nations, some
of which then go on to divide amoeba-like into ever smaller
pieces. Moldova conceivably might split in three: the Gagauz, a
150,000-member clan of Turkish Muslims, have proclaimed autonomy
and appealed to Turkey for protection.

    Of the two trends, the one toward what is usually called
self-determination might now be the stronger. All over the
world, ethnic movements are demanding and frequently getting
their own turf, sometimes though not always complete with flag,
army, currency and United Nations seat. The secessionist groups
range in size from the 50 million citizens of Ukraine to 30,000
Ainu, descendants of the aboriginal inhabitants of northern
Japan. They demand "exclusive possession" of two or three small
islands in the southern Kuriles -- also claimed by Moscow and
Tokyo -- where they can cluster and preserve their culture.

    Not even long-established multiethnic states seem to be
immune from breakup. For 74 years Czechoslovakia achieved a
mostly peaceful accommodation between Slovaks and Czechs. As
recently as 1989 they were solidly united in the "velvet
revolution" against communist rule. But now, driven by
discontent with their economic lag, the Slovaks have won Czech
agreement to effect a "velvet divorce," splitting up peacefully
by Sept. 30 into two countries. Both sides are having second
thoughts and talking about forming some sort of confederation.
But ethnic separatism may be a genie difficult to cram back
into the bottle. Says Slovak leader Vladimir Meciar: "We
probably will not be able to prevent a breakup."

    The thought that self-determination might be the wave of the
future makes leaders of the established powers shudder. To them,
it threatens instability on a horrendous scale. Secessions often
have touched off savage neighbor-vs.-neighbor wars, like those
in Moldova; in Georgia, where South Ossetians have been fighting
to break away and join ethnic brethren across the border in
Russia; and of course in Yugoslavia and in the enclave of
Nagorno-Karabakh, caught in a violent tug-of-war between Armenia
and Azerbaijan. Even peaceful secessions could spawn a slew of
mininations, unable to support themselves economically and
dependent on aid from richer nations for survival. At a recent
international conference French President Francois Mitterrand
worried out loud "whether in the future every tribal group will
dispose of its own laws to the exclusion of any common law?" and
immediately answered himself, "You can sense how impossible that
would be."

    Less impossible than irresistible, comes the reply from some
political scientists. They view the turmoil as the necessary
pain attending the birth of a genuinely new world order no
longer dominated by large nation-states but composed mainly of
regional associations of smaller countries. It is possible too
to see the move toward self-determination as a net gain for
liberty. In any case, the day seems to be past when rebellious
people can be forced to remain in a state they want no part of.
Since resistance to a breakup is usually futile, say many
experts, the task for international bodies such as the U.N. is
to guide the upheavals into peaceful channels.

    That, however, is a mammoth job that would begin very late
if it started today. The idea that every group with a common
ancestry, language, history and culture should have its own
state and write its own laws goes back more than a century. The
principle of self-determination got a big boost from Woodrow
Wilson at the end of World War I, and in 1945 was written into
the Charter of the U.N.

    In the Third World the dissolution of Western empires gave
birth to many new states whose borders had been drawn for the
convenience of colonial administrators and enclosed peoples who
had never got along with each other. Jockeying among varied
ethnic-religious groups for pieces of the old imperial turf has
been igniting secessionist wars ever since. Possibly the
deadliest one within the past decade has been the insurrection
of Hindu Tamil groups against the Buddhist Sinhalese in Sri
Lanka. The Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace counts, among many others, six separate
conflicts in India and three each in Burma and Indonesia in
which guerrilla groups are seeking independence.

    The biggest impulse to the recent explosion, however, has
been the end of the cold war. "The reason why the ethnic
rivalries and aspirations surfaced so suddenly in the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe is that till recently communism kept
them in a time warp," says Oxford history professor Robert
O'Neill. Tensions burst forth with explosive fury as soon as
the lid of dictatorship was lifted.

    By now the movement has begun feeding on itself. In the
former Soviet Union, for example, the success of Latvians,
Ukrainians, Armenians, Georgians and Tajik, among others, in
breaking free from Moscow has encouraged separatist movements
inside Russia. Tatars, Chechen, Ingush and Yakut are demanding
either greater autonomy within the Russian Federation or full
independence. In many areas, though, ethnic groups are so
thoroughly mixed that it is impossible to draw neat border
lines between their respective turfs. Any attempt to do so only
creates new minority problems: a Serb minority in Croatia, for
example, instead of a Croat minority in a Serb-dominated
Yugoslavia. That leads at best to severe tensions, at worst to
savage wars between peoples who once lived in peace.

    Yugoslavia, says a U.S. State Department official, is the
horrible example of "self-determination gone mad." He and
others accuse Serbia of adopting a poisonous nationalism that
demands ethnic purity at home, enforced by deporting
"foreigners" if necessary, and conquest of any lands -- portions
of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, for example -- to which one's
brethren have migrated. Once that spirit takes hold, says the
official, "anything becomes justifiable in the name of your
kind: expulsion, devastation, murder."

    Yugoslavia also provides an example of how badly the
international community has been fumbling in managing
self-determination. The U.S. and the European Community tried to
keep the so-called nation together long after that had become
impossible. Then they split over whether to recognize the
independence of Slovenia and Croatia. The U.N. sent
peacekeeping forces far too late and, by making clear that it
would not allow its soldiers to become involved in any fighting,
effectively signaled Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic that
nobody would seriously try to stop his efforts to create a
Greater Serbia.

    But then how should the international community cope with a
trend that is both irresistible and extremely dangerous?
Thoughtful diplomats and academic analysts offer four general
guidelines:

    1) Do whatever is possible through preachment, aid and
sanctions to encourage the spread of democracy. The most
destructive ethnic explosions usually have occurred under
repressive regimes. In contrast, secession movements in Quebec
and Scotland have generally concentrated on peaceful
persuasion. Democratic Canada and Britain have given Quebecois
and Scots nonviolent ways in which to voice their angers and
aspirations.

    2) Grant a large measure of self-government to dissident
ethnic groups. Democracy alone may not satisfy ethnics who
suspect that their representatives in a national legislature
will be constantly outvoted on such matters as where and how
tax money should be spent. The presence of 22 Kurds out of a
total of 450 members in the Turkish parliament has not
prevented Kurdish terrorists seeking autonomy from turning
southeastern Turkey into a land of fear.

    3) Develop a set of principles to govern when new states
should be given diplomatic recognition, and what they must do to
qualify for admission into international bodies. Robert
Badinter, president of the French Constitutional Council and
head of the E.C. Arbitration Commission on Yugoslavia, suggests
that new states must establish democratic institutions, accept
international covenants on human rights, pledge to respect
existing frontiers and guarantee respectful treatment of their
own ethnic and/or religious minorities.

    4) Work out rules for determining when international
intervention is necessary to prevent ethnic bloodshed, and
develop mechanisms to carry it out. The old idea was that
outsiders had no business interfering with anything a
government might do within its borders to its own people. That
principle has been shattered within the past 13 months by two
events: the dispatch of a U.N. force to northern Iraq to protect
Kurds from massacre by Saddam Hussein's forces (the Kurds have
since set up what amounts to an autonomous zone there); and the
arrival, however tardy, of the U.N. peacekeeping force in
Croatia while the Croats were still fighting to break free from
Belgrade.

    But since the U.N. neither can nor should butt into every
secessionist dispute around the world, some standard is needed
to judge when intervention is justified. One often heard
suggestion is that intervention is defensible whenever a civil
war threatens to send floods of refugees across international
frontiers. Established powers also need to work out in advance
how to organize and finance an intervention force, rather than
repeatedly reinventing the wheel. NATO foreign ministers,
meeting in Norway last month, approved for the first time the
formation of a force that could be used outside the territory of
the alliance states, and U.N. Secretary-General Boutros
Boutros-Ghali has called for the creation of a standing U.N.
force.

    None of this can happen too soon. Demands for ethnic
self-determination could soon cause fearsome violence in many
more parts of the world. China gives the outside world the
impression of being a monolith, yet it contains 55 ethnic
minorities numbering perhaps 80 million people, many of whom
are bitterly discontented. New violence already has broken out
in Tibet, according to reports reaching London. In Europe there
are feelings of repression and aspirations toward autonomy, if
not independence, among Hungarians in Romania, Turks in Bulgaria
and Poles in Lithuania, among others. In Afghanistan civil war
could yet pit southern Pashtun against northern Uzbek and Tajik
in a conflict that could spill over into neighboring Pakistan
and the formerly Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

    All this adds up to a crazy quilt of ethnic ambition. The
task ahead is to ensure that the quilt is not forced into
service as a shroud.