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Georgia launched a major military offensive against South Ossetia on Friday in a bid to regain control of its breakaway province. The total death toll can already be as high as 1400 including some Russian peacekeepers. Kosovo’s unilateral proclamation of independence from Serbia last February played a key role in these developments. Whether this has created a legal precedent or not, but realpolitik takes its course regardless. The claim of Western Powers that Kosovo is an absolutely unique case showed be a joke almost immediately when UDI based to their orchestration opened the Pandora box.

Moscow and few other capitals considered the move a serious step toward the degradation of international law and the triumph of arbitrary approaches to the resolution of global problems.

Pandora box starts to open

• Armenian political expert Stepan Grigoryan says that Yerevan should recognize Serbia’s Kosovo province as a precedent for its recognition of Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh.
• The Silesian Autonomy Movement has sent a petition to Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk asking him to allow all regional communities to gain autonomy status. If he does not agree, the Silesians say they are ready to raise the issue of separation.
• On May 4, the oil-rich province of Santa Cruz held a vote on autonomy from the rest of Bolivia. Bolivian government calls the actions of separatist movement as the Kosovo strategy - an American attempt to destabilize a national government it cannot control.
• The potentially destabilizing consequences of this precedent have been much discussed with reference to other unhappy portions of other internationally recognized sovereign states with strong separatist movements such as Transniestria, Bosnia’s Republika Srpska, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Kashmir, Tibet and Kurdistan.

Exit strategy

The root of the problem is that the international community cannot agree on rules for the independence of small regions. I agree with those who said, that conflicts can be determined only by negotiations, not by imposition.

From my point of view the best exit strategy from Pandora box is to return Kosovo case from where all today’s development started. The steps forward could be:

1. Starting real negotiations between local stakeholders without determined outcome (which was not the case with Status Talks lead by Ahtisaari nor Troika).
2. Accepting the deal made by locals be it anything they can agree.
3. The international community (and donors) should then support implementation of this deal made by negotiations.

Similar steps could be applied other conflicts also. The possible outcome can be based e.g. to Westphalian order (the concept of nation state sovereignty based on territoriality and the exclusion of external actors from domestic authority structures).

Results can vary from case to case. The deal can be independence, federation, some autonomy model such as Aland or Hong Kong model. At its best the solution can be like”velvet divorce” of the Czechs and Slovaks. And also the worst scenario probably is better than situation today.