Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, September 28, 1993 TAG: 9309290335
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARTHA BRILL OLCOTT
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Several Soviet successor states are already immersed in bloody wars and may fall victim to the ``Bosnian syndrome.'' Backed at least tacitly by Russia, Armenia ``freed'' the disputed Nagorno Karabakh territory, and is now slowly carving up Azerbaijan. If Russian-backed Abkhaz secessionists get their way, Eduard Shevardnadze's Georgia will lose its coastline and best farmlands to Russia. Russia and neighboring Uzbekistan have intervened in Tajikistan's civil war ``to protect strategic interests,'' but have only helped promote the further fragmentation of a nation already on the edge of collapse.
Several other newborn states are less bloodied but their territorial integrity may be only marginally more secure. Moldova is splintering, and Russian separatists in its Transdniestr region enjoy the support of the ``renegade'' 14th Army. Uzbekistan, Central Asia's most populous new state, has designs on southern Kyrgyzstan, and has already held military exercises on its neighbor's soil. Russia has been careful to respect the territorial sovereignty of its other neighbors. But the Russian Army has claimed for itself the right to defend Russian nationals in all three Baltic republics. Russia and Ukraine have still to come to final terms over control of nuclear weapons on Ukrainian soil. The territorial integrity of Ukraine has also been challenged by Russian separatists.
Formerly strong supporters of Mikhail Gorbachev and the cause of a reformed Soviet Union, the Western leaders at the July Tokyo summit demonstrated just how much the priorities of the industrial nations lie with Russia and not with the new successor states. Should difficult choices need to be made, stability and order in Europe are likely to be seen as better served by placating a Russia that aspires to be democratic than by censuring her.
The international community is unlikely to feel its interests threatened by the disappearance of most of these states, since there was no great support for their creation. Bosnia and the various civil wars on or near Russia's borders are sure to make the international community even more leery of supporting other potential ``breakaway peoples.''
Not that the international community was enthusiastic earlier. Despite Western leaders' decades of lamenting the fate of communism's ``captive nations,'' calls to expand ``the new world order'' to encompass these peoples met with little support until after the Soviet Union dissolved. Only then was the United Nations expanded to include the Soviet successor states and Yugoslavia's breakaway republics.
National minorities seeking independence should take note of these trends. Burned by Bosnia, and already engaged in troubleshooting in the Caucasus and Central Asia, the international communities will be even warier than previously of supporting the political claims of the Kurds or the Tibetans, both groups whose civil rights are widely accepted as being abused.
The lessons for those living in the United Nations' new member states are harsher still. Bosnia's fate is a clear warning that statehood brings enormous responsibilities, but few international guarantees of newly won freedoms.
The Serbs ganged up against the Bosnians and got away with it. The world failed to draw a clear standard for potential intervention. This is something that must frighten Ukrainians, just as it does the Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians, all of whom who have seen their statehood evaporate before.
\ Martha Brill Olcott is a political science professor at Colgate University and a senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. She wrote this article for Newsday.
L.A. Times-Washington Post News Service
by CNB